34 HUHTING SPORTS OF THE WEST. 



FOREST LIFE-PERIL. 



THE huge forests of America and Canada are slowly 

 yielding to the axe of the backwoodsman. From morn- 

 ing to night, his broad keen blade glitters in its relent- 

 less descent, and the bright flashing chips fly, till down 

 thunders one monarch of the woods after another, whose 

 only revenge on his destroyer, is the leaving of a tor- 

 menting stump. Those stumps, dotted here and there 

 among his cleared land, are dreadfully in the 4vay of the 

 plowman, till time or gunpowder, completes their de- 

 struction, and enables him to achieve that pride of his 

 heart, a straight furrow. 



But if the axe were the only means of turning the 

 woodlands into cornfields and pastures, or into what may 

 some day become so, the process would go on much more 

 slowly than it does. Fire plays no unimportant part 

 in the destruction of the woods ; and its fierceness, and 

 the extent of its ravages, are such as none can conceive, 

 save those who have witnessed them. Lightning strikes 

 a dry tree, and kindles up a blaze ; or, perhaps, the 

 heaped-up cuttings and brushwood, left by the " lum- 

 berer" or backwoodsman, are set on fire, either acci- 

 dentally, (possibly by a spark from the odious tobacco- 

 pipe, which we can scarcely forgive, even in that com- 

 fortless place,) or purposely, to get rid of the rubbish ; 

 and the conflagration runs on for miles, consuming, not 

 trees only, and the frightened wild inhabitants of the 

 forest, but, in its unchecked fury, licking up the tender 



