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Show 560. Mutton was "the least desirable of food" and young Muir preferred to eat lupine and saxifrage like the Indians. All men, he knew, must eat, but it irked him that one could not go for "a few days' saunter in the Godful woods without maintaining a base on a wheat-field and grist-mill." Later in the summer he wished to live on pine-buds "for the sake of this grand independence." But he could not, just as he could never live like a juniper overlooking Tenaya Lake. It is in this context that he argued, "Man seems to be the only animal whose food soils him." A problem as old as Genesis. Unlike the clean wild animals, fallen Man soiled himself whenever he labored for food. All labor for bread was degrading in the eyes of young Muir. It is no coincidence that he began to notice immediately after this incident that the sheep were destroying Nature's lilly meadows; "man alone, and the animals he tames, destroy these gardens," he lamented. As he pursued his studies in the mountains, the sheep business seemed more and more distasteful. There was simply no way out of young Muir's dilemma. Though he could not eat the mutton he guarded, he also knew that the bread he ate was earned in the sheep business. Billy may be depicted as more soiled than young Muir, but it is only a matter of degree. The Indians whom Billy hated were able to get their living from wild plants and animals, but Muir suspected that the dirty Indians he saw on occasion were no more natural than the fashionable "glaring tailored tourists." Even though he thought about the wild foods Indians ate, and said, "Our education |