This longing grew upon me. I became restless with it. In
the daytime I dreamed over my work. At night my sleep
was broken and restless. At times I would even wander
forth, at night into the park, and there, deep in the
night shadow of the trees, imagine myself alone in the
recesses of the dark woods remote from the toil and fret
of our distracted civilization.
This increasing feeling culminated in the resolve which
becomes the subject of this narrative. The thought came
to me suddenly one night. I woke from my sleep with a
plan fully matured in my mind. It was this: I would, for
one month, cast off all the travail and cares of civilized
life and become again the wild man of the woods that Nature
made me. My plan was to go to the edge of the great
woods, somewhere in New England, divest myself of my
clothes--except only my union suit--crawl into the woods,
stay there a month and then crawl out again. To a trained
woodsman and crawler like myself the thing was simplicity
itself. For food I knew that I could rely on berries,
roots, shoots, mosses, mushrooms, fungi, bungi--in fact
the whole of Nature's ample storehouse; for my drink,
the running brook and the quiet pool; and for my companions
the twittering chipmunk, the chickadee, the chocktaw,
the choo-choo, the chow-chow, and the hundred and one
inhabitants of the forgotten glade and the tangled thicket.
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