t ardent lover to freeze on her snowy breast without
waving a leaf in pity, or offering him a match; and scores of her
devotees may starve to death in as many different languages before she
will offer a loaf of bread. She does not deal in matches and loaves;
rather in thunderbolts and granite mountains. And the ashes of her
campfires bury proud cities. But, like all tyrants, she yields to force
and gives the more, the more she is beaten. She may starve or freeze
the poet, the scholar, the scientist; all the same, she has in store
food, fuel and shelter, which the skillful, self-reliant woodsman can
wring from her savage hand with axe and rifle.

Only to him whose coat of rags
Has pressed at night her regal feet,
Shall come the secrets, strange and sweet,
Of century pines and beetling crags.

For him the goddess shall unlock
The golden secrets which have lain
Ten thousand years, through frost and rain,
Deep in the bosom of the rock.

The trip was a long and tiresome one, considering the distance. There
were no hairbreadth escapes; I was not tackled by bears, treed by
wolves, or nearly killed by a hand-to-claw "racket" with a panther; and
there were no Indians to come sneak-hunting around after hair. Animal
life was abundant, exuberant, even. But the bright-eyed woodfolk seemed
tame, nay, almost friendly, and quite intent on minding their own
business. It was a "pigeon year," a "squirrel year," and also a
marvelous year for shack or mast. Every nut-bearing tree was loaded
with sweet well-filled nuts; and this, coupled with the fact that the
Indians had left and the whites had not yet got in, probably accounted
for the plentitude of game.

I do not think there was an hour of daylight on the trip when
squirrels were not too numerous to be counted, while pigeons were a
constant quantity from start to finish. Grouse in the thickets and
quail in the high oak openings, or small prairies, with droves of wild
turkeys among heavy timber, were met with almost hourly, and there was
scarcely a day on which I could not have had a standing shot at a bear.
But the most interesting point about the game was--to me, at least--the
marvelous abundance of deer. They were everywhere, on all sorts of
ground and among all varieties of timber; very tame they were, too,
often stopping to look at the stranger, offering easy shots at short
range, and finally going off quite leisurely.

No ardent lover of forest life could be