SPECIALISTS IN THE WOODS.

Only people who have poked around up there more or less realize how many persons make a living out of the Maine woods. This reference is not to the lumbermen and the pulp stuff choppers. Their presence in the woods is a matter of course. This is a word about the army of specialists. One might say that they are the gleaners who follow the red-shirted reapers whose harvest is the giants of the forests. The side issues of the Maine woods feed many mouths; and speaking about mouths there are, of course, the gum pickers.

Some people have an idea that spruce gum is gathered in the forest by the lumbermen at odd jobs. It may be remarked in passing that from 4:30 a. m. until dark the Maine loggers have something else to do. They haven't any hankering to climb trees.

Practically all the spruce gum of commerce is gathered by men who make it their business and work at it as steadily as a man in a factory. You will find the snowshoe trail of these busy chaps zigzagging through pathless stretches, and if you happen to be up that way you will see their camp-fires glowing deep in many a lonely glen.

Few people behold them at their work. The constant supply of gum in store windows shows they are kept busy.

There is more or less excitement about gum picking. The standard price for gum is $1 a pound, and a fancy article of clear nuggets brings $1.50. Some days when lucky strikes are frequent the gum picker can clear from $5 to $10.

The gum picker can sell even the scraps and chippings. The patent spruce gum maker boils those down. Several medicine firms also make a spruce gum cough balsam.

Maine gum pickers usually travel in pairs. Some go on their own hook, others are employed by wholesale druggists. Usually they range over wide territory, sleeping here and there in the deserted logging camps that sprinkle northern Maine. A few fresh boughs of browse in the bunks and some strips of bark over the habitable corner of the camp make the place a comfortable home.

If a city man happens to be ordered into the woods by his physician he would do well to take up gum picking for his pastime, even if he does not care for the money. There is just enough activity about it to keep a man's mind clear and his muscles healthy. It takes him abroad through the crisp winter air and gives him an excuse for "hucking it."

A gum picker's equipment comprises warm clothing, snowshoes, climbers—such as telegraph linemen use—a curved chisel in the handle of which a pole may be set, a good jack-knife and a gun. These are the necessaries.

Almost as necessary is a good supply of tobacco, for if you can imagine a gum picker sitting down of an evening by the camp fire and cleaning his day's pick of gum without clouds of smoke about his head your imagination pictures a very cheerless scene.

There is a special thing about gum picking—the daily expenses are small. The men cannot register at hotels or patronize saloons. It is either a deserted camp or the lee side of a tree at night.

As they are obliged to tote their household supplies on a moose sled, they are frugal in their diet. With plenty of work, a few bushels of beans, flour, and molasses, a gum picker is fixed nicely for a long and cold winter. He figures that it costs him about 50 cents a week, and if he is handy with his gun he reduces expenses materially.

Of course it is rather lonely sometimes in the deep woods, but there is a pretty bright side to the picture.

The gum picker rolls off his bunk in the morning, his nostrils full of the good green savor of the spruce boughs beneath his head all night. He fries his bacon, warms his beans and sloofs at his steaming tin of tea.

Then he has a leisurely smoke before the sputtering embers of the fire, gets his kit on his back and his gum bag under his arm, ties a lunch of biscuit and gingerbread in his handkerchief, straps on his snowshoes, and trudges away into the forest, his pipe trailing blue smoke behind in the sparkling air of the winter morning.

The gum picker must have a good eye for trees. A careless and myopic man would travel over acres of territory and miss the dollars right along. The shrewd picker, the experienced man, runs his practiced eye along every trunk.

Here and there he sees a tall spruce marked by a seam through which its life-blood has oozed for years. The bubbles have crept out and have been clarified day by day in the sun and the rain. They have absorbed the odoriferous breath of the forest.

There they are at last, amber and garnet nuggets, ready for the picker's chisel and for the teeth of the gum-chewing girls far away in the city. Sometimes the picker goes up on his climbers and taps and ticks and picks like a giant woodpecker. Sometimes the tree is felled.

The gum king of the Moosehead region is a rather cranky old chap, who has been at the business ever since he was a youth. He roams all over that region and has reduced the thing to a science.

At regular intervals he makes a trip through some remote district and wounds the spruces with his ax and chisel. Then after a few years he travels around that way and gathers the gum.

It is only in Maine that the great gum nuggets with centres like the red of a dying coal are obtained, and the folks that chew gum say that for yanking qualities this gum beats the world.

The Maine hoop pole man makes even better wages than his brother the gum picker. The hoop pole man follows along in the wake of the loggers.

He barbers the face of the hillsides of stuff that no one else wants. He is after the second growth, as the young birch and ash are called. These spring up around the rotting stumps.

The hoop pole man takes a horse with him in his tours. He cuts the poles, and the horse hauls them to camp by daylight. Evenings the pole man fashions the hoops with a draw shave, sitting beside a roaring fire and sucking at his black pipe.

Sometimes the poles are sold round, but the harvester who trims his own stuff and shaves the hoops receives two or three cents each for the finished products, and that pays. The hoop pole business is pretty steady work, but the evenings are pleasant, after all, with the slish of shaves, the crackle of the fire and the rumble of story telling. Even the rabbit, up-ending outside, looks in through the windows at the light and warmth, waggles his ears and wishes he might join the group.

As soon as the hoop poles are sold each is marked across with red chalk a little way from the end. For some time in certain parts of Maine persons did a snug business by stealing poles, but nowadays no dealer will buy any that have been thus marked. Yet sometimes the canny thief cuts off the ends that bear the chalk mark.

A while ago one man sold his hoop poles to a dealer, who marked them and laid them in his sled. Then the seller came around by night, stole the poles, cut them off and sold them to another dealer as hoops for half barrels. It may be seen, therefore, that the city man doesn't know all the tricks. If this enterprising hoop pole man could have got the hoops once more he could have trimmed them down and disposed of them as hoops for nail kegs.

Then there is the axe handle man. He needs ash of a larger growth than the hoop pole saplings. The trees are chopped in the fall, and then by means of a "froe" and axe each handle is roughly blocked out. Then they are buried so that they may season without cracking.

As an additional precaution against parting of the fibres the broad end of each handle is daubed with a sort of paint the principal ingredient of which is grease. Ash goes to pieces easily if the sun gets at it and the axe handle man must be careful of his wares. The rough handles are sent away to the factory as soon as the snow comes.

Of all tough jobs the ship knee man has the worst in the woods. The knees bring good prices, but the man who gets them out earns every cent.

He goes prospecting with an axe, hunting for hack or back juniper or tamarack. When one is found he looks to see if it has the proper crook in its root. If the right angle is there and the root proves sound he sets to work digging it out—and it is a muscle racking job.

The man who is after hemlock bark for the tanneries is another chap who strays far in the woods, for the bark is away back nowadays.

The Indian who hunts after basket stuff or birch bark for a canoe hull is the most patient searcher. The big birches are few and far between in the Maine woods, and sometimes an Indian from the Penobscot or Passamaquoddy tribe will tramp a hundred miles before he finds a tree that will yield a piece of bark without knothole or crack and which will be large enough for a canoe.

A number of men are now making good money in the Maine woods by searching the brooks for fresh water clams. They are getting some good pearls from these bivalves. Some hunters in the Moosehead region recently found a pearl valued at $200.

The most unsocial folk in the Maine forests are the trappers. They don't want anyone within twenty miles of them. Gunners will steal from the traps, they believe, and lumbermen scare away game. Even bobcats rob them, as bloody smears near a rifled trap indicate.

Some of the old trappers have a twenty-mile circuit of traps and resent it if any neighbors come that way. Some of the biggest rough and tumbles that the Maine beavers have ever witnessed have been fought out by bow-legged old trappers who have chanced to cross trails and have believed that they were being crowded on a hundred square miles of territory.