Then there is the axe handle man. He needs ash of a larger growth than the hoop pole saplings. The trees are chopped in the fall, and then by means of a "froe" and axe each handle is roughly blocked out. Then they are buried so that they may season without cracking.
As an additional precaution against parting of the fibres the broad end of each handle is daubed with a sort of paint the principal ingredient of which is grease. Ash goes to pieces easily if the sun gets at it and the axe handle man must be careful of his wares. The rough handles are sent away to the factory as soon as the snow comes.
Of all tough jobs the ship knee man has the worst in the woods. The knees bring good prices, but the man who gets them out earns every cent.
He goes prospecting with an axe, hunting for hack or back juniper or tamarack. When one is found he looks to see if it has the proper crook in its root. If the right angle is there and the root proves sound he sets to work digging it out—and it is a muscle racking job.
The man who is after hemlock bark for the tanneries is another chap who strays far in the woods, for the bark is away back nowadays.
The Indian who hunts after basket stuff or birch bark for a canoe hull is the most patient searcher. The big birches are few and far between in the Maine woods, and sometimes an Indian from the Penobscot or Passamaquoddy tribe will tramp a hundred miles before he finds a tree that will yield a piece of bark without knothole or crack and which will be large enough for a canoe.
A number of men are now making good money in the Maine woods by searching the brooks for fresh water clams. They are getting some good pearls from these bivalves. Some hunters in the Moosehead region recently found a pearl valued at $200.
The most unsocial folk in the Maine forests are the trappers. They don't want anyone within twenty miles of them. Gunners will steal from the traps, they believe, and lumbermen scare away game. Even bobcats rob them, as bloody smears near a rifled trap indicate.
Some of the old trappers have a twenty-mile circuit of traps and resent it if any neighbors come that way. Some of the biggest rough and tumbles that the Maine beavers have ever witnessed have been fought out by bow-legged old trappers who have chanced to cross trails and have believed that they were being crowded on a hundred square miles of territory.