The band of boys, who, in spite of swamps and jungles, had learned to love the forest dearly, for its many beauties, and for the wild offspring with which it teemed, sorrowfully gasped, as if they saw the skeleton of a friend.
Chapter XII.
“Go It, Old Bruin!”
Before them lay a ruined tract of country, extending northward farther than eye could reach. It is called by Maine woodsmen a brûlée, name borrowed from their French-Canadian neighbors, who dwell across the boundary line which separates the Dominion from the United States.
The word signifies “burnt tract;” but it gives a feeble idea of the fire-smitten, blackened region on which the lads looked.
The forest until now had been a wilderness truly, but a wilderness where every kind and size of growth, from the giant pine to the creeping wintergreen and shaded mosses, mingled in beautiful confusion. Here it became a desert. For the terrible forest fires, the woodsman’s tragic enemy, had swept over it not long before, devastating an area of many square miles. Millions of dollars worth of valuable timber had been reduced to rotting embers. Storm-defying pines had crashed to the earth, and were overridden by the flames in their wild rush onward. Sometimes only a smutty stump showed where they had stood; sometimes, robbed of life and every limb, portions of the fire-eaten trunks still remained erect,—bare, blackened poles. All smaller growth, and even the surface of the ground, parched by summer heats, had burned like tinder. Rocks and stones were baked and crumbling.
“Boys, that’s the most mournful sight a woodsman can see,” said Doc, looking away over the wrecked region, touched with golden lights from an October sunset. “It makes one who loves the woods feel as if he had lost a living friend.”
“Well, ’tain’t no manner o’ use to fret over it,” declared Joe energetically. “Nature don’t waste time in fretting, you bet! She starts in and tries to cover the stripped ground, as if she was sort of ashamed to have it seen.”
The guide pointed earthward. At his feet a dwarfed growth of blueberry bushes and tiny trees was already springing up to screen the unsightly, ash-strewn land.
“True enough, Joe! Nature is a grand one for remedies,” answered the doctor. “Still, it will be half a century or more before she can raise a timber growth here again. Hulloa! Dol, what are you fellows up to?”