Here and there where we travelled, the forests were on fire—fires luckily not caused by those chance conflagrations, which do so much harm in Finland, but duly organised to clear a certain district. Matters are arranged in this wise: when a man wants to plough more land, he selects a nice stretch of wood, saws down all the big trees, which he sledges away, the next set (in point of size) he also hews down, but leaves where they fall, with all their boughs and leaves on, till the sun dries them. Then he makes a fire in their midst, the dried leaves soon catch, and in a few hours the whole acreage is bare except for the tree trunks, which are only charred and serve later for firewood. All the farm hands, often augmented by neighbours, assist at these fires, for although a man may wish to clear two or three acres, if the flames were not watched, they would soon lay twenty or thirty bare, and perhaps destroy an entire forest. The ashes lie on the ground and become manure, so that when, during the following summer, he begins to plough, the sandy soil is fairly well-fed, and ultimately mildly prolific. He is very ingenious this peasant, and takes the greatest care not to let the flames spread beyond his appointed boundary, beating them with huge sticks, as required, and keeping the flames well in hand. The disastrous forest fires, caused by accidental circumstances, spoil the finest timber, and can only be stayed in their wild career, as we remarked elsewhere, by digging trenches, over which the roaring flames cannot pass. Such fires are one of the curses of Finland, and do almost as much harm as a flight of locusts in Morocco.
"How old are those trees we see, twenty or thirty years?"
Our friend the Kommerserådet smiled.
"Far, far more," he replied; "speaking roughly, every tree eight inches in diameter twenty feet from the ground is eighty years old, nine inches ninety years, ten inches a hundred years old, and so on."
We were amazed to think that these vast forests should be so old, for if it took so long for a tree to grow, and so many millions were felled every year, it seemed to us that the land would soon be barren.
"Not at all," our friend replied; "a forest is never cleared. Only trees which have reached a proper girth are felled. In every forest but a certain number of trees are cut each year, so that fresh ones are in a continuous stream taking their places."
Rich merchants possess their own forests, their own saw-mills, their own store houses, and even their own ships; but the bulk of exporters pay for cut timber. In hiring a forest the tenant takes it on lease for so many years with the right to fell all trees so soon as they reach certain dimensions. The doomed trees are marked, and now we must follow their after course.
In the autumn and winter they are felled and left for the first fall of snow, when they are dragged, sometimes two or three logs one behind the other fixed together with iron chains, to the nearest open road for further conveyance by sledge when the snow permits.
No single horse could move such a weight in summer, but by the aid of sledges and snow all is changed, and away gallop the little steeds down the mountain side, pushed forward at times by the weight behind. By this means the trees are conveyed to the nearest waterway.
Then the logs are stamped with the owner's registered mark and rolled upon the ice of lake or river, to await the natural transport of spring. Once the ice thaws the forests begin to move, for as "Birnam Wood marched to Dunsinane," the Finnish forests float to other lands.