Mountain Goat

Solitary eccentric who blazed his own path through the wilderness.

When a young man voluntarily abandons society to live alone in a hand-built cabin beside Walden Pond, subsisting on beans and solitude for two years, he is demonstrating something unmistakably mountain-goat: the compulsion to seek higher, lonelier ground than anyone else dares. Thoreau's refusal to pay taxes as a protest against slavery — landing him in jail without regret — reflects the mountain-goat's stubborn independence and willingness to occupy a precarious ledge that others would find terrifying. His declaration that he "went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately" captures the mountain-goat's essential nature: not antisocial, but fiercely self-directed, navigating rugged terrain on private terms. Like the mountain-goat, Thoreau found sure footing precisely where conventional society saw only impossible cliffs.