The timber-spruce, as it is commonly called, seems to drop its lower limbs a little more readily than its darker boughed brother, which goes by the name of cat-spruce among the local lumbermen, to thus prepare itself for the lumberman’s axe as yielding a timber in which at a given age are fewer knots. White and black spruce, the botanists call them, they and the lumbermen definitely distinguishing between the two by minute differences, which to the new-comer in the big wood are not so easily appreciable.
You may know the fir more readily. It seems to me a tree of a finer, sweeter soul than any other evergreen. George Kimball, the novelist, who wrote “Piney Home” about the people who dwell among the quaint farms and silent stretches of interminable forests along the Moluncus and Macwahoc, puts it pithily and prettily when he says: “The spruces wear their hair pompadour; the firs part theirs in the middle.”
The fir, indeed, is a Quaker lady among evergreen trees, with her hair so smoothly parted, her dark, unassuming, yet beautiful garb, and that soothing, alluring, healing fragrance which floats ever about her like an atmosphere of sincerity and loveliness. It seems as if all the wounds of all the other denizens of the wood might be brought to her to heal, so loving is her presence, so benign the soothing influence that floats from her amber tears.
The sap of all trees has something of goodness and delight in it. The maples bear sugar that is more than sweetness; it has in it some Attic salt that makes the imagination smack its lips. The brew of the birch is more than beer; it is the embodiment of a flavor that bears dreams of rosy mornings on woody ridges that look down on the golden glory of the primeval world. So the faint fragrance of the fir floats like a divine presence from a loving heart that would fain clasp to itself the wounded and stricken of the world and dress their wounds and make them whole again. No wonder custom has adopted the fir for the Christmas tree. There is no tree so fit to bear loving gifts to all the world.
The spruce partridge, as he is commonly called up here, the Canada grouse (Dendragapus canadensis) of the scientists, is a bird that I find very common and amazingly unafraid under the spruce and fir in these northern woods. He is a smaller, grayer, darker bird than the ruffed grouse which is the familiar bird of our home woods. Up here they call the latter “birch partridge,” because he feeds on birch buds, while the spruce partridge feeds on the tips of the spruce. The birch partridge is more wary. As at home, he thunders up from the underbrush and shoots himself across space and into the shelter of the farther wood like an indignant cannonball.
The spruce partridge winds along the brakes and undergrowth just ahead of you, or in the more open space under the dense evergreens flutters up into the lower branches, and seems to think himself secure there. I have stood among a flock of these beautiful creatures while they called faintly and reassuringly to one another,—so near that I might see every minute detail of plumage. Then, before they flew, I stepped quietly up and touched the soft feathers of the one on the lowest branch.
Then, indeed, panic fear seemed to
Seems to think himself secure there