where man soon learns to
forget his birthright, and readily yields to the animal in him.

It was a scene of mighty slaughter amongst the giants of the forest.
Hundreds sprawled in the path of man's gleaming axe. Giants they were,
hoary with age, and gnarled with the sinews built up by Nature to resist
her fiercest storms. They lay there, in every direction, reaching up
with tattered arms outstretched, as though appealing for the light, the
warmth, and the sweetness of life they would know no more.

Amidst this carnage a great camp was growing up. There were huts
completed. There were huts only in the skeleton. They were dotted about
in a fashion apparently without order or purpose. Yet long before the
falling of the first snow, order would reign everywhere and man's
purpose would be achieved.

The bunkhouses, the stores, the offices, the stables, they must all be
ready before the coming of the "freeze-up." Summer is the time of
preparation. Winter is the season when the lumber-jack's work must go
forward without cessation or break of any sort. Not even the excuse of
sickness can be accepted. There is no excuse. The lumber-jack must work,
or sink to the dregs of a life that has already created in him a spirit
of indifference to the laws of God and man. So the life of the forest is
hard and fierce, and the battle of it all is long.

But the men who seek it are more than equal to the task. They are of all
sorts, and all races. They drift to the forest from all ranks of life by
reason of the spirit driving them. They come from the universities of
the world. They come straight from the gates of the penitentiary. They
come from the land, the sea, the office. They come from all countries,
and they come for every reason. The call of the forest is deep with
significance. Its appeal is profound. Its life is free, and shadowed,
and afar.

For long moments the clinch of the fighting men remained unbroken. They
lay there upon the ground locked in a deadly embrace. A spasmodic jolt,
a violent, muscular heave. The result was changed position, while the
clinch remained unrelaxed. There were movements of gripping hands. There
were changes of position in the intertwined legs clad in their hard cord
trousers. The heavily-booted feet stirred and stirred again in response
to the impulse of the searching brains of the fighters, and every slight
movement had deep meaning for the onlookers.

Yet none of these movements revealed the inspi