34 HUNTING 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 way 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 1 turning the 

 woodlands into cornfields and pastures, or into w T hat 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, consul ing, not 

 trees only, and the frightened wild inhabitants of the 

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



