"Wilderness lord of the olden time, Stalwart and plumed pine; They have dragged thee down to the roaring town From the realms that once were thine. And he who reigns in thy stately stead Has never a time o' truce, For the axe and saw and the grinder's maw Have doomed thee, too, King Spruce."
At half-past four in the dark of the morning "Dirty-apron Harry's" nickel alarm-clock purred relentlessly, and he rolled out of his bunk, his eyelids sticking like a blind puppy's. At seventeen, youth relishes morning naps. But, as cookee of Barnum Withee's camp on "Lazy Tom" operation, he was chosen to be the earliest bird to crow. His first duty as chanticleer was to wake "Icicle Ike" and "Push Charlie," the teamsters, whose hungry charges were stamping impatient hoofs in the hovel. He dressed himself while stumbling across the dingle to the men's camp, his eyes still shut. This feat was not as difficult as it sounds. The difference between Harry's night-gear and day raiment was merely a Scotch cap and the canvas robe of office that gave him his title.
The teamsters grunted when he shook them, and followed him out of the frowsy, snore-fretted atmosphere of the big camp. They did their morning yawnings and stretching as they walked. When Duty calls "Time!" to a woodsman the body is on the dot, even if the soul lags unwillingly.
The humorists of the woods have it that the cookee pries up the sun when he jacks the big pot out of the bean-hole. For such an important operation, "Dirty-apron Harry" went at it listlessly.
The bean-hole was beyond the horse-hovel, sheltered in the angle of a little palisade of poles whose protection would be needed when the winter's snows drifted. Harry wearily dragged a hoe in that direction after he had kindled a fire in the cook-house stove. He did not look up to the first pearly sheen of sunrise streaming through the yellow of the frost-touched birches. The glory of the skies would wake him too soon. He gave up the final fuddle of slumber grudgingly, his dull mind still piecing the visions of the night, his soul full of loathing for the workaday world of greasy pots and dirty tins. But when he turned the corner of the bean-hole shelter he dropped out of dreams with the suddenest jolt of his life. A black bear was trying to dig up the bean-pot, growling softly at the heat of the round stones she uncovered. Two cubs sat near by, watching operations with great interest, their round ears up-cocked, their jaws drooling expectantly. The big bear whirled promptly and cuffed the hoe out of Harry's limp grasp, leaped past him before his trembling legs could move him, and scuffed away into the woods, with her progeny crowding close to her sheltering bulk. The cookee sped in the other direction towards the hovel with as great alacrity.
