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Updated: May 22, 2025
The air was crisp and nipping, the frost crackled under his feet, the smoke from his pipe seemed no thicker than the steam from his breath, the ax rang on the hard aspens. Wade swung this implement like a born woodsman. The chips flew and the dead wood smelled sweet. Some logs he chopped into three-foot pieces; others he chopped and split.
R.C. took one side of a ridge, with Copple and me on the other, and we worked down toward where we had seen the sign. After half an hour of slow, stealthy glide through the forest we sat down at the edge of a park, expecting R.C. to come along soon. The white aspens were all bare, and oak leaves were rustling down. The wind lulled a while, then softly roared in the pines.
Many aspens were fresh cut, one at least two feet thick, and all the small branches had been cut off and dragged to the water, where I could find no further trace of them. The grass was matted down, and on the bare bits of ground showed beaver tracks. Game appeared to be scarce. He said he had once seen a herd of several hundred deer migrating from one section of country to another.
Shade is death slow death to the life of trees. These little aspens are fightin' for place in the sunlight. It is a merciless battle. They push an' bend one another's branches aside an' choke them. Only perhaps half of these aspens will survive, to make one of the larger clumps, such as that one of full-grown trees over there.
The white branches of the aspens cast only the symmetrical outline of the tree form on the illumined grass, and seemed scarcely less bare than in winter, but on one swaying bough the mocking-bird sang all the joyous prophecies of the spring to the great silver moon that made his gladsome day so long.
As one who looks back at evening from the summit of some lofty ridge over the long track which he has followed since the morning, so now did my mind travel back over the immense distance through which I had ridden in twenty-two days of actual travel and in thirty-three of the entire journey-that distance could not have been less than 1000 miles; and as each camp scene rose again before me, with its surrounding of snow and storm-swept prairie and lonely clump of aspens, it seemed as though something like infinite space stretched between me and that far-away land which one word alone can picture, that one word in which so many others centre Home.
"I sure am," said Scott. "How many do you think we can gather in?" "Not so many on one trip. Perhaps fifteen if we have good luck. A big herd leaves a big trail." "There's an old corral up near the Government elevation monument," said Douglas. "It's all overgrown with bushes and young aspens so's I don't think one person out of twenty, knows it's there. Maybe we could corral 'em there?"
The wild rose and the raspberry vines add their glossy purplish and cherry red stems to the color combination, and a contrast is afforded by the silvery gray bark of stray aspens. A still softer and more beautiful shade of silver gray is seen in the big hornet's nest of last year which still hangs suspended from a low sugar maple.
We were far from camp, and Edd was not sure of a bee-line during daylight, let alone after dark. Deep in the forest the sunset gold and red burned on grass and leaf. The aspens took most of the color. Swift-flying wisps of cloud turned pink, and low along the western horizon of the forest the light seemed golden and blue.
He dashed across the marsh, and came back again to Karr, without having stepped into a mudhole. "Have we seen the whole forest now?" he asked. "No, not yet," said Karr. He next conducted the elk to the skirt of the forest, where fine oaks, lindens, and aspens grew. "Here your kind eat leaves and bark, which they consider the choicest of food; but you will probably get better fare abroad."
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