No beverage is more grateful than the cup of spring water you drink at
such a time; no moment more refreshing than that in which you look
about you at the darkened forest. You have cast from you with the warm
blanket the drowsiness of dreams. A coolness, physical and spiritual,
bathes you from head to foot. All your senses are keyed to the last
vibrations. You hear the littler night prowlers, you glimpse the
greater. A faint, searching woods perfume of dampness greets your
nostrils. And somehow, mysteriously, in a manner not to be understood,
the forces of the world seem in suspense, as though a touch might
crystallize infinite possibilities into infinite power and motion. But
the touch lacks. The forces hover on the edge of action, unheeding the
little noises. In all humbleness and awe, you are a dweller of the
Silent Places.

At such a time you will meet with adventures. One night we put
fourteen inquisitive porcupines out of camp. Near M'Gregor's Bay I
discovered in the large grass park of my camp-site nine deer, cropping
the herbage like so many beautiful ghosts. A friend tells me of a fawn
that every night used to sleep outside his tent and within a foot of
his head, probably by way of protection against wolves. Its mother had
in all likelihood been killed. The instant my friend moved toward the
tent opening the little creature would disappear, and it was always
gone by earliest daylight. Nocturnal bears in search of pork are not
uncommon. But even though your interest meets nothing but the bats and
the woods shadows and the stars, that few moments of the sleeping world
forces is a psychical experience to be gained in no other way. You
cannot know the night by sitting up; she will sit up with you. Only by
coming into her presence from the borders of sleep can you meet her
face to face in her intimate mood.