slope was clothed with scrubby hemlock and thickets of young fir and
patches of hazel, out of which he stirred a great many grouse and once
a deer.

But if he found no stakes to show him the boundaries of his property,
he gained the upper rim of the high cliff which walled the southern
side of the Big Bend, and all the valley opened before him. Smoke
lifted in a pale spiral from the house below his camp. Abreast of the
log boom he had passed in the river, he marked the roofs of several
buildings, and back of the clearings in the logged-over land opened
white squares against the dusky green of the surrounding timber. He
perceived that a considerable settlement had arisen in the lower
valley, that the forest was being logged off, that land was being
cleared and cultivated. There was nothing strange in that. All over
the earth the growing pressure of population forced men continually to
invade the strongholds of the wilderness. Here lay fertile acres,
water, forests to supply timber, the highway of the sea to markets.
Only labor,--patient, unremitting labor--was needed to shape all that
great valley for cultivation. Cleared and put to the plow, it would
produce abundantly. A vast, fecund area out of which man, withdrawing
from the hectic pressure of industrial civilization, could derive
sustenance,--if he possessed sufficient hardihood to survive such
hardships and struggle as his forefathers had for their common lot.

Hollister ranged the lower part of the hillside until hunger drove him
back to camp. And, as it sometimes happens that what a man fails to
come upon when he seeks with method and intent he stumbles upon by
accident, so now Hollister, coming heedlessly downhill, found the
corner stake he was seeking. With his belt-axe he blazed a trail from
this point to the flat below, so that he could find it again.