had no literature, and has none today....

Day by day I grow more knowing in the ways of the trees and the moss and
the snow on the ground, and all things are my friends. The stump of a fir
tree stands thawing in the sun; I feel my familiarity with it grow, and
sometimes I stand there loving it, for there is something in it that moves
my soul. The bark is badly broken. One winter in the deep snow, the tree
must have been crippled, and now it points upward long and naked. I put
myself in its place, and look at it with pity. My eyes perhaps have the
simple, animal expression that human eyes had in the age of the mastodons.

No doubt you will seize this opportunity to mock me, for there are many
amusing things you can say about me and this stump of a fir. Yet in your
heart, you know that I am superior to you in this as in everything else,
with the single exception that I have not your conventional
accomplishments, nor have I passed examinations. About the forest and the
earth you can teach me nothing, for here I feel what no man else has felt.

Sometimes I take the wrong direction and lose my way. Yes, truly this may
happen sometimes. But I do not begin to twist and lose myself outside my
very door, like the children of the city. I am twelve miles out, far up
the opposite bank of the Skjel River, before I begin to get lost, and then
only on a sunless day, with perhaps thick, wild snow coming down, and no
north or south in the sky. Then you must know the special marks of this
kind of tree and that, the galipot of the pine, the bark of deciduous
trees, the moss that grows at their roots, the angle of the south and
north-pointing branches, the stones that are moss-covered and those that
are bare, and the pattern of the network of veins in the leaves. From all
these things while there is daylight I can find my way.