A gum picker's equipment comprises warm clothing, snowshoes, climbers—such as telegraph linemen use—a curved chisel in the handle of which a pole may be set, a good jack-knife and a gun. These are the necessaries.
Almost as necessary is a good supply of tobacco, for if you can imagine a gum picker sitting down of an evening by the camp fire and cleaning his day's pick of gum without clouds of smoke about his head your imagination pictures a very cheerless scene.
There is a special thing about gum picking—the daily expenses are small. The men cannot register at hotels or patronize saloons. It is either a deserted camp or the lee side of a tree at night.
As they are obliged to tote their household supplies on a moose sled, they are frugal in their diet. With plenty of work, a few bushels of beans, flour, and molasses, a gum picker is fixed nicely for a long and cold winter. He figures that it costs him about 50 cents a week, and if he is handy with his gun he reduces expenses materially.
Of course it is rather lonely sometimes in the deep woods, but there is a pretty bright side to the picture.
The gum picker rolls off his bunk in the morning, his nostrils full of the good green savor of the spruce boughs beneath his head all night. He fries his bacon, warms his beans and sloofs at his steaming tin of tea.
Then he has a leisurely smoke before the sputtering embers of the fire, gets his kit on his back and his gum bag under his arm, ties a lunch of biscuit and gingerbread in his handkerchief, straps on his snowshoes, and trudges away into the forest, his pipe trailing blue smoke behind in the sparkling air of the winter morning.
The gum picker must have a good eye for trees. A careless and myopic man would travel over acres of territory and miss the dollars right along. The shrewd picker, the experienced man, runs his practiced eye along every trunk.
Here and there he sees a tall spruce marked by a seam through which its life-blood has oozed for years. The bubbles have crept out and have been clarified day by day in the sun and the rain. They have absorbed the odoriferous breath of the forest.
There they are at last, amber and garnet nuggets, ready for the picker's chisel and for the teeth of the gum-chewing girls far away in the city. Sometimes the picker goes up on his climbers and taps and ticks and picks like a giant woodpecker. Sometimes the tree is felled.