Ted Olson

“ WHAT is Soul? Who can define it? What is that intangible quality that makes me what I am, that brands me as a creature distinct, individual, with an entity that is my own and none other's?
Who can answer? I do not know. I can only tell you my story—the story of Malcolm Rae—and ask that you give it what credence you can.
It was two years ago that I bade Jane Cavanaugh good-by at the railway station in our little home town of Radford. She was weeping, and clumsily I tried to comfort her.
"I sha'n't be gone long, dearest," I said. "A year isn't long. ”

“ How long I lay there I can only guess. Bit by bit my strength returned. I sat up. I was on the edge of a mountain meadow, through which the stream swept, still foaming and boisterous. The thunder of the canyon came to me noisily.
The sound of it called me suddenly to a realization of my position. I strove to rise. A sickening, terrible pain shot through me, and as I dropped back to the sand I knew that my left leg was shattered.
It was not long before I knew the worst. Murdock and Norton were dead. I could not doubt the truth. ”

“ Up waterways we pressed, across silent, silver lakes, hemmed in to the very brim with an untouched growth of pine and spruce; across portages, where streams thundered down precipitous canyons while we laboriously transported canoe and duffel through the timber, following faint paths that told plainly how rarely they had known human foot prints. ”

“ August passed—a series of long days filled only with the toil of paddle and portage. September was on us, and the days grew shorter, and sharp at either end. We were in a veritable untrodden land now. The mountains were close upon us. The portages grew more frequent, the way more rough and toilsome. Norton, the leathery-skinned old prospector, informed us curtly one morning, "Four more days, and we're there."
That day we abandoned the canoe, cacheing it safely in shrubbery and underbush. For two days we pressed upward, packing across a ridge that tested our strength to the utmost. ”

“ The soul had fled because living soul could not inhabit dead flesh. But if the physical conditions that had ended life were removed, could not the soul again restore it to life. If aid, food, warmth were to come, could I not live again in the body? ”

“ Four days took us to the end of the railroad—a station tumbled in the midst of scarce-broken prairie and timberland. There we met the prospector, a shriveled, wiry, hairy old man, marked indelibly with the brand that men bear who have lived much in solitude. ”

“ God knows how, but he lives. The crisis is past. He will recover."
And he did recover. The body of Gordon Paige won back to life and health.
But the soul within his body was the soul of Malcolm Rae!
WHAT is soul? What is self? I speak to you with the voices of Gordon Paige. I write, and the handwriting is that of Gordon Paige.
But I—the entity that dwells in the body of Paige—I am Malcolm Rae.
In the spring they brought the news of Malcolm Rae's death to Jane Cavanaugh. She loved him—she was heart-broken. But she found comfort in the presence of her old friend Gordon Paige. ”