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This arduous employment is called "lumbering," and those who engage in it are "lumberers." The word "lumber," in its general sense, applies to all kinds of timber. But though many different trees, such as oak, ash and maple, are cut down, yet the main business is with the pines.
After a dinner, at which apple-sauce was the greatest luxury to me, but our moose-meat was oftenest called for by the lumberers, I walked across the clearing into the forest, southward, returning along the shore. For my dessert, I helped myself to a large slice of the Chesuncook woods, and took a hearty draught of its waters with all my senses.
Joe spent this Sunday and the night with his acquaintances. The lumberers told me that there were many moose hereabouts, but no caribou or deer. A man from Oldtown had killed ten or twelve moose, within a year, so near the house that they heard all his guns.
They line their nests with dry grass, and rushes, and roots gnawed fine, and do not pass the winter in sleep, as the dormice, flying squirrels, racoons, and bears do. They are very innocent and playful, both when young, and even after they grow old. The lumberers often tame them, and they become so docile that they will come at a call or whistle.
There is but one clearing upon its shores, and that had been made by lumberers many years before; the place abounded with red cedar. A second growth of young timber had grown up in this spot, which was covered also with raspberry bushes several hundred acres being entirely overgrown with this delicious berry.
'I met with planks here and there, hewed off in squaring the timber: but even without that, you know, they're always the pioneers of the settler along every stream through Canada. This lake of yours communicates with the Ottawa, through the river at the "Corner," which is called "Clyde" farther on, and is far too tempting a channel for the lumberers to leave unused.
With that he went away, and came to me no more; but I saw him one day that I was on this side of the river, sitting in a tavern with some men who looked like lumberers. I asked who they were, and heard that they were a gang in the employ of a man who lives near Cacouna." Mrs. Costello drew a long breath, "Could he belong to the gang? In that case he might be near here at any moment."
Lumberers have a notion that he is harmful to timber, digging little holes through the bark to encourage the settlement of insects. The regular rings of such perforations which one may see in almost any apple-orchard seem to give some probability to this theory.
"The old man was unarmed, and too feeble to pursue the dreadful beast. He could only wring his hands and rend his grey hairs in grief and terror; but his lamentations would not restore the child to life. A band of hunters and lumberers, armed with rifles and knives, turned out to beat the woods, and were not long in tracking the savage animal to his retreat in a neighbouring cedar swamp.
He lived all alone in a little log-house, and spent his time in fishing, and trapping, and hunting; and he was very dull, for he had no wife and no child like me to talk to. The only people whom he used to see were some French lumberers, and now and then the Indians would come in their canoes and fish on his lake, and make their wigwams on the lake shore, and hunt deer in the wood.
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