| OCR Text |
Show 313. all were attractive to Muir. But the key to his conversion came from the deer he found eating near him one morning, "eating breakfast with me, like gentle sheep around a shepherd." Muir saw deer as "perfect embodiment of poetic form and motion;" he "only wanted to run [his] hand along its beautiful curving limbs." No wonder he was increasingly repelled by anything that wasn't wild. He later met an Indian who was working as a shepherd of sheep. "Unfortunately, however, he made pretentions to civilization, and spoke contemptuously of wild Indians; and of course the peculiar instincts of wildness belonging to his race had become dim. . . . " Muir's irony worked nicely; he became wilder by the day, plunged into the wilderness and finally even set his mule, Brownie, free, "for no mountaineer is truly free who is trammelled with friend or servant, or who has the care of more than two legs." Once he was wild, he could see the wilderness in its own terms, and could begin to answer the scientific questions which were the basis of "Post-Glacial History." These were questions about area, distribution, relations with environment, and possible changes in those relations. Just because Muir was not using the catchwords of ecological writing which we have come to look for, doesn't mean that he wasn't doing ecological thinking. He was. For the sake of convenience and clarity, I would like to outline his argument about the natural history of Sequoia forests as it appears in all three articles. I will use the termonology of later ecologists. |
