40 CAMP-FIRES IN THE CANADIAN ROCKIES 



with your seven-league boots on, you can better judge 

 of the situation as a whole. Near the end of the trip I 

 was part of a striking illustration of this strange fact. 



Our first half-day's travel up that steep mountain- 

 groove was spent chiefly on the northern slope. There 

 were long stretches of " green timber," — which means 

 living coniferous timber, green all the year round. In 

 it the ground was covered with a velvet carpet of brown 

 needles, and ornamented with a setting of thimbleberry 

 bushes bearing bright crimson berries. There were 

 thousands of slender, open-topped currant bushes bear- 

 ing scattered clusters of jet-black currants, bitter to the 

 taste but good to allay mouth-dryness and thirst. The 

 trees are mostly the Canadian white spruce (Picea Engel- 

 manni) and the jack pine, with a sprinkling of balsam, 

 juniper, quaking asp and larch. Throughout that whole 

 region the deciduous trees are so few that they are very 

 inconspicuous, and those which do exist are mostly 

 mere bushes. 



In the green timber the soft ground is very restful to 

 feet that are dead tired from the ankle-strain of rugged 

 slide-rock. The aroma of the coniferous foliage is both 

 grateful and comforting, but the best hunting-grounds 

 for large game animals are found elsewhere. No won- 

 der that in past years the Indians occasionally set fire to 

 the forests, and burned out great areas in order to let in 

 the sunlight, grow grass and create good feeding-grounds 

 — and also hunting-grounds, — for hoofed animals. 



But the beautiful and all-embracing " green timber" 

 has its habitants. Its resinous shadows envelop and shel- 



