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Next year he will burn some more wood the first burning will have left many charred stumps and trunks, which he supplements with a little wood dragged from other parts of the forest on the same spot, and so the next year, by which time it will become necessary to begin a new clearing, or dhya.
In the first flare of it he looked down the slope that led riverward. Little rivulets of water were running down it. Rocks and stumps were in their way, and underfoot it was slippery. Marette's fingers were clinging to his again, as she had held to them on the wild race up to Kedsty's bungalow from the barracks.
I'm awful sorry for the sprain, he said, offering her his hand; and as she took it in hers, noticing about the wrist prints of his fingers which had grasped it so tightly and held it so firmly as he dragged her along over stumps, and bogs, and stones, until she sank at his feet, 'I guess I was a brute to race her like that, he said to himself, as he went out into the darkness and started for home.
When it is all over the region lies desolate for years. It becomes a waste, a tangle of briers pitiful upstarts of trees and burned stumps. Had it not been for the trapper's and the Clown's forethought the fugitives would have fared worse.
Two of the men, with their rifles ready, stepped outside and swiftly swung their gaze along the edge of the forest. The early morning mists obscured the vision somewhat. A bell tinkled just within the undergrowth. Instantly the fellows outside dropped behind stumps, while we inside removed the plugs from loopholes.
In some places as many as fifty tree stumps were seen in one spot, within the compass of half an acre, all cut through at about eighteen inches from the root. We may remark, in passing, that the beaver is very much like a gigantic water-rat, with this marked difference, that its tail is very broad and flat like a paddle.
As it was, the nose and lips of the slimy monster struck the youth's foot and slid up the side of his leg. Hideous was the yell with which Stumps received the salute. Acrobatic was the tumble with which he rolled over his comrades, and dire was the alarm created in all their hearts as they bounced from under the respective corners of their covering, and stood up, aghast!
On both sides of our path spread the graceful undergrowth, waving in an ocean of green, and hiding the stumps with which the plain was covered, while far away, to right and left, the prospect was bounded by forest walls, and gloomy bulwarks and parapets of pines arose in front, as if designed, in their perfect denseness, to exclude the world from some bosky Garden of Paradise beyond.
"You'll go through it next time, Stumps, if you plunge like that," said Jeff, who had watched the fight with lively interest, and had encouraged the combatants with sundry marks of applause, besides giving them much gratuitous advice.
They wished even for the corduroy expedient a little farther on, when the line became encumbered with stumps left from the underbrushing, and which caught in the axletree every few score yards. Now came the handspikes into action, which provident Sam had cut, and laid into the waggon when the road was fair and smooth; for the wheels had to be lifted high enough to slip over the obstacles.