All the protection that the law can give will not prevent the game
naturally belonging to a wooded country from leaving it when it is
deforested, nor keep fish in waters that have shrunk to a quarter of
their ordinary volume before midsummer. The streams of such a country
will thus shrink when the mountains, where the snows lie latest and the
feeding springs are, and the swamps, which dole out their slow but
steady tribute, are bereft of shade. The thin soil of a rocky hill, when
deprived of its shelter of branches, will be burned by the summer sun
out of all power to help the germination of any worthy seed, or to
nurture so noble a plant as a tree through the tender days of its
infancy. It supports only useless weeds and brambles. Once so denuded,
it will be unsightly and unprofitable for many years if not always.
Some swamps at great expense may be brought into tillage and meadow, but
nine times out of ten, when cleared of the lusty growth of woods, they
bear nothing but wild grass, and the streams that trickled from them all
the summer long in their days of wildness show in August only the
parched trail of the spring course.
Our natives have inherited their ancestors' hatred of trees, which to
them were only cumberers of the ground, to be got rid of by the
speediest means; and our foreign-born landholders, being unused to so
much woodland, think there can be no end to it, let them slash away as
they will.
Ledges and steep slopes that can bear nothing but wood to any profit,
are shorn of their last tree, and the margins of streams to the very
edge robbed of the willows and water-maples that shaded the water and
with their roots protected the banks from washing. Who has not known a
little alder swamp, in which he was sure to find a dozen woodcock, when
he visited it on the first day of the season each year? Some year the
first day comes and he seeks it as usual, to find its place marked only
by brush heaps, stubs, and sedges; and for the brook that wimpled
through it in the days of yore, only stagnant pools. The worst of it is,
the owners can seldom give any reason for this slaughter but that their
victims were trees and bushes.
The Yankee, with his proverbial thriftiness and forecast, appears
entirely to lose these gifts when it comes to the proper and sensible
management of woodlands. Can he not understand that it is more
profitable to keep a lean or thin soil that will grow nothing well but
wood, growing wood instead of worthless weeds? The crop is one which is
slow in coming to the harvest, but it is a sure one, and is every year
becoming a more valuable one. It breaks the fierceness of the winds, and
keeps the springs from drying up, and is a comfort to the eye, whether
in the greenness of the leaf or the barrenness of the bough, and under
its protecting arms live and breed the grouse, the quail and the hare,
and in its shadowed rills swim the trout.