be pretty near it
now."

A few minutes afterwards the party filed out of the dense woods, passed
through a grove of young spruces, forded a brook which emptied itself
into the stream they were following, and came upon a scene blasted,
barren, and unutterably dreary.

The band of boys, who, in spite of swamps and jungles, had learned to
love the forest dearly, for its many beauties, and for the wild
offspring with which it teemed, sorrowfully gasped, as if they saw the
skeleton of a friend.

CHAPTER XII.

"GO IT, OLD BRUIN!"

Before them lay a ruined tract of country, extending northward farther
than eye could reach. It is called by Maine woodsmen a _brulee_, name
borrowed from their French-Canadian neighbors, who dwell across the
boundary line which separates the Dominion from the United States.

The word signifies "burnt tract;" but it gives a feeble idea of the
fire-smitten, blackened region on which the lads looked.

The forest until now had been a wilderness truly, but a wilderness where
every kind and size of growth, from the giant pine to the creeping
wintergreen and shaded mosses, mingled in beautiful confusion. Here it
became a desert. For the terrible forest fires, the woodsman's tragic
enemy, had swept over it not long before, devastating an area of many
square miles. Millions of dollars worth of valuable timber had been
reduced to rotting embers. Storm-defying pines had crashed to the earth,
and were overridden by the flames in their wild rush onward. Sometimes
only a smutty stump showed where they had stood; sometimes, robbed of
life and every limb, portions of the fire-eaten trunks still remained
erect,--bare, blackened poles. All smaller growth, and even the surface
of the ground, parched by summer heats, had burned like tinder. Rocks
and stones were baked and crumbling.

"Boys, that's the most mournful sight a woodsman can see," said Doc,
looking away over the wrecked region, touched with golden lights from an
October sunset. "It makes one who loves the woods feel as if he had lost
a living friend."

"Well, 'tain't no manner o' use to fret over it," declared Joe
energetically. "Nature don't waste time in fretting, you bet! She starts
in and tries to cover the stripped ground, as if she was sort of ashamed
to have it seen."

The guide pointed earthward. At his feet a dwarfed growth of blueberry
bushes and tiny trees was already springing up to screen the unsightly,
ash-strewn land.