This is a quote from the 1883 article in Cowboys and Indians. It was also part of the narration in the "1883" Series you can stream if you are interested.
"Here, there can be no mistakes. Because here doesn’t care. The river doesn’t care if you can swim. The snake doesn’t care how much you love your children. And the wolf has no interest in your dreams. If you fail to beat the current, you will drown. If you get too close, you will be bitten. And if you are too weak, you will be eaten. We are in the land of no mercy now. "
What is interesting to me is we live here on earth in times like this again. Why?
Because Covid and Putin don't care about you and I either. They only want to survive and your death or mine means nothing to either of them at all.
This reminds me also of a true horrific story of how parents put their child on the back of a deer in Yosemite National Park who were from another country where wild animals might not exist anymore. The deer promptly threw the child off it's back and stomped the child to death with it's hooves.
The animals in the western United States are still wild and might kill you even if it is just a deer. To not realize this is to be dead (or your children). Learning how to behave around truly wild things is just a part of what I was taught to think like when I was growing up. The other thing I was taught by my father and grandfather was to navigate by locations. In other words you look for things that stand out when you are hiking in the wilderness like specific mountains and rivers or significant trees or rocks so you don't get lost by accident.
The west is so big and so wild that some people not realizing this get lost on almost any day of the year because they never learned to memorize large objects like certain rocks or trees or rivers so they don't get lost and starve to death and die from no food or water or exposure to the elements or all these things at once.
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