“He must have a good eye for gum trees?” suggested Thad.
“Just what he has,” replied the accommodating Allan. “A near-sighted gum hunter, or even a careless one, would miss many a chance to fill up his pack. The keen picker runs his eye along every trunk. Here and there he sees a tall spruce marked by a seam, through which the sap has oozed, perhaps for years. The bubbles have crept out, and been clarified day by day by contact with sun and rain. There they are, nuggets of amber and garnet, ready for the picker’s chisel. Sometimes he climbs up, and taps away like a giant woodpecker. Then again, when it pays to do it, the tree is felled; for of course he has his axe along; no man would ever go into the Maine woods without that, you know.”
“If I was in that business,” spoke up Bumpus, “tell you what I’d do.”
“Go on, then,” said Giraffe, taking advantage of the fat boy’s abstraction to pick the pancake off his plate, there being no more in the main dish.
“Why, I’d just have a few acres of extra fine trees, and I’d scar ’em good and hard, so they’d bleed. Then, in a year or two, I’d just gather the gum, like they do in the turpentine regions down South.”
“Good idea, Bumpus,” declared Allan. “But another great man has thought of that same idea, which isn’t copyrighted either. Every year this man, who is called the spruce gum king, takes a certain circuit, and wounds the trees. Then, a couple of years afterwards he wanders that way, and reaps his harvest. There’s another industry that gives employment to lots of men up here. That’s gathering hoop poles.”
“Oh! tell us something about that,” demanded Step Hen.
“Well,” Allan went on, “he follows in the wake of the logger, you might say, for he just wants the second growth that springs up around the stumps left after the tree is cut down. He takes what no one else seems to want, the young birch and ash sprouts that are too plentiful anyway.
“He takes a horse with him on his tours, for he has lots to tote. He hauls his day’s cutting to camp, and spends the evening fixing the poles. It’s pretty hard work, I’m told, all around; but then the evenings are pleasant, what with the crackle of the fire; the swish of the shaves at work taking the bark off the poles; the pipe-smoking; and the story-telling.”
“What do they get for the poles after they’ve been skinned?” asked Step Hen.