Something was lumbering through the brush, all the while munching or gnawing more noisily than the sound of its approach.
The boy sat, spine erect, listening for sounds that would tell him if the animal was a steer, an elk or a bear. It was difficult to tell from inside his tent. Quietly, he opened the zipper to the entrance and peeked out, keeping his head close to the ground.
Dawn was just breaking so he could see only a few feet. He saw the tall weeds at the edge of his campsite shaking in harmony with the sounds of the chewing and he knew that this was no bear. He pulled his head and shoulders back into the tent and carefully put on his jeans, flannel shirt, and boots. He would have to wait until it got a little lighter.
In a few minutes, the cold fall night gave way to the subdued light of dawn as the mountain-rimmed valley became visible, yet the light gave no strength to the colors of morning.
A short distance from his campsite, the boy found an uprooted, mature pine tree half a man tall at the root, and the hole beneath the root added another couple of feet, which he didn't need, so he actually had to stand astraddle of the base of the large tree. In any event, his attention was fixed by the majesty of the 6-point elk grazing about 40 yards across the tundra.
The elks hooves sunk into the soft, green earth about six inches with every step, but they never showed a sign of mud or moisture. Where the animal stood was a point of convergence of the tiny mountain rivulets that, about a half a mile further down, would become Eagle Creek -- a rushing mountain stream that would swallow a man and a horse at its deep rapids, near Richland. The ground was too cold to be muddy and it gave away gently to the elk's body, granting the animal a sense of comfort that surely drew him to select this place to eat rather than the meadow to the immediate southeast.
Rapidly, the gray dawn was flooded with the yellow-orange sunlight that broke through the mountainous barrier according to the size and shape of the rim, leaving the eastern portions of the valley unlit in contrast to the blanket of warming light that covered the western mountain floor not more than 20 miles away.
High Valley, as it was called, was rimmed by foothills that leaped into mountains of the 6,000 to 8,000 foot variety. The valley floor was covered with rolling meadows that reached up the foothills into the pine and tamarack forests of the mountain slopes. Fully one-third of the mountains' face was bare, gray-blue rock. Beyond the valley were the Blue Mountains. To the east lay Hell's Canyon, the nation's deepest canyon carved out by the timeless waters of the Snake River. To the west was an even larger valley called the Grand Ronde or Great Round Valley by the Indians who named it.
At the first sign of morning, the elk lifted his chocolate-colored head and let out a deep throaty bugle that challenged Mother Nature herself. With his horns projecting up into the sky a full five feet higher than the top of his buckskin shoulders, he was, at the moment, the master of all he surveyed. His voice was deep and resonant and the strength of his long call penetrated the mountains for miles around.
In a few minutes came a distant reply and, to the boy, it seemed as though the second voice may be from an even larger beast. It was not long before he heard a tremendous crashing coming through the woods that brought the six-point elk to full attention. His nose flared and he beat the ground with his hooves while he extended his neck and let go a tremendous challenge that would have driven off any other animal for miles. The thrashing in the forest stopped for a moment, and then came the defiant reply followed by an even louder crashing at the edge of the woods. Finally he emerged with his eight-pointed horns fighting with the air and snot blowing from his foaming muzzle.
In a flash, the six-point charged the invader and they collided in midair with a thunderous sound, the echo of which was interrupted by another charge and collision, after which the larger eight-point seemed relieved of his fury and quietly, yet proudly, walked back into the woods from which he came. The six-point bull elk, his shoulders lathered with sweat from the contest, soon was joined by several cow elk and a few yearlings who had been watching, out of the boy's sight, at the edge of a clearing.
The boy, too excited to think, stood up and gave a yell as best he could, and the elk looked up at him and, in a flash, they galloped into the trees and waited to see if he would follow. Of course, the boy had the whole of a new day to chase after whatever suited his fancy.
This place and this event, I am sure you would agree, is very likely to exist; and, as it turns out, it did happen just a couple of miles outside of Union, Oregon. The elk, you might suspect, were directed by a force commonly known as instinct. This force is as real as the chair at your desk and is a widely accepted phenomenon. No man could train two Hollywood movie elk to begin to approach the majestic performance brought about by instinct.
Yet, it never ceases to befuddle me how a majority of chiropractors and an even larger majority of humanity dismiss another natural force that is even more important -- how highly educated chiropractors cringe at the mention of it and beg for reliance on more medical terminology. The natural force I present to you was discovered by a chiropractor and is termed innate.
While many have described other terms such as homeostasis and the like, it was a chiropractor who first sought to link a healing art, science, and philosophy to assist the innate mechanism of the human body. Modern chiropractors have lost sight of this central concept to chiropractic and have instead focused their entire resource upon the disease termed subluxation. They intend to control the body by force of hand and knowledge rather than assist the force that is within.
Chiropractic is based upon innate, just as medicine is based upon disease. Chiropractors who reduce innate to the presence or absence of subluxations are no more likely to get a result than an animal trainer trying to train two elk to mimic their instincts.
There is no more likely place to practice chiropractic, than next to innate.
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