eat
consequence to the future forest.

[Illustration: FOREST RANGERS SCALING TIMBER]

Nearly all of these duties the Ranger may perform in certain cases
without supervision, if his judgment and training are sufficient, but
the marking especially is often done under the eye or in accordance with
the directions of the technical Forester, whose duty it is to see that
the future of the forest is protected by enforcing the conditions of
sale.

These are but a part of the duties of the Ranger, for he is concerned
with all the uses which his District may serve. The streams, for
example, may be important for city water supply, irrigation, or for
waterpower, and their use for these purposes must be under his eye.
Hotels and saw-mills on sites leased from the Government may dot his
District here and there. The land within National Forests may be put to
a thousand other uses, from a bee ranch on the Cleveland Forest in
southern California to a whaling station on the Tongass Forest in
Alaska, all of which means work for him.

The result of all this is that the Ranger comes in contact with city
dwellers, irrigators, cattlemen, sheepmen, and horsemen, ranchers,
storekeepers, hotel men, hunters, miners, and lumbermen, and above all
with the settlers who live in or near his District. With all these it is
his duty to keep on good terms, for well he knows that one man at
certain times can set more fires than a regiment can extinguish, and
that the best protection for his District comes from the friendly
interest of the men who live in it or near it.

A Forest Guard is in effect an assistant to the Ranger, and may be
called upon to carry out most of the duties which fall upon a Ranger.

The foregoing short statement will make it clear that preliminary
experience as a Ranger may be of the utmost value to the man who
proposes later on to perform in the Government Service the duties of a
trained Forester. It is becoming more and more common, and fortunately
so, for graduates of forest schools to begin their work in the United
States Forest Service as Rangers or Forest Guards. The man who has done
well a Ranger's work, like the graduate of an engineering school who,
after graduation, has entered a machine shop as a hand, has acquired a
body of practical information and experience which will be invaluable to
him in the later practice of his profession, and which is far beyond the
reach of any man who has not been trained in the actual e