Cornhuskers / Carl Sandburg [electronic text]

CORNHUSKERS

PRAIRIE

I was born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.

Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam. Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches. Here the gray geese go five hundred miles and back with a wind under their wings honking the cry for a new home. Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.

The prairie sings to me in the forenoon and I know in the night I rest easy in the prairie arms, on the prairie heart.

After the sunburn of the day handling a pitchfork at a hayrack, after the eggs and biscuit and coffee, the pearl-gray haystacks in the gloaming are cool prayers to the harvest hands.

In the city among the walls the overland passenger train is choked and the pistons hiss and the wheels curse. On the prairie the overland flits on phantom wheels and the sky and the soil between them muffle the pistons and cheer the wheels.

I am here when the cities are gone. I am here before the cities come. I nourished the lonely men on horses. I will keep the laughing men who ride iron. I am dust of men.

The running water babbled to the deer, the cottontail, the gopher. You came in wagons, making streets and schools, Kin of the ax and rifle, kin of the plow and horse, Singing Yankee Doodle, Old Dan Tucker, Turkey in the Straw, You in the coonskin cap at a log house door hearing a lone wolf howl, You at a sod house door reading the blizzards and chinooks let loose from Medicine Hat, I am dust of your dust, as I am brother and mother To the copper faces, the worker in flint and clay, The singing women and their sons a thousand years ago Marching single file the timber and the plain.

I hold the dust of these amid changing stars. I last while old wars are fought, while peace broods mother-like, While new wars arise and the fresh killings of young men.

I fed the boys who went to France in great dark days. Appomattox is a beautiful word to me and so is Valley Forge and the Marne and Verdun, I who have seen the red births and the red deaths Of sons and daughters, I take peace or war, I say nothing and wait.

Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields, the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley? Have you heard my threshing crews yelling in the chaff of a strawpile and the running wheat of the wagonboards, my cornhuskers, my harvest hands hauling crops, singing dreams of women, worlds, horizons?

Rivers cut a path on flat lands. The mountains stand up. The salt oceans press in And push on the coast lines. The sun, the wind, bring rain And I know what the rainbow writes across the east or west in a half-circle: A love-letter pledge to come again.

Towns on the Soo Line, Towns on the Big Muddy, Laugh at each other for cubs And tease as children.

Omaha and Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul, sisters in a house together, throwing slang, growing up. Towns in the Ozarks, Dakota wheat towns, Wichita, Peoria, Buffalo, sisters throwing slang, growing up.

Out of prairie-brown grass crossed with a streamer of wigwam smoke—out of a smoke pillar, a blue promise—out of wild ducks woven in greens and purples— Here I saw a city rise and say to the peoples round world: Listen, I am strong, I know what I want. Out of log houses and stumps—canoes stripped from tree-sides—flatboats coaxed with an ax from the timber claims—in the years when the red and the white men met—the houses and streets rose.

A thousand red men cried and went away to new places for corn and women: a million white men came and put up skyscrapers, threw out rails and wires, feelers to the salt sea: now the smokestacks bite the skyline with stub teeth.

In an early year the call of a wild duck woven in greens and purples: now the riveter's chatter, the police patrol, the song-whistle of the steamboat.

To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake. I say to him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short.

What brothers these in the dark? What eaves of skyscrapers against a smoke moon? These chimneys shaking on the lumber shanties When the coal boats plow by on the river— The hunched shoulders of the grain elevators— The flame sprockets of the sheet steel mills And the men in the rolling mills with their shirts off

Playing their flesh arms against the twisting wrists of steel: what brothers these in the dark of a thousand years?

A headlight searches a snowstorm. A funnel of white light shoots from over the pilot of the Pioneer Limited crossing Wisconsin.

In the morning hours, in the dawn, The sun puts out the stars of the sky And the headlight of the Limited train.

The fireman waves his hand to a country school teacher on a bobsled. A boy, yellow hair, red scarf. and mittens, on the bobsled, in his lunch box a pork chop sandwich and a V of gooseberry pie.

The horses fathom a snow to their knees. Snow hats are on the rolling prairie hills. The Mississippi bluffs wear snow hats.

Keep your hogs on changing corn and mashes of grain, O farmerman. Cram their insides till they waddle on short legs Under the drums of bellies, hams of fat. Kill your hogs with a knife slit under the ear. Hack them with cleavers. Hang them with hooks in the hind legs.

A wagonload of radishes on a summer morning. Sprinkles of dew on the crimson-purple balls. The farmer on the seat dangles the reins on the rumps of dapple-gray horses. The farmer's daughter with a basket of eggs dreams of a new hat to wear to the county fair.

On the left-and right-hand side of the road, Marching corn— I saw it knee high weeks ago—now it is head high— tassels of red silk creep at the ends of the ears.

I am the prairie, mother of men, waiting. They are mine, the threshing crews eating beefsteak, the farmboys driving steers to the railroad cattle pens. They are mine, the crowds of people at a Fourth of July basket picnic, listening to a lawyer read the Declaration of Independence, watching the pinwheels and Roman candles at night, the young men and women two by two hunting the bypaths and kissing bridges. They are mine, the horses looking over a fence in the frost of late October saying good-morning to the horses hauling wagons of rutabaga to market. They are mine, the old zigzag rail fences, the new barb wire.

The cornhuskers wear leather on their hands. There is no let-up to the wind. Blue bandannas are knotted at the ruddy chins.

Falltime and winter apples take on the smolder of the five-o'clock November sunset: falltime, leaves, bonfires, stubble, the old things go, and the earth is grizzled.

The land and the people hold memories, even among the anthills and the angleworms, among the toads and woodroaches—among gravestone writings rubbed out by the rain—they keep old things that never grow old.

The frost loosens corn husks. The Sun, the rain, the wind loosen corn husks. The men and women are helpers. They are all cornhuskers together. I see them late in the western evening in a smoke-red dust.

The phantom of a yellow rooster flaunting a scarlet comb, on top of a dung pile crying hallelujah to the streaks of daylight, The phantom of an old hunting dog nosing in the underbrush for muskrats, barking at a coon in a treetop at midnight, chewing a bone, chasing his tail round a corncrib, The phantom of an old workhorse taking the steel point of a plow across a forty-acre field in spring, hitched to a harrow in summer, hitched to a wagon among cornshocks in fall, These phantoms come into the talk and wonder of people on the front porch of a farmhouse late summer nights. "The shapes that are gone are here," said an old man with a cob pipe in his teeth one night in Kansas with a hot wind on the alfalfa.

Look at six eggs In a mockingbird's nest.

Listen to six mockingbirds Flinging follies of O-be-joyful Over the marshes and uplands.

Look at songs Hidden in eggs.

When the morning sun is on the trumpet-vine blossoms, sing at the kitchen pans: Shout All Over God's Heaven. When the rain slants on the potato hills and the sun plays a silver shaft on the last shower, sing to the bush at the backyard fence: Mighty Lak a Rose. When the icy sleet pounds on the storm windows and the house lifts to a great breath, sing for the outside hills: The Ole Sheep Done Know the Road, the Young Lambs Must Find the Way.

Spring slips back with a girl face calling always: "Any new songs for me? Any new songs?"

O prairie girl, be lonely, singing, dreaming, waiting— your lover comes—your child comes—the years creep with toes of April rain on new-turned sod. O prairie girl, whoever leaves you only crimson poppies to talk with, whoever puts a good-by kiss on your lips and never comes back— There is a song deep as the falltime redhaws, long as the layer of black loam we go to, the shine of the morning star over the corn belt, the wave line of dawn up a wheat valley.

O prairie mother, I am one of your boys. I have loved the prairie as a man with a heart shot full of pain over love. Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.

I speak of new cities and new people. I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes. I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down, a sun dropped in the west. I tell you there is nothing in the world only an ocean of to-morrows, a sky of to-morrows.

I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say at sundown: To-morrow is a day.

RIVER ROADS

LET the crows go by hawking their caw and caw. They have been swimming in midnights of coal mines somewhere. Let 'em hawk their caw and caw.

Let the woodpecker drum and drum on a hickory stump. He has been swimming in red and blue pools somewhere hundreds of years And the blue has gone to his wings and the red has gone to his head. Let his red head drum and drum.

Let the dark pools hold the birds in a looking-glass. And if the pool wishes, let it shiver to the b!ur of many wings, old swimmers from old places.

Let the redwing streak a line of vermillion on the green wood lines. And the mist along the river fix its purple in lines of a woman's shawl on lazy shoulders.

PRAIRIE WATERS BY NIGHT

CHATTER of birds two by two raises a night song joining a litany of running water—sheer waters showing the russet of old stones remembering many rains.

And the long willows drowse on the shoulders of the running water, and sleep from much music; joined songs of day-end, feathery throats and stony waters, in a choir chanting new psalms.

It is too much for the long willows when low laughter of a red moon comes down; and the willows drowse and sleep on the shoulders of the running water.

EARLY MOON

THE baby moon, a canoe, a silver papoose canoe, sails and sails in the Indian west. A ring of silver foxes, a mist of silver foxes, sit and sit around the Indian moon. One yellow star for a runner, and rows of blue stars for more runners, keep a line of watchers. foxes, baby moon, runners, you are the panel of memory, fire-white writing to-night of the Red Man's dreams. Who squats, legs crossed and arms folded, matching its look against the moon-face, the star-faces, of the West? Who are the Mississippi Valley ghosts, of copper foreheads, riding wiry ponies in the night?—no bridles, love-arms on the pony necks, riding in the night a long old trail? Why do they always come back when the silver foxes sit around the early moon, a silver papoose, in the Indian west?

LAUGHING CORN

THERE was a high majestic fooling Day before yesterday in the yellow corn.

And day after to-morrow in the yellow corn There will be high majestic fooling.

The ears ripen in late summer And come on with a conquering laughter, Come on with a high and conquering laughter.

The long-tailed blackbirds are hoarse. One of the smaller blackbirds chitters on a stalk And a spot of red is on its shoulder And I never heard its name in my life.

Some of the ears are bursting. A white juice works inside. Cornsilk creeps in the end and dangles in the wind. Always—I never knew it any other way— The wind and the corn talk things over together. And the rain and the corn and the sun and the corn Talk things over together.

Over the road is the farmhouse. The siding is white and a green blind is slung loose. It will not be fixed till the corn is husked. The farmer and his wife talk things over together.

AUTUMN MOVEMENT

I CRIED over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go, not one lasts.

FALLTIME

GOLD Of a ripe oat straw, gold of a southwest moon, Canada thistle blue and flimmering larkspur blue, Tomatoes shining in the October sun with red hearts, Shining five and six in a row on a wooden fence, Why do you keep wishes on your faces all day long, Wishes like women with half-forgotten lovers going to new cities? What is there for you in the birds, the birds, the birds, crying down on the north wind in September, acres of birds spotting the air going south? Is there something finished? And some new beginning on the way?

ILLINOIS FARMER

BURY this old Illinois farmer with respect. He slept the Illinois nights of his life after days of work in Illinois cornfields. Now he goes on a long sleep. The wind he listened to in the cornsilk and the tassels, the wind that combed his red beard zero mornings when the snow lay white on the yellow ears in the bushel basket at the corncrib, The same wind will now blow over the place here where his hands must dream of Illinois corn.

HITS AND RUNS

I REMEMBER the Chillicothe ball players grappling the Rock Island ball players in a sixteen-inning game ended by darkness. And the shoulders of the Chillicothe players were a red smoke against the sundown and the shoulders of the Rock Island players were a yellow smoke against the sundown. And the umpire's voice was hoarse calling balls and strikes and outs and the umpire's throat fought in the dust for a song.

VILLAGE IN LATE SUMMER

Lips half-willing in a doorway. Lips half-singing at a window. Eyes half-dreaming in the walls. Feet half-dancing in a kitchen. Even the clocks half-yawn the hours And the farmers make half-answers.

BLIZZARD NOTES

I DON'T blame the kettle drums—they are hungry. And the snare drums—I know what they want—they are empty too. And the harring booming bass drums—they are hungriest of all.

The howling spears of the Northwest die down. The lullabies of the Southwest get a chance, a mother song. A cradle moon rides out of a torn hole in the ragbag top of the sky.

SUNSET FROM OMAHA HOTEL WINDOW

INTO the blue river hills The red sun runners go And the long sand changes And to-day is a goner And to-day is not worth haggling over.

Here in Omaha The gloaming is bitter As in Chicago Or Kenosha.

The long sand changes. To-day is a goner. Time knocks in another brass nail. Another yellow plunger shoots the dark.

Constellations Wheeling over Omaha As in Chicago Or Kenosha.

The long sand is gone and all the talk is stars. They circle in a dome over Nebraska.

STILL LIFE

Cool your heels on the rail of an observation car. Let the engineer open her up for ninety miles an hour. Take in the prairie fight and left, rolling land and new hay crops, swaths of new hay laid in the sun. A gray village flecks by and the horses hitched in front of the post-office never blink an eye. A barnyard and fifteen Holstein cows, dabs of white on a black wall map, never blink an eye. A signalman in a tower, the outpost of Kansas City, keeps his place at a window with the serenity of a bronze statue on a dark night when lovers pass whispering.

BAND CONCERT

BAND concert public square Nebraska city. Flowing and circling dresses, summer-white dresses. Faces, flesh tints flung like sprays of cherry blossoms. And gigglers, God knows, gigglers, rivaling the pony whinnies of the Livery Stable Blues.

Cowboy rags and nigger rags. And boys driving sorrel horses hurl a cornfield laughter at the girls in dresses, summer-white dresses. Amid the cornet staccato and the tuba oompa, gigglers, God knows, gigglers daffy with life's razzle dazzle.

Slow good-night melodies and Home Sweet Home. And the snare drummer bookkeeper in a hardware store nods hello to the daughter of a railroad conductor— a giggler, God knows, a giggler—and the summerwhite dresses filter fanwise out of the public square.

The crushed strawberries of ice cream soda places, the night wind in cottonwoods and willows, the lattice shadows of doorsteps and porches, these know more of the story.

THREE PIECES ON THE SMOKE OF AUTUMN

SMOKE Of autumn is on it all. The streamers loosen and travel. The red west is stopped with a gray haze. They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks, They make a long-tailed rider In the pocket of the first, the earliest evening star.

Three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines River.

There is a sheet of red ember glow on the river; it is dusk; and the muskrats one by one go on patrol routes west.

Around each slippery padding rat, a fan of ripples; in the silence of dusk a faint wash of ripples, the padding of the rats going west, in a dark and shivering river gold.

(A newspaper in my pocket says the Germans pierce the Italian line; I have letters from poets and sculptors in Greenwich Village; I have letters from an ambulance man in France and an I. W. W. man in Vladivostok.)

I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of ripples on a sheet of river gold.

Better the blue silence and the gray west, The autumn mist on the river, And not any hate and not any love, And not anything at all of the keen and the deep: Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor, And the new corn shoveled in bushels And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows, Umber lights of the dark, Umber lanterns of the loam dark.

Here a dog head dreams. Not any hate, not any love. Not anything but dreams. Brother of dusk and umber.

LOCALITIES

WAGON WHEEL GAP is a place I never saw And Red Horse Gulch and the chutes of Cripple Creek.

Red-shirted miners picking in the sluices, Gamblers with red neckties in the night streets, The fly-by-night towns of Bull Frog and Skiddoo, The night-cool limestone white of Death Valley, The straight drop of eight hundred feet From a shelf road in the Hasiampa Valley: Men and places they are I never saw.

I have seen three White Horse taverns, One in Illinois, one in Pennsylvania, One in a timber-hid road of Wisconsin.

I bought cheese and crackers Between sun showers in a place called White Pigeon Nestling with a blacksmith shop, a post-office, And a berry-crate factory, where four roads cross.

On the Pecatonica River near Freeport I have seen boys run barefoot in the leaves Throwing clubs at the walnut trees In the yellow-and-gold of autumn, And there was a brown mash dry on the inside of their hands.

On the Cedar Fork Creek of Knox County I know how the fingers of late October Loosen the hazel nuts. I know the brown eyes of half-open hulls. I know boys named Lindquist, Swanson, Hildebrand. I remember their cries when the nuts were ripe. And some are in machine shops; some are in the navy; And some are not on payrolls anywhere. Their mothers are through waiting for them to come home.

CABOOSE THOUGHTS

IT'S going to come out all right—do you know? The sun, the birds, the grass—they know. They get along—and we'll get along.

Some days will be rainy and you will sit waiting And the letter you wait for won't come, And I will sit watching the sky tear off gray and gray And the letter I wait for won't come.

There will be accidents. I know ac-ci-dents are coming. Smash-ups, signals wrong, washouts, trestles rotten, Red and yellow ac-ci-dents. But somehow and somewhere the end of the run The train gets put together again And the caboose and the green tail lights Fade down the right of way like a new white hope:

I never heard a mockingbird in Kentucky Spilling its heart in the morning.

I never saw the snow on Chimborazo. It's a high white Mexican hat, I hear.

I never had supper with Abe Lincoln. Nor a dish of soup with Jim Hill.

But I've been around. I know some of the boys here who can go a little. I know girls good for a burst of speed any time.

I heard Williams and Walker Before Walker died in the bughouse.

I knew a mandolin player Working in a barber shop in an Indiana town, And he thought he had a million dollars.

I knew a hotel girl in Des Moines. She had eyes; I saw her and said to myself The sun rises and the sun sets in her eyes. I was her steady and her heart went pit-a-pat. We took away the money for a prize waltz at a Brotherhood dance. She had eyes; she was safe as the bridge over the Mississippi at Burlington; I married her.

Last summer we took the cushions going west. Pike's Peak is a big old stone, believe me. It's fastened down; something you can count on.

It's going to come out all right—do you know? The sun, the birds, the grass—they know. They get along—and we'll get along.

ALIX

THE mare Alix breaks the world's trotting record one day. I see her heels flash down the dust of an Illinois race track on a summer afternoon. I see the timekeepers put their heads together over stopwatches, and call to the grand stand a split second is clipped off the old world's record and a new world's record fixed.

I see the mare Alix led away by men in undershirts and streaked faces. Dripping Alix in foam of white on the harness and shafts. And the men in undershirts kiss her ears and rub her nose, and tie blankets on her, and take her away to have the sweat sponged.

I see the grand stand jammed with prairie people yelling themselves hoarse. Almost the grand stand and the crowd of thousands are one pair of legs and one voice standing up and yelling hurrah.

I see the driver of Alix and the owner smothered in a fury of handshakes, a mob of caresses. I see the wives of the driver and owner smothered in a crush of white summer dresses and parasols.

Hours later, at sundown, gray dew creeping on the sod and sheds, I see Alix again: Dark, shining-velvet Alix, Night-sky Alix in a gray blanket,

Led back and forth by a nigger. Velvet and night-eyed Alix With slim legs of steel.

And I want to rub my nose against the nose of the mare Alix.

POTATO BLOSSOM SONGS AND JIGS

Rum tiddy um, tiddy um, tiddy um tum tum. My knees are loose-like, my feet want to sling their selves. I feel like tickling you under the chin—honey—and a-asking: Why Does a Chicken Cross the Road? When the hens are a-laying eggs, and the roosters pluck-pluck-put-akut and you—honey—put new potatoes and gravy on the table, and there ain't too much rain or too little: Say, why do I feel so gabby? Why do I want to holler all over the place?

Do you remember I held empty hands to you and I said all is yours the handfuls of nothing?

I ask you for white blossoms. I bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees. I bring out "The Spanish Cavalier" and "In the Gloaming, O My Darling."

The orchard here is near and home-like. The oats in the valley run a mile. Between are the green and marching potato vines. The lightning bugs go criss-cross carrying a zigzag of fire: the potato bugs are asleep under their stiff

and yellow-striped wings: here romance stutters to the western stars, "Excuse… me…"

Old foundations of rotten wood. An old barn done-for and out of the wormholes ten-legged roaches shook up and scared by sunlight, So a pickax digs a long tooth with a short memory. Fire can not eat this rubbish till it has lain in the sun.

The story lags. The story has no connections. The story is nothing but a lot of banjo plinka planka plunks.

The roan horse is young and will learn: the roan horse buckles into harness and feels the foam on the collar at the end of a haul: the roan horse points four legs to the sky and rolls in the red clover: the roan horse has a rusty jag of hair between the ears hanging to a white star between the eyes.

In Burlington long ago And later again in Ashtabula I said to myself: I wonder how far Ophelia went with Hamlet. What else was there Shakespeare never told? There must have been something. If I go bugs I want to do it like Ophelia. There was class to the way she went out of her head.

Does a famous poet eat watermelon? Excuse me, ask me something easy.

I have seen farmhands with their faces in fried catfish on a Monday morning.

And the Japanese, two-legged like us, The Japanese bring slices of watermelon into pictures. The black seeds make oval polka dots on the pink meat.

Why do I always think of niggers and buck-and-wing dancing whenever I see watermelon?

Summer mornings on the docks I walk among bushel peach baskets piled ten feet high. Summer mornings I smell new wood and the river wind along with peaches. I listen to the steamboat whistle hong-honging, hong-honging across the town. And once I saw a teameo straddling a street with a hayrack load of melons.

Niggers play banjos because they want to. The explanation is easy.

It is the same as why people pay fifty cents for tickets to a policemen's masquerade ball or a grocers-and butchers' picnic with a fat man's foot race. It is the same as why boys buy a nickel's worth of peanuts and eat them and then buy another nickel's worth. Newsboys shooting craps in a back alley have a fugitive understanding of the scientific principle involved. The jockey in a yellow satin shirt and scarlet boots, riding a sorrel pony at the county fair, has a grasp of the theory.

It is the same as why boys go running lickety-split away from a school-room geography lesson in April when the crawfishes come out and the young frogs are calling and the pussywillows and the cat-tails know something about geography themselves.

I ask you for white blossoms. I offer you memories and people. I offer you a fire zigzag over the green and marching vines. I bring a concertina after supper under the home-like apple trees. I make up songs about things to look at: potato blossoms in summer night mist filling the garden with white spots; a cavalryman's yellow silk handkerchief stuck in a flannel pocket over the left side of the shirt, over the ventricles of blood, over the pumps of the heart.

Bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees. Let romance stutter to the western stars, "Excuse …me…"

LOAM

In the loam we sleep, In the cool moist loam, To the lull of years that pass And the break of stars,

From the loam, then, The soft warm loam, We rise: To shape of rose leaf, Of face and shoulder.

We stand, then, To a whiff of life, Lifted to the silver of the sun Over and out of the loam A day.

MANITOBA CHILDE ROLAND

LAST night a January wind was ripping at the shingles over our house and whistling a wolf song under the eaves.

I sat in a leather rocker and read to a six-year-old girl the Browning poem, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

And her eyes had the haze of autumn hills and it was beautiful to her and she could not understand.

A man is crossing a big prairie, says the poem, and nothing happens—and he goes on and on—and it's all lonesome and empty and nobody home.

And he goes on and on—and nothing happens—and he comes on a horse's skull, dry bones of a dead horse— and you know more than ever it's all lonesome and empty and nobody home.

And the man raises a horn to his lips and blows—he fixes a proud neck and forehead toward the empty sky and the empty land—and blows one last wondercry.

And as the shuttling automatic memory of man clicks off its results willy-nilly and inevitable as the snick of a mouse-trap or the trajectory of a 42-centimeter projectile,

I flash to the form of a man to his hips in snow drifts of Manitoba and Minnesota—in the sled derby run from Winnipeg to Minneapolis.

He is beaten in the race the first day out of Winnipeg— the lead dog is eaten by four team mates—and the man goes on and on—running while the other racers ride—running while the other racers sleep—

Lost in a blizzard twenty-four hours, repeating a circle of travel hour after hour—fighting the dogs who dig holes in the snow and whimper for sleep— pushing on—running and walking five hundred miles to the end of the race—almost a winner—-one toe frozen, feet blistered and frost-bitten.

And I know why a thousand young men of the Northwest meet him in the finishing miles and yell cheers —I know why judges of the race call him a winner and give him a special prize even though he is a loser.

I know he kept under his shirt and around his thudding heart amid the blizzards of five hundred miles that one last wonder-cry of Childe Roland—-and I told the six-year-old girl all about it.

And while the January wind was ripping at the shingles and whistling a wolf song under the caves, her eyes had the haze of autumn hills and it was beautiful to her and she could not understand.

WILDERNESS

THERE is a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes … a red tongue for raw meat … and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fox in me … a silver-gray fox … I sniff and guess… I pick things out of the wind and air … I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers… I circle and loop and double-cross.

There is a hog in me … a snout and a belly … a machinery for eating and grunting… a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fish in me … I know I came from saltblue water-gates … I scurried with shoals of herring… I blew waterspouts with porpoises …before land was… before the water went down… before Noah… before the first chapter of Genesis.

There is a baboon in me… clambering-clawed … dog-faced … yawping a galoot's hunger … hairy under the armpits … here are the

hawk-eyed hankering men… here are the blond and blue-eyed women … here they hide curled asleep waiting … ready to snarl and kill …ready to sing and give milk… waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird… and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want… and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.