Chapter 8. Seeking For Light

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_ CHAPTER EIGHT. SEEKING FOR LIGHT

Thus Oowikapun heard Mookoomis at the camp fires tell these weird old stories, and in listening to him he tried to forget his own sorrows and anxieties.

When he thought he had become so well acquainted with him that he could make a confidant of him, he told him a little of what he had learned from Memotas, but he was careful to hide his own secret feelings, for he knew that Mookoomis was a strong pagan, as well as a great hater of the whites. Not as yet having met with any of the detested race who were Christians, he thought they were all alike, and had only come across the ocean to rob and cheat and kill the poor Indian and take possession of all his lands.

One evening, when they were alone, Oowikapun ventured to tell him about the book of heaven which the white man had, and which some Indians had got hold of and were reading with great interest, and that some of them had even accepted its teachings and were believing in them. This news made Mookoomis very angry, and Oowikapun was sorry that he had told him; but it was now too late, and so he had to listen while the angry man talked and gave his views on these things.

He said, referring to the legend, that the Great Spirit never intended the book for the Indian, but that he had made him a hunter, and sent him out into the forest and the prairies, and on the great lakes and rivers, and there he was to listen and hear the Great Spirit's voice and see his works. "This," added Mookoomis, "is the Great Spirit's plan, and he will be angry with any of his red children who become dissatisfied with this arrangement, and try to go the white man's way or read his book."

These talks did not bring comfort to Oowikapun, or lift the burden from his soul; and so, in his desperation, although he did not expect much comfort, he told Mookoomis of his heart sorrows and disquietude of spirit. The old man did not get angry, but listened to him very patiently; and then advised and even urged him to go out into the woods away from every human sound, and in peaceful solitudes let nature speak to him and soothe his troubled spirit.

So Oowikapun obeyed the voice of Mookoomis, and, quickly arranging his affairs, he went out into the solitudes, far away from any human being, in the hope that there, alone with nature, he might get rest for his soul. In doing this he was only imitating thousands who, too stubborn or too ignorant to come to the great Comforter in his own way, are trying in some other way to find that peace which God alone can give.

We pity those who ignorantly do these things, but what can we say of those who have been taught the plan of salvation through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and yet will go on talking pertly about God in nature, and of their ability to find themselves in him by studying him in his works? God in nature, without Christ, is a riddle, a perplexity, a mystery.

We pity poor Oowikapun. Just enough light had come to him to show him that he was a poor, miserable sinner, but he had not yet received enough to show him the true plan of salvation; and so he was still groping along in the gloom, and much more to be pitied than the thousands who know in theory what is God's plan of salvation, but who reject it because of their pride or hardness of heart:

Everything seemed against him. His eyes were opened to see things now as never before, for not as a skillful hunter, but as a seeker after peace, was he out in nature's solitudes. Everything around him seemed mysterious and contradictory. This teacher, nature, whose lessons he had come to learn, seemed to be in a very perverse mood, as if to impart just the reverse of what he would learn, and seemed herself to be destitute of the very things he had hoped she would have imparted to him.

Sharp and rude was his first awakening from his illusion. He had not gone far into the wilderness before it came to him, and it happened thus. As he was walking along in the forest he heard, but a short distance ahead of him, a pitiful cry of a creature in distress. Quickly he hurried on, and was just in time to see the convulsive gasp of a beautiful young fawn that had been seized and was being mangled by a great, fierce wolf, which had found it where it had been hidden away by the mother deer before she had gone into the beaver meadows to feed.

To send the death-dealing bullet through the brains of the savage wolf was soon done, but, alas! it was too late to save the little innocent fawn, whose great, big, beautiful eyes were already glassy in death, and whose life-blood pouring out from the gaping wounds was crimsoning the leaves and flowers where it had fallen.

"Is this," said Oowikapun, with sadness of spirit, "the first lesson nature has for me? To her I am coming for peace and quietness of spirit, and is this what I first see?" Thus on he travelled until he reached the shores of a great lake, where he had resolved to stay for a time, at the advice of Mookoomis, to try to find in the solitudes, in communion with nature, that which his soul craved.

As an observant hunter he had ever been a student of nature, but never before with such an object in his heart as now filled it. He found no happiness in his investigations, but was appalled at the sights which met him and the mysteries with which the study of them baffled him. Death and discord seemed to reign everywhere, and the strong seemed ever tyrannising over the weak.

Such sights as the following were ever before him. One day, while sitting near the shore of the lake, where before him the sunlit waters played with the pebbles at his feet, he saw a beautiful kingfisher hover in mid-air for an instant, and then suddenly plunge down in the water and quickly rise up again with a fine fish in his bill. Almost instantly, from the top of an old dead tree near the shore, he observed a fierce hawk, whose sharp eye had seen the fish thus captured. With a scream that rang out sharp and clear, it flew swiftly after the kingfisher, and so terrified it that it quickly dropped the fish and hurriedly flew away to a place of safety. Seizing the fish in its bill, with a scream of triumph, the hawk was about to return to the shore, when another actor appeared upon the scene. Away up on the side of the cliff, which rose up a little back from the shore to the height of several hundred feet, on a projecting ledge of rocks, a pair of eagles came year after year and built their crude, wild nest. One of these great birds was watching the transaction going on below. When it heard the shrill scream of triumph from the fishhawk, it knew that the time for action had arrived. With both wings closed it shot down from the eyrie, and ere the hawk, with its stolen plunder, had reached its old, storm-beaten tree, the king of birds struck it such a blow that, dazed and terrified, it dropped the fish, and barely succeeded in getting away. It was not the fishhawk the eagle was after, but fish; and as the active bird saw the fish drop from the beak of the fishhawk, it flew down after it and caught it in mid-air ere it reached the water. Then, in majestic circles, it slowly ascended to its eyrie. This sight under other circumstances would have been enjoyable; but now, when he was a seeker in nature for peace and happiness, the greed and rapacity of the stronger over the weaker only filled him with sadness.

Thus for several weeks he tried to study nature, or to learn lessons from her, while, far away from all his people, he dwelt in his little camp, which he had made at the foot of a beautiful birch tree, or wandered over the hills or in the forests. But he was no better off, for all the sights that met his eyes were very similar to those we have described. It was cruelty and death and destruction everywhere.

Nature alone and unaided does not reveal Christ the Saviour. Since the fall, and the entrance of sin with all of its attendant miseries into this once glorious world of ours, the study of nature, with all her vagaries, without the light of revelation to clear up her mysteries, is more apt to drive men from God than to draw them to him.

So Oowikapun found out, especially one night, after tossing about on his bed of balsam boughs in his little tent. While lying there, utterly miserable and dissatisfied with himself, he was startled by hearing, far away, the dull, sullen roar of thunder, telling of an approaching storm. Such was the mode in which he was that this sound was welcomed, and he sprang up rejoicing, for there had suddenly come into his mind the thought that perhaps now he would hear something in nature's voice from which he could draw comfort and happiness.

With this hope in his heart he went out of his tent and seated himself on a rock near at hand. One by one the stars disappeared as the thick, black clouds came rolling up, quickly covering the whole expanse of heaven, and making the night one of inky darkness, save when the cliffs and forest, islands and lake, were illumined by the vivid lightning's flash.

Soothed by that awesome feeling which comes to many in the brief last moments which precede the burst of the tempest, Oowikapun was comforted, and began to say to himself, "At last I hear the voice of nature for which I have so long been waiting, and now tranquillised I wait for all she has to tell me of comfort and of rest."

Hardly had these thoughts passed through his mind ere there came a lightning flash so vivid, and a thunderbolt so near and powerful, followed by a crashing peal of thunder so sudden and so deafening, that Oowikapun was completely stunned and thrown helpless to the ground. When he recovered consciousness the storm had nearly died away. A few muttering growls of thunder could still be heard, and some flashes of lightning upon the distant horizon told in which direction the storm had disappeared.

Oowikapun staggered to his feet, and tried to comprehend what had happened. That something had struck him was evident. What it was at first he was too bewildered to understand. Thinking the best thing he could do in this dazed condition would be to go back under the shelter of his little tent, he turned to do so, but found it an impossibility. The thunderbolt that had stunned him had struck the large birch tree, and so shattered it to pieces that, as it fell, it had crushed down the little wigwam into a helpless wreck.

Great indeed was the disappointment and vexation of Oowikapun, who, while vainly imagining that at length he was about to hear the soothing voice of nature to comfort and bless him, got from her such a crack that he was knocked senseless, and, in addition, had his dwelling place completely wrecked. Groping round in the ruins, he succeeded in finding his blanket, which he threw over his shoulders as a slight protection against the heavy rain, which continued falling all night.

Oowikapun still lingered in his lonely forest retreat. His pride revolted at the idea of having to return to the village and confess that all his efforts had been in vain and that only defeat and humiliation had been his lot.

So a new wigwam was built in a more sheltered place amid the dark evergreen trees. His depression of spirit was such that for a long time he left his abode only when hunger compelled him to hunt for his necessary food. When he did resume his wanderings they were generally in the night. The singing of the birds had no charm for him, and the brightness of the summer days chased not away his gloom. More congenial to him were the "watches of the night," when the few sounds that fell upon his ears were weird and ghostly. Here, amid the gloomy shadows where the only sounds were the sighing of the winds among the trees, the melancholy hootings of the owls, or the distant howlings of the wolves, he passed many weary hours.

The psalmist, with adoring love, could say: "Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge," but to Oowikapun neither the "speech" of the day nor the "knowledge" of the night gave any responsive answer to his heart's longings or led him any nearer to the source of soul comfort. And yet nature spoke to him as grandly as it was possible for her to utter her voice, and her last effort was of the sublimest character and such as but few mortals are permitted to witness.

It came to Oowikapun one night when he had aimlessly wandered far out from the shadows of the forest gloom, to a spot where the canopy of heaven, bright with its multitudes of stars, was above him.

Perhaps in no other land can nature in her varied aspects of sublimity and grandeur as regards celestial phenomena, be better studied than in the wild north-land. Her cyclonic storms in summer and her blizzard blasts in winter are at times not only terrific in their destructive power, but they are also overwhelmingly grand in their appearance.

Then her "visions of the night" are at times sublimely beautiful. Her star-decked vault of heaven, absolutely free from all mists and fogs and damps, seems so high and vast. The stars glisten and twinkle with wondrous clearness. The flashing meteors fade out but slowly, and the moon is so white and bright that her shadows cast are often as vivid as those of the sun in some other lands.

But nothing equals a first-class field night of the mysterious aurora borealis. No other phenomenon of nature in magnitude of display, in varied brilliancy of colour, in bewildering rapidity of movement, in grandeur so celestial, in its very existence so unaccountable, is calculated to lift man up and away from things earthly, into the very realm and presence of the spiritual, as does a first-class display of the northern lights, as seen in the far north-land. While they are generally more frequent in the winter months than at other times of the year, yet they are very uncertain in their comings, and sometimes burst upon the world and illuminate and fill up with celestial glory the brief hours of some of the short summer nights.

To Oowikapun, in his mental darkness and disquietude, there came one of these more than earthly visions of entrancing beauty. If in any one of nature's phenomena she could speak to a troubled soul, surely it would be in this. For while to Elijah the answer was in the still small voice, yet man unaided by divine revelation prefers the earthquake and the fire, or some other grand, overwhelming manifestation of nature's power, which appeals to the sensuous rather than to the spiritual.

To these Northern Indians the auroras have ever been associated with the ghostly or spiritual. In some of the tribes the literal translation of the northern lights is the "spirits of their forefathers going out to battle."

The display that Oowikapun gazed upon was one of more than ordinary sublimity. He had left his little wigwam which nestled among the balsams, and had gone out from the forest gloom and had seated himself on the shore of the lake where the little waves made soothing music as they played among the pebbles at his feet. The sun had gone down in splendour, leaving a glorious radiance of sapphire and crimson on hills and waves. Quietly and imperceptibly the shadows of night mantled the long twilight gloaming, and then one by one the stars came out from their hiding places, until the whole high dome of heaven was bright. The milky way brightened into wondrous distinctness, until it seemed to Oowikapun like a great pathway, and he wondered, as held in the tradition of his people, if on it, by and by, he should travel to the happy hunting grounds of his fathers.

After a time a brightness began to dawn in the northern sky, and then from it some brilliant streamers of light suddenly shot up to the heavens above. Then wavy ribbons of light quickly followed, and rapidly unrolling themselves parallel with the horizon, quivered and danced in rhythmic movements, blazing out at times in varied vivid colours as they gracefully undulated from east to west. Often had Oowikapun seen these displays, but up to this time he had only gazed with languid interest upon these nightly visitants. This night, however, there was a display so glorious that he stood as one entranced.

With a suddenness that can be shown only by electrical phenomena, there almost instantaneously shot up from below the eastern horizon a dazzling blaze of gorgeous electrical light, which in successive bounds rushed on and on until, like a brilliant meteor a million times magnified, it spanned the heavens, and for a time in purest white it seemed to hang an arch of truce from heaven to earth. For a little while it quivered in its dazzling whiteness, and then from it flashed out streamers in all the colours of the rainbow. With one end holding on to the arch of snowy whiteness they danced and scintillated and blazed until the whole heavens seemed aglow. Then breaking loose they seemed to form themselves into whole battalions of soldiers, and advanced and fought and retreated until the heavens seemed to be the battlefield of the ages, and stained with the blood of millions slain. During all the apparent carnage, great streamers waved continuously above the contending armies, and seemed like great battle flags leading on the forces to greater deeds of valour. Sometimes they seemed to change into great fiery swords, ready to add to the apparent carnage and destruction that seemed so intensely real.

Thus in ever-changing glories the vision of the heavens above continued, while Oowikapun, awed and subdued in spirit, felt thankful that he was only a spectator upon such scenes of ghostly carnage and blood. But impressive and glorious as what had already been revealed, the auroras had yet in reserve the climax of their display, and when it came it nearly froze his blood in his veins, and threw him trembling and terrified on his face upon the ground. Suddenly did the change come. With, the rapidity of a lightning flash, the great quivering arch of light transformed itself, into a corona of such dazzling splendour that no words can describe it. From purest white the multitudes of streamers, of which it was now composed, suddenly changed to pink and blue, and green and yellow, all the time flitting and scintillating so rapidly that the eyes were pained in their vain efforts to follow the rapid flights.

Then in a twinkling of an eye the whole changed to a deep, blood-red crimson--so bloodlike, so terrible, so dazzling, so awful, that the brave man was crushed down, terrified and subdued before this blinding display of the omnipotent power of the Great Spirit.

The dauntless courage that had made him exult at the prospect of meeting the fiercest bear in the forest, with no other weapon than his trusty hunting knife, or the most hostile foe of his tribe, was of no avail here, and so, a crushed and vanquished man, as soon as he could, he cowered back to his wigwam, where, wrapping himself in his blanket, he long remained. He trembled at the thought of having been in such apparent contact with the spirit land, while his unhappy soul chided him with a sense of his unfitness for that unknown life beyond.

Poor Oowikapun, he was like many who, although they live under happier influences and amid the blaze of Gospel day, yet foolishly think that if some heavenly manifestation of the glory beyond, some glimpse of the land that is afar off, or some sight of its celestial inhabitants, were given them to enjoy, very quickly would they be convinced and converted.

John, the beloved disciple, saw the New Jerusalem and its inhabitants; dazzled and confused he fell at the feet of one of those redeemed ones, and worshipped the creature instead of the Creator.

Something more than the mere visions of heaven's glories or northern auroras are necessary to give peace to the troubled soul. Even so found unhappy Oowikapun, for when the excitement of these night visions wore off, he felt more than ever crushed down with a sense of his own littleness, while darker seemed his spiritual vision than ever before these auroral glories had blazed and flashed around him.

Disgusted and disappointed, he packed up his few things and returned to his village more miserable and depressed in spirit than ever.

He had had many evidences of a Creator, but had met with nothing that told him of a Saviour. The idea of being able to "look up through nature unto nature's God," is an utter impossibility unless the one looking has some knowledge of God in Christ Jesus. With this knowledge in his possession he can answer as did the devout philosopher when asked the question, "What are the latest discoveries in nature?" replied, "God everywhere."

With God revealed in Christ Jesus there is something real in which to trust. Her mysteries that long perplexed are cleared up, and darkness that long continued is dissipated, and the trusting one realises that no longer is he slowly and feebly feeling his way along on the "sinking sands" of uncertainties, but is securely built on the "Rock of ages." _

Read next: Chapter 9. Physical Torture

Read previous: Chapter 7. Mookoomis And His Legends

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