barren, and unutterably dreary.

The band of boys, who, in spite of swamps and jungles, had learned to
love the forest dearly, for its many beauties, and for the wild
offspring with which it teemed, sorrowfully gasped, as if they saw the
skeleton of a friend.




CHAPTER XII.

"GO IT, OLD BRUIN!"


Before them lay a ruined tract of country, extending northward farther
than eye could reach. It is called by Maine woodsmen a _brûlée_, name
borrowed from their French-Canadian neighbors, who dwell across the
boundary line which separates the Dominion from the United States.

The word signifies "burnt tract;" but it gives a feeble idea of the
fire-smitten, blackened region on which the lads looked.

The forest until now had been a wilderness truly, but a wilderness where
every kind and size of growth, from the giant pine to the creeping
wintergreen and shaded mosses, mingled in beautiful confusion. Here it
became a desert. For the terrible forest fires, the woodsman's tragic
enemy, had swept over it not long before, devastating an area of many
square miles. Millions of dollars worth of valuable timber had been
reduced to rotting embers. Storm-defying pines had crashed to the earth,