We loitered about until it was dark, and then tried to make our way on to where my old home had been. It could not be half a mile away, but that half-mile was beset with houses, and as we drew nearer the houses became thicker, until I saw that it would be useless to go on, for where the cedar-trees used to grow, where the hill-slope was that I had tumbled down, where Blacky the squirrel and Rat-tat used to live, was now the middle of a town. At the first sign of dawn we made our way back to the beaver-pool, and, crossing the dam again, turned our backs for ever on the neighbourhood where I had spent my childhood. It was no longer bears' country.
Now for the first time I understood what the coming of man meant to the people of the forest and the mountains. I had, indeed, seen a man-town before, and the men coming and going up and down the streams, but, somehow, it had not occurred to me that where they came they never went away again. These men here, however, with their houses, their roads and cows and horses--they would never go away. They were wiping out the forest: the animals that lived in it had vanished: the very face of the mountains was changed, so that I could not tell the spots that I knew best; and I was sure that we could never drive them out again. I was sorry that I had come to see the old home, and we were a gloomy couple as we started on our return journey southwards.
For a long time yet we would have to go cautiously, for man was all around us. Along the streams he had been digging, digging, digging, endlessly digging, but what he gained by it we could not comprehend; for we often watched him at work, and he seemed to take nothing out of the ground, nor to eat anything as he dug. When he was not digging, he was chopping trees, either to build more houses, to make dams across the streams, or to break the wood up into pieces to burn. So wherever he came the forest disappeared, and the rivers were disfigured with holes and ditches and piles of gravel on which no green thing grew, and nothing lived that was good to eat.
In travelling we kept away from the streams as much as possible, moving along the hillsides, and only coming down to the water when we wished to cross. We had been travelling in this way for some two or three nights, when one morning very early we came down to a stream at a point close by a clump of buildings. The wind was blowing from them to us, and suddenly Wooffa threw herself up on her haunches and gasped one word--'Pig!'