20 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON 



to the face of the cliff, my fingers gripping a 

 slight seam overhead, my feet feeling blindly at 

 the brink beneath, when there came up to me, 

 small and smothered, the wash of the waves, — 

 the voice of space and nothingness and void, the 

 call of the chasm out of which I was so hardly 

 climbing. A cold hand clasped me from behind. 



With an impulse as instinctive as the un- 

 fledged murre's, I flattened against the toppling 

 rock, fingers and feet, elbows, knees, and chin 

 clinging desperately to the narrow chance, — a 

 falling fragment of shale, a gust of wind, the 

 wing-stroke of a frightened bird, enough to 

 break my hold and swing me out over the water, 

 washing faint and far below. Along breath, and 

 I was climbing again. 



Yet in that instant I was born again, not a 

 human being, but a mere being; stripped of 

 everything except life and the clinging to life ; 

 reduced to one of my ancestral animal selves ; 

 reverting in that moment of time through the 

 aeons of my development back to the bird of me, 

 back to my murre self, catching by chin, knees, 

 elbows, feet, and fingers to the rocky seams for 

 life, naked life. I was reborn a murre, fighting 



