It led him for upwards of ten miles nearly due south, sometimes approaching, sometimes leaving the river, but keeping always in its direction.The country in general was rolling.Low parallel ridges of gentle declivity glided constantly across his way, their valleys sloping to the river.Thorpe had never seen a grander forest of pine than that which clothed them.
For almost three miles, after the young man had passed through a preliminary jungle of birch, cedar, spruce, and hemlock, it ran without a break, clear, clean, of cloud-sweeping altitude, without underbrush.Most of it was good bull-sap, which is known by the fineness of the bark, though often in the hollows it shaded gradually into the rough-skinned cork pine.In those days few people paid any attention to the Norway, and hemlock was not even thought of.
With every foot of the way Thorpe became more and more impressed.
At first the grandeur, the remoteness, the solemnity of the virgin forest fell on his spirit with a kind of awe.The tall, straight trunks lifted directly upwards to the vaulted screen through which the sky seemed as remote as the ceiling of a Roman church.Ravens wheeled and croaked in the blue, but infinitely far away.Some lesser noises wove into the stillness without breaking the web of its splendor, for the pine silence laid soft, hushing fingers on the lips of those who might waken the sleeping sunlight.
Then the spirit of the pioneer stirred within his soul.The wilderness sent forth its old-time challenge to the hardy.In him awoke that instinct which, without itself perceiving the end on which it is bent, clears the way for the civilization that has been ripening in old-world hot-houses during a thousand years.Men must eat; and so the soil must be made productive.We regret, each after his manner, the passing of the Indian, the buffalo, the great pine forests, for they are of the picturesque; but we live gladly on the product of the farms that have taken their places.Southern Michigan was once a pine forest: now the twisted stump-fences about the most fertile farms of the north alone break the expanse of prairie and of trim "wood-lots."Thorpe knew little of this, and cared less.These feathered trees, standing close-ranked and yet each isolate in the dignity and gravity of a sphinx of stone set to dancing his blood of the frontiersman.He spread out his map to make sure that so valuable a clump of timber remained still unclaimed.A few sections lying near the headwaters were all he found marked as sold.He resumed his tramp light-heartedly.
At the ten-mile point he came upon a dam.It was a crude dam,--built of logs,--whose face consisted of strong buttresses slanted up-stream, and whose sheer was made of unbarked timbers laid smoothly side by side at the required angle.At present its gate was open.
Thorpe could see that it was an unusually large gate, with a powerful apparatus for the raising and the lowering of it.
The purpose of the dam in this new country did not puzzle him in the least, but its presence bewildered him.Such constructions are often thrown across logging streams at proper intervals in order that the operator may be independent of the spring freshets.When he wishes to "drive" his logs to the mouth of the stream, he first accumulates a head of water behind his dams, and then, by lifting the gates, creates an artificial freshet sufficient to float his timber to the pool formed by the next dam below.The device is common enough; but it is expensive.People do not build dams except in the certainty of some years of logging, and quite extensive logging at that.If the stream happens to be navigable, the promoter must first get an Improvement Charter from a board of control appointed by the State.So Thorpe knew that he had to deal, not with a hand-to-mouth-timber-thief, but with a great company preparing to log the country on a big scale.
He continued his journey.At noon he came to another and similar structure.The pine forest had yielded to knolls of hardwood separated by swamp-holes of blackthorn.Here he left his pack and pushed ahead in light marching order.About eight miles above the first dam, and eighteen from the bend of the river, he ran into a "slashing" of the year before.The decapitated stumps were already beginning to turn brown with weather, the tangle of tops and limbs was partially concealed by poplar growths and wild raspberry vines.
Parenthetically, it may be remarked that the promptitude with which these growths succeed the cutting of the pine is an inexplicable marvel.Clear forty acres at random in the very center of a pine forest, without a tract of poplar within an hundred miles; the next season will bring up the fresh shoots.Some claim that blue jays bring the seeds in their crops.Others incline to the theory that the creative elements lie dormant in the soil, needing only the sun to start them to life.Final speculation is impossible, but the fact stands.
To Thorpe this particular clearing became at once of the greatest interest.He scrambled over and through the ugly debris which for a year or two after logging operations cumbers the ground.By a rather prolonged search he found what he sought,--the "section corners" of the tract, on which the government surveyor had long ago marked the "descriptions." A glance at the map confirmed his suspicions.The slashing lay some two miles north of the sections designated as belonging to private parties.It was Government land.
Thorpe sat down, lit a pipe, and did a little thinking.
As an axiom it may be premised that the shorter the distance logs have to be transported, the less it costs to get them in.Now Thorpe had that very morning passed through beautiful timber lying much nearer the mouth of the river than either this, or the sections further south.Why had these men deliberately ascended the stream?
