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After building our hospital, we had made limekilns for disinfecting the frigate, we had been wood-cutters, and charcoal burners, and carpenters. We had made ourselves spare masts and spars. We had drained ponds too; explored in all directions, hunting and fishing, and discovered lakes and rivers. Though we made good bags during these excursions, they consisted of small game only.
The forest-beings are rarely gay and harmless. The forest life was felt as terrible. Tree-worship still survives to-day. Wood-cutters... those who take the life of trees... you see a race of haunted men...." He stopped abruptly, a singular catch in his voice. Bittacy felt something even before the sentences were over. His wife, he knew, felt it still more strongly.
I swore at it. Now I couldn't see the ripple or the snag either. I stood in the doorway, peering, and the arrows came in swarms. They might have been poisoned, but they looked as though they wouldn't kill a cat. The bush began to howl. Our wood-cutters raised a warlike whoop; the report of a rifle just at my back deafened me.
"That is not Father," said his mother, and both went towards the running man. When they met, the man stood still and said, gasping: "Don't go any farther, turn around, Elsbeth. I came straight to you, for something has happened." "Oh, my God!" cried the woman in the greatest anguish, "has something happened to Toni?" "Yes, he was with the wood-cutters, and then he was struck.
At night we slept in the open, and next day crossed the mountain into a forest of oak and pine sprinkled with silver birches. Hundreds of wood-cutters passed us on the trail, each carrying a single log upon his back. Before we reached the village of Shing Lung-shan we came into an area of desolation. Thousands of splendid trees were lying in a chaos of charred and blackened trunks.
There are masons, carpenters, and gardeners, all carrying out their respective duties; blacksmiths busy at the forge, reapers gathering in the harvest, furriers preparing rich skins, children picking maize, drovers tending their flocks, wood-cutters returning heavily loaded from the mountains.
He was bound to live in style, lest he should be taken for a shoddy contractor, who does not know how to spend his money. Crazy, therefore, imitated the leaders of fashion but in the same way European wood-cutters are imitated by Australasian savages, who, when they cut down a tree, wait for its fall until they are crushed by its weight.
Woods, mountains, valleys were crossed with a kind of feverish haste, and the approach of night alone forced us to bivouac. At about three o'clock in the morning, Lucien began to reproach us for our laziness. Wood-cutters now passed, who saluted me by name, and one guided us for more than a league, astonished at l'Encuerado's tales.
Many of these unfortunate emigrants, now entirely deprived of shelter and ambrosia, must needs take to vulgar handicrafts, as a means of earning their bread. Under these circumstances, many whose sacred groves had been confiscated, let themselves out for hire as wood-cutters in Germany, and were forced to drink beer instead of nectar.
After losing his way in the Bois de Boulogne, awakening both the cattle and the sheep there in the course of his nightly ramble, he at last found one of the little huts erected to shelter the gardeners and wood-cutters, and remained there until daybreak, when he was able to take his bearings and proceed towards the Auteuil gate of the ramparts.
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