Quotes About Wilderness

There's the spider in the outhouse minding his own business

when they heard we were out in this country not to kill animals but just to climb mountains they took us to be hopeless eccentrics and left us alone.

The vast diamond silence of the forest

The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralize about it. He did not even think the law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.

But it did not all happen in a day, this giving over of himself, body and soul, to the man-animals. He could not immediately forego his wild heritage and his memories of the Wild. There were days when he crept to the edge of the forest and stood and listened to something calling him far and away.

But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.

He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial.

He had killed man, the noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang.

Sometimes he pursued the call into the forest, looking for it as though it were a tangible thing, barking softly or defiantly... Irresistible impulses seized him. he would be lying in camp, dozing lazily in the heat of the day, when suddenly his head would lift and his ears cock up, intent and listening, and he would spring on his feet and dash away, and on and on, for hours, though the forest aisles.

In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors. They quickened the old life within him, the old tricks which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks... And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.

There is a patience of the wild – dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself.

Wolf - tis what he is. He's not blackhearted like some men. 'Tis no heart he has at all.

They alone moved through the vast inertness. They alone were alive, and they sought for other things that were alive in order that they might devour them and continue to live.

White Fang was glad to acknowledge his lordship, but it was lordship based upon superior intelligence and brute strength...There were deeps in his nature which had never been sounded. A kind word, a caressing touch of the hand, on the part of Gray Beaver, might have sounded these deeps; but Gray Beaver did not caress nor speak kind words. It was not his way.

The dark circle became a dot on the moon-flooded snow as Spitz disappeared from view.

The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck

Sometimes they went hungry, sometimes they feasted riotously, all according to the abundance of game and the fortune of hunting.

Well, Buck my boy.

The clay of White Fang had been molded until he became what he was, morose and lonely, unloving and ferocious, the enemy of all his kind.

In noaptea aceea, Colt Alb strapunse tacerea cu un urlet prelung. Isi atinti botul spre stelele reci, impartasindu-le durerea lui.

He could not endure a prolonged contact with another body.  It smacked of danger.  It made him frantic.  He must be away, free, on his own legs, touching no living thing. 

Jack London (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916), was an American author who wrote The Call of the Wild and other books. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first Americans to make a huge financial success from writing. Source: Wikipedia

Scoutmasters need the capacity to enjoy the out-of-doors.

It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it