If you travel up the stream until you reach one of its higher tributaries, and turn up beside the latter, you may eventually find yourself at one of the lumber-camps which feed the far-off saw-mill in the valley below. In a picturesque clearing in the forest you will see the low but comfortable log cabin and log stable; you will see the timber-slide, with a rill of water flowing down it to make the logs slide more easily as they are shot down into the tributary stream; you will hear the crack of the teamster's whip and his cheery cry as he urges on his horses—four, six, eight, or ten of them—straining at a rough sleigh on which rest the ends of one, two, three, four, or five big logs; you may hear the swish of the big, two-handled cross-cut saw, as the woodmen cut through the trunk of gigantic fir, cedar, or spruce, or the slow, resonant crash as the forest giant totters, falls, smashes prone to the earth; you may hear the ring of the woodmen's axes as they lop away its branches and strip off its bark.
The men who guide these big timber-booms down the broad, swift rivers of the Canadian forest-lands, and pilot them over the boiling rapids, are marvellously clever in keeping their balance on the unsteady, ever-rolling logs. A favourite pastime with them is log-rolling. Wearing boots for the purpose—boots shod with sharp steel spikes—they walk out, each man on a broad log, and set it rolling. Once the log is started, it begins to roll at an increasing speed. Faster and faster go the feet of the raftsman; faster and faster spins the log. With arms outstretched and every muscle tense, the raftsman preserves his balance long after an ordinary landsman would have gone over—souse!—into the stream. That is indeed the fate which overtakes all of the competitors except one, and he—the man who preserves his balance the longest—is, of course, the winner of the game, the envied of his companions, the admired of all the lumber-jacks and their numerous friends. The cleverest men at this sport are the French-Canadians.
Nevertheless, all is not always peace and contentment in a Canadian forest. To say nothing of the wild beasts—e.g., bear, lynx, mountain lion—which live in them, the actual trees of the forest are themselves a source of menace and danger to men. During the hot, dry days of summer an unheeded spark from a woodman's pipe, a red-hot cinder from a passing train, a neglected camp-fire—the ashes left unextinguished—are each enough to ignite the highly inflammable undergrowths of the forest; and once set alight, the moss which carpets the floor of the forest, the broken sticks which litter the ground from many a winter storm, the bushes, the dead trees, all catch up the flame, and after smouldering, it may be for weeks, the whole forest suddenly bursts into flame. If this happens when a strong wind is blowing, nothing hardly can save the town or settlement, the ranch or saw-mill, that may chance to lie on the side of the fire towards which the wind is blowing. And it is indeed not only a grand but also a terrible sight to stand and watch a large "bush"-fire raging over, say, a square mile or two on a mountain-side. You see the red flames towering up like so many gigantic pillars of fire, now leaping up, now sinking down. As the fire appears to die down in one quarter, you see it break out with great and sudden fury in another, and then ere long it takes a fresh lease of life in the direction in which it first died down. A forest fire such as this advances with terrible swiftness, and woe to the houses which lie in its path! In the summer of 1908 the town of Fernie, a place of 5,000 to 6,000 inhabitants, situated in the Crow's Nest Pass of the Rocky Mountains, was almost completely blotted out and extinguished in the course of a few hours; and so sudden was the onset or the fire that the people had literally to flee for their very lives, leaving everything they possessed behind them, and even in some cases in their hurry and confusion losing touch with those who were near and dear to them. A bush-fire is an awful visitation. It also means a very serious loss of valuable timber, no matter where it occurs.
The maple, whose leaf in conjunction with the beaver is the national emblem of Canada, yields in the spring a very sweet sap, which is boiled down to produce a syrup or sugar of a very delicious flavour. Doubtless its qualities were learned from the Indians, and the earlier settlers in the woods depended on it altogether for sugar. Now it is prepared as a luxury. "Sugar-making weather," bright, clear days, with frosty nights, come in March. To the great delight of the children the trees are tapped by boring a small hole in the trunk, and affixing a small iron spout, which leads the sap to a pail. The rate at which it drops varies, but as much as two gallons may be collected from a tree in a day. This is boiled in iron pots, hung over a fire in the woods, or in the up-to-date way in a large flat pan, till it thickens to syrup.
In the old days sugaring off was a great occasion; all the neighbouring boys and girls were asked in, and amid much jollification around the bright fire at night in the forest, the hot sugar was poured off on the snow, forming a delicious taffy, and all "dug in" at the cost of burnt fingers and tongue. Songs were sung, ghost-stories told, the girls were frightened by bears behind the trees, and this unique gathering broke up in groups of two or three, finding their way home in the moonlight through the maple wood.
The Canadian youth has many opportunities for a life in the wilds which all boys enjoy. In order to prevent the occurrence of the destructive forest-fires, fire-rangers are appointed throughout the whole of Northern Ontario, whose duty it is to patrol a certain part of the woods and see that no careless camper has left his fire smouldering when he strikes camp. The young men appointed for this duty are usually students from the colleges who are on their holidays; they work in pairs, and live in a tent pitched at some portage; they see no one but passing tourists or prospectors, and each day they walk over the trail and return—a certain stated distance. The rest of their time they have for fishing and other pleasures of life in the forest. They return in the autumn brown as Indians, and strong and healthy after the most enjoyable and useful of holidays.
CHAPTER X
WEALTH IN ROCK AND SAND
The history of gold and silver has always been romantic and exciting, and Canada has furnished her full share of adventure and fortune, riches won in a day and lost in a night. All known minerals are found scattered here and there over the thousands of miles of north land. Besides the precious metals, the most important are coal, iron, nickel, and asbestos, and the deposits of the last two are much the most important in the world. Gold was first found by the Indians, who made ornaments of it; they found it in the sands of the rivers, and from there prospectors followed it to where it was hidden in ore in the mountains. The most famous deposits are in the Yukon, and no mining camp had a more exciting history than this, where working men staked claims that brought them a fortune and lost it in cards and dice overnight. But the Government saw that rights were respected, and soon banks were opened to keep the "dust," and the miner everywhere admits that he gets a "square deal" in Canada. At Cobalt it is said that the silver deposits were first found when a horse, pawing the rock with his iron shoe, uncovered the "cobalt bloom," the colour that there is the sign of silver. Another story is that a man picked up a stone to throw at a squirrel and found it so heavy that he examined it, to find it solid silver. If you went there you would be shown the famous "silver sidewalk" (pavement), 18 inches wide, and running for several hundred yards, of solid silver. It sounds like a tale from the "Arabian Nights."