Forest Devastation 25 



anxious to have the adjacent woods burned to assist in 

 clearing the next year. These small fires usually do no 

 more harm than to kill a number of trees and leave a danger- 

 ous slash about the clearing. They generally die out of 

 their own accord and are seldom spectacular. Some 

 smouldering logs, a little flame here and there creeping along 

 the dead leaves, or the occasional blaze when a pile of dead 

 brush or a clump of balsam trees is reached ; that is all. 

 If it shows a tendency to spread too much, especially if it 

 threatens to burn fences, the farmer resorts to a little fire 

 fighting. The leaves are scraped away in a track across 

 its front; .all rotten logs that could carry the fire across 

 this cleared strip are dug out and the brush is piled back. 

 Sometimes a little water is carried to extinguish smoulder- 

 ing logs, or the spreading ground blaze has to be beaten 

 out with brush or old sacks soaked in water. The whole 

 process is uninspiring, seldom exciting and always dirty. 

 A shower comes and fires are forgotten. The very fre- 

 quency of these small, and usually considered harmless, 

 fires tends to make the settlers careless. It is doubtful, 

 however, if the total harm done by them is not more than 

 that done by the large ones which are often tragic. Cer- 

 tainly without the small fires there would be no large ones. 

 Sometimes there is a summer when the shower does not 

 come. Day after day the sun shines hotter and the earth 

 becomes drier. Every bit of brush is dry and snaps under 

 foot ; every rotten log is but a heap of tinder ; in the pine 

 woods, where the sun reaches the ground, the needles are 

 parched and give way under the foot like dry sand. The 



