on. It was agreed between us that, even if it were possible to
hit anything with our guns, we would not kill without skinning, and we
wouldn't skin without eating, after which resolution the forest things
probably breathed easier, for it was a fairly safe handicap.

I shall not soon forget that morning drive to Jake's Landing, at the
head of Lake Kedgeemakoogee, where we put in our canoes. My trip on the
train along the coast, and the drive through farming country, more or
less fertile, had given me little conception of this sinister
land--rock-strewn and barren, seared by a hundred forest fires. Whatever
of green timber still stands is likely to be little more than brush.
Above it rise the bare, gaunt skeletons of dead forests, bleached with
age, yet blackened by the tongues of flame that burned out the life and
wealth of a land which is now little more than waste and desolation--the
haunt of the moose, the loon and the porcupine, the natural home of the
wild trout.

It is true, that long ago, heavy timber was cut from these woods, but
the wealth thus obtained was as nothing to that which has gone up in
conflagrations, started by the careless lumbermen and prospectors and
hunters of a later day. Such timber as is left barely pays for the
cutting, and old sluices are blocked and old dams falling to decay. No
tiller of the soil can exist in these woods, for the ground is heaped
and drifted and windrowed with slabs and bowlders, suggesting the wreck
of some mighty war of the gods--some titanic missile-flinging combat,
with this as the battle ground. Bleak, unsightly, unproductive, mangled
and distorted out of all shape and form of loveliness, yet with a
fierce, wild fascination in it that amounts almost to beauty--that is
the Nova Scotia woods.

Only the water is not like that. Once on the stream or lake and all is
changed. For the shores are green; the river or brook is clear and
cold--and tarry black in the deep places; the water leaps and dashes in
whirlpools and torrents, and the lakes are fairy lakes, full of green
islands--mere ledges, many of them, with two or three curious sentinel
pines--and everywhere the same clear, black water, and always the trout,
the wonderful, wild, abounding Nova Scotia trout.

To Jake's Landing was a hard, jolting drive over a bad road, with only a
break here and there where there is a house or two, and maybe a sawmill
and a post-office, the last sentinels of civilization. It was at