Читать книгу The Pioneer Woodsman as He Is Related to Lumbering in the Northwest - George Henry Warren - Страница 9

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Gaining Experience—Getting Wet.

Some field experience which I had acquired in surveying when a sophomore in college, assisted me greatly in quickly learning how to subdivide the sections, while my knowledge of timber gained at an early age, when assisting my father in choosing trees in the forest suitable for his uses as a manufacturer, aided me greatly in judging the quality and quantity of the pine timber growing in the greater forests of the Northwest.

Freshly equipped with provisions, and with plats corrected up to date, we returned to the deep woods. There we divided into parties of only two—the land looker and his assistant. The latter's duty was chiefly to help carry the supplies of uncooked foods, blankets, tent, etc., to pitch tent at night, and, ordinarily, to do the most of the cooking, though seldom all of it. On some days much good vacant (unentered) pine was found, and on other days none at all. Several miles of woods were at times laboriously passed through, without seeing any timber worth entering (buying). Some portions would consist of hardwood ridges of maple, oak, elm; some of poplar, birch, basswood; others of long stretches of tamarack and spruce swamps, sections of which would be almost without wooded growth, so marshy and wet that the moss-covered bottom would scarcely support our weight, encumbered as we always were by pack sacks upon our backs, which weighed when starting as much as sixty pounds and sometimes more. Their weight diminished daily as we cooked and ate from our store which they contained.

"The almost saucy, yet sociable red squirrel". (Page 48.)

Windfalls—places where cyclones or hurricanes had passed—were sometimes encountered. The cyclones left the trees twisted and broken, their trunks and branches pointing in various directions; the hurricanes generally left the trees tipped partly or entirely to the ground, their roots turned up and their trunks pointing quite uniformly in the same relative direction. The getting through, over, under, and beyond these places, which vary from a few rods to a possible mile across, especially in winter when the mantle of snow hides the pitfalls and screens the rotten trunks and limbs from view, tries the courage, patience, and endurance of the woodsman. All of the time he must use his compass and keep his true direction as well as measure the distance, otherwise he would not know where he was located. Without this knowledge his work could not proceed.

Sometimes we would come to a natural meadow grown up with alders, around the borders of which stood much young poplar. A stream of water flowed through the meadow, and the beavers had discovered that it was eminently fitted, if not designed, for their necessities. Accordingly, they had selected an advantageous spot where nature had kindly thrown up a bank of earth on each side and drawn the ends down comparatively near to the stream. Small trees were near by, and these they had cut down, and then cut into such lengths as were right, in their judgment, for constructing a water-tight dam across the narrow channel between the two opposite banks of earth. The flow of water being thus checked by the beaver dam, the water set-back and overflowed the meadow to its remotest confines, and even submerged some of the trunks of the trees to perhaps a depth of two feet. Out further in the meadow and amongst the alders where had flowed the natural stream, the water in the pond was much deeper.

These ponds sometimes lay directly across the line of our survey and inconvenienced us greatly. We disliked to make "offsets" in our lines and thus go around the dam, for the traveling in such places was usually very slow and tedious. The saving of time is always important to the land hunter, since he must carry his provisions, and wishes to accomplish all that is possible before the last day's rations are reached. It was not strange, then, if we first tried the depth of the water in the pond by wading and feeling our way. While we could keep our pack sacks from becoming wet, we continued to wade toward the opposite shore, meantime remembering or keeping in sight some object on the opposite shore, in the direct course we must travel, which we had located by means of our compass before entering the water. Sometimes a retreat had to be made by reason of too great depth of water. During the summer months we did not mind simply getting wet clothes by wading; but once in the fall just before ice had formed, this chilly proposition of wading across, was undertaken voluntarily, and was only one of many uncomfortable things that entered into the woodsman's life.

Subjected thus to much inconvenience and discomfort by those valuable little animals, we could but admire their wisdom in choosing places for their subaqueous homes. They feed upon the bark of the alder, the poplar, the birch, and of some other trees. These grew where they constructed their dam and along the margin of the pond of water thus formed. They cut down these trees by gnawing entirely around their trunks, then they cut off branches and sections of the trunks of the trees, and drew them into their houses under the ice. Most trees cut by the beaver are of small diameter. I once measured one beaver stump and found it to be fourteen inches in diameter. I still have in my possession a section of a white cedar stump measuring seventeen inches in circumference that had been gnawed off by beavers. It is the only cedar tree I have ever known to have been cut down by these wise little creatures.