God's Country by James Oliver Curwood — Read

This morning is a glory of sunshine and peace after last night's rain. It seems inconceivable that the blue sky above the forest was filled a few hours ago with the crash of thunder and the blaze of lightning. I was up at dawn, wakened by a pair of red squirrels playing upon the roof of my cabin. Together we watched the sun rise, and after that they chattered about my open door while I prepared my breakfast. We are becoming great friends. One of them I have given the name of Nuts, and for no reason in the world unless it is because there are no nuts up here; and the other, the sleek, beautiful little female, I call Spoony because she looks at me so slyly, with her pretty head perked on one side, as if flirting with me.

It is only eight o'clock, yet we have been up nearly four hours. At the edge of the creek, less than a stone's throw from the cabin, I have built me a narrow table of smooth-hewn saplings between two old spruce trees, and this is my open-air studio when the weather is fine. Word of it has gone abroad, though I am many hundreds of miles from civilization. Many kinds of wild things have come to get acquainted with me, fascinated chiefly, I think, by the marvelous new language of my clicking typewriter. The welcome and friendship of these little wilderness-hearts are growing nearer and more apparent to me every day; and with each day the Great Truth speaks to me even more clearly than the day before -- that each of these beating hearts, like my own, is a part of that nature which I worship and is as vitally a spark of its life as the heart which is beating inside my own flannel shirt.