"Woodsman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cultivating it: such was the custom of the back-woodsmen, and, for want of this law, it often happened that after they had cultivated a farm, the land would be applied for and purchased by some speculator, who would forcibly eject the occupant, and take possession of the improved property. A back-woodsman was not to be trifled with, and the consequences very commonly were that the new proprietor was found some fine morning with a rifle-bullet through his head. To prevent this unjust spoliation on the ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... and then a feeling of anger and reckless courage filled the heart of the woodsman's child, and, darting forward, she made a snatch at her pail, at the same time dealing the young robber a sharp blow over the face and eyes with the branch of shad-bush in ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... I, "old trapper as he is, see if I don't catch him. I know how to bait the trap; so he will walk right into it. And then, if he has anything to eat there, I'll show him how to cook it woodsman fashion. I'll teach him how to dress a salmon; roast, boil, or bake. How to make a bee-hunter's mess; a new way to do his potatoes camp fashion; and how to dispense with kitchen-ranges, cabouses, or cooking-stoves. If I could ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... "A true woodsman never quits his piece while he has any powder in his horn or a bullet in his pouch. I have not drawn a trigger this day, Eau-douce, and shouldn't relish the idea of parting with those reptiles without causing them to ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... no midnight prowler visited the summit of Ringwaak Hill, and the first of dawn found the great ram again at his post of observation. It is possible that he had another motive besides his interest in his new, wonderful world. He may have expected the woodsman to follow and attempt his recapture, and resolved not to be taken unawares. Whatever his motive, he kept his post till the sun was high above the horizon, and the dew-wet woods gleamed as if sown with jewels. Then he ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... told something of his intentions to his stepmother. He was going to Colmar on the morrow with a horse and small cart, and would take with him what clothes he had ready. He did not speak to Marie that night, but he said something to his father about the timber and the mill. Gaspar Muntz, the head woodsman, knew, he said, all about the business. Gaspar could carry on the work till it would suit Michel Voss himself to see how things were going on. Michel Voss was sore and angry, but he said nothing. He sent to his son a couple of hundred francs by ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... moccasins on the morning he turned up on guard. All the while he kept a sharp lookout, right and left, on the ground—the Red Fox must have thrown his cartridge shell somewhere, and for that Hale was looking. Across the brook he could see the tracks no farther, for he was too little of a woodsman to follow so old a trail, but as he stood behind a clump of rhododendron, wondering what he could do, he heard the crack of a dead stick down the stream, and noiselessly he moved farther into the bushes. His heart thumped ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... conflict. Beside him stood the tall and stalwart form of Little John, whose name was given him in jest, for he was the stoutest of the band. There also were valiant Much, the miller's son, gallant Scathelock, George a Green, the pindar of Wakefield, the fat and jolly Friar Tuck, and many another woodsman of renown, a band of lusty archers such as all England ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... verbal messages, it was true, but they were by no means tender, for Cavanagh knew better than to intrust any fragile vessel of sentiment to this stalwart young woodsman. Now that Lee knew the mysterious old man was dying, she longed for his release—for his release would mean her lover's release. She did not stop to think that it would be long, very long, before she could touch Cavanagh's hand or even ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... woodsman's brown wrist tenderly into both his hands, and said, scarce above a whisper, "He gave His, first. He started it. Who can refuse, He starting it? And thou wilt not refuse." The voice rose—"I see, I see the victory! Well art thou nominated 'St. ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... suggested a remoteness that were yet less reassuring. His son, who stood in awe of him—not because of paternal severity, but because no boy could refrain from a worshipping respect for so miraculous a shot, a woodsman so subtly equipped with all elusive sylvan instincts and knowledge—forbore to break upon his meditations by the delivery of Grinnel's message. Nevertheless the consciousness of withholding it weighed heavily upon him. He only pretermitted it for ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... obliterated all trace of himself, could have more quickly, noiselessly, mysteriously disappeared amongst the greenery, than did this mountaineer. His movements, made with the instinctive cunning of the woodsman and with muscles trained not only by wild life there in the mountains to speed, endurance and exactitude, but by many an hour of stealthy stalking of the "revenuers" sent to search out his moonshine still, raid it, take him prisoner, were ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... lay not there. Midst the din and roar of battle, a poor dying peasant had dragged himself to the fountain where died the Lord of Fontenaye, the Lord of Tamworth tower and town. Spoilers stripped and mutilated both bodies and the lowly woodsman was carried to the proud ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... that fire had not come to aid the fir in perpetuating itself? This, too, we can answer from the signs today. Every Northwestern woodsman knows tracts of varying size (usually small because fire has been almost universal) covered with big old hemlock, white fir and cedar, with here and there a dying giant fir, perhaps, but mainly showing fir occupancy ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... he was awakened by a persistent tapping on the door. In the woodsman's manner, he was instantly broad awake. He lit the gas and opened the door to admit Newmark, partially dressed over ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... a huge young woodsman who was standing behind some of the others, out of Laurette's range of vision, started eagerly forward. Bill Goodine was acknowledged to be the best-looking man on the Big Aspohegan,—an opinion in which he himself most heartily concurred. He was also noted as a wrestler ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... trained yourself in the Oregon woods. When you were only a boy, few marksmen I ever knew could beat you, an' I never saw your equal for eye an' ear, for trackin' a hoss, for all the gifts that make a woodsman.... Wal, rememberin' this an' seein' the trouble ahaid for the Isbels, I just broke out whenever I had a chance. I bragged before men I'd reason to believe would take my words deep. For instance, not long ago I missed ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... and we have the fragments of a diary kept during this first and last wandering outside his native country. He copied the log, noted the weather, and evidently strove to get some idea of nautical matters while he was at sea and leading a life strangely unfamiliar to a woodsman and pioneer. When they arrived at their destination they were immediately asked to breakfast and dine with Major Clarke, the military magnate of the place, and our young Virginian remarked, with characteristic prudence and a certain touch of grim humor, "We went,—myself ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... of outline, framed by the thickets as he was, that was particularly characteristic of the wild denizens of the woods. But even in the heavy shadows his identity was clear at once. He was simply a woodsman,—and he held his horse by ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... peaks have a nip in the air at three in the mornin'!" Matthews came down to the raft chaffing his hands. "That's a job worthy a woodsman," he observed, holding the halter reins while the Ranger got a ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... country round Cambridge in his amateurish but intense way. During his first Christmas vacation, he went down to the Maine Woods and camped out, and there he met Bill Sewall, a famous guide, who remained Theodore's friend through life, and Wilmot Dow, Sewall's nephew, another woodsman; and this trip, subsequently followed by others, did much good to his physique. He still had occasional attacks of asthma—he "guffled" as Bill Sewall called it—and they were sometimes acute, but his tendency to ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... to listen attentively, but though the woods were full of slight noises, she heard nothing that she could decide positively was the gypsy. Still, burdened as he was with Dolly, it seemed to Bessie that he must make some noise, no matter how skilled a woodsman he might be, and how much training he had had in silent traveling in his activities as a poacher and hunter of game in woods where keepers ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Long Lake - Bessie King in Summer Camp • Jane L. Stewart
... upon it, he could not tell. "At all events, the fellow will be too poor to exercise the pre-emption right, and of course must move off." So spoke the land agent. This would answer admirably. Although my Texan experience had constituted me a tolerable woodsman, it had not made me a woodcutter; and the clearing of the squatter, however small it might be, would serve as a beginning. I congratulated myself on my good luck; and, without further parley, parted with my scrip—receiving ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... at this time, a boom-town in decay, and Burton whom I had not seen for ten years, seemed equally forlorn. After trying his hand at several professions, he had finally drifted to this place, and was living alone in a rude cabin, camping like a woodsman. Being without special training in any trade, he had fallen into competition with the lowest ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... stories of King's Mountain. He had heard old men tell of pointing deadly rifles at red-coats at New Orleans, and had absorbed their own love of Old Hickory. The school-master himself, when a mere lad, had been with Scott in Mexico. The spirit of the back-woodsman had been caught in the hills, and was alive and unchanged at that very hour. The boy was practically born in Revolutionary days, and that was why, like all mountaineers, Chad had little love of State ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... tinkle of the stream on my left I judged that we were ascending to a higher shelf in the glen. The Indian moved very carefully, as noiseless as the flight of an owl, and I marvelled at the gift. In after days I was to become something of a woodsman, and track as swiftly and silently as any man of my upbringing. But I never mastered the Indian art by which the foot descending in the darkness on something that will crackle checks before the noise is made. I could do it by day, when I could see what was on the ground, but in the dark ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... hadn't it in my heart to intercept his retreat. But Ben, to whom a "black cat" was particularly obnoxious, from its nefarious habit of robbing traps, had no such scruples, and, bringing up his rifle with the careless quickness of an old woodsman, fired before I could interpose a word. The fisher dropped, and after writhing and snapping ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... familiar with other kinds of fishing. We had, however, for teacher one who for fifty years had been a salmon-fisher—first as a boy in Ireland, and since that for many years in Canada, in most of whose rivers he had killed salmon. As an angler he was a thorough artist, as a woodsman he was an expert, and as a companion he was most agreeable. Among the Indians, who have the habit of naming every person from some personal trait, he was known as "the Kingfisher," and by that name I shall call him. The second of our party, who procured the right of fishing the Restigouche, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... the vigorous school of frontier warfare, "the earth for his bed, his canopy the heavens," Washington excelled the hunter and woodsman in their athletic habits, and in those trials of manhood which filled the hardy days of his early life. He was amazingly swift of foot, and could climb steep mountains seemingly without effort. Indeed, in all the tests of his great physical ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... lots of ways," she confessed wearily, "but none of 'em seemed to work. First I thought of hidin' it up near Pine Ridge, but I was afraid some woodsman might happen on it; then I started to take it down to the river in our wagon; but Elias Barnes would get in an' light his pipe, and I was so afraid a spark ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... explained, and introduced Mr. Evans and the boys. "These are the Sandwiches," he said, including them all in a comprehensive wave of his hand, whereat Colonel Berry roared with laughter. "Boys, meet Colonel C. C. Berry, the best woodsman in fourteen states, and the best goodfellow ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... of bees reminds me of a well-known woodsman and camp-fire man who recently extolled in print the intelligence of hornets, saying that they have the ability to differentiate friends from foes. "They know us and we talk to them and they are made to feel as welcome as any of our guests." "When ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... the same size near to the opposite precipice, which he felled in the same way. Both monarchs mingled and severely injured their royal heads in the middle of the pass, which thus became entirely blocked up, for our woodsman had so managed that the trees fell ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... Americans contribute to the motley contingent. They come from every direction and from various distances, some of them traveling a hundred miles or more to secure a few days' or weeks' work. Almost every farmer or woodsman living anywhere in the region of the marshes turns out with his entire family; and the families of all the laboring men and mechanics of the surrounding towns and cities join in the general hegira to the bogs, and help to harvest ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... you'll cross the mountains and skin twenty of an evening," he said. "Ye'll make a woodsman sure. You've got the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... close watch on the stars and although making no claims to being a first-class woodsman, Perk could tell the time of night by the heavenly bodies setting one after another, which would account for his late confident assertion that morning could not ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... up again immediately and took the dishes down to the spring to wash them. He had just dipped the plates into the pool under the spring when the old woodsman stopped him. ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... of its trunk; its branches hide vampires and all manner of evil things which prey upon the innocent; "The wild boar of the forest sharpen their tusks against the bark, for it is harder than flint, and the axe of the woodsman turns back upon the striker. "Then cries the sycamore, 'Hail and rain have no power against me, nor can the fiercest sun penetrate beyond my outside fringe; "'The man who impiously raises his hand against ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... woods far away from the haunts of men. When I had to leave this sylvan retreat it required eleven hours by stage to reach the railway-station. There for some weeks I lived in a log cabin, accompanied by a cook and a professional woodsman. I was not there to camp, to fish, or to loaf, and yet I did all these. There were some duties and work connected with the enterprise and these gave zest to the fishing and the loafing. Giant trees, space, and sky ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... night of Saturday, January 10, he took his men through the gap at Aldie and into Fairfax County. His first stop was at a farmhouse near Herndon Station, where he had friends, and there he met a woodsman, trapper and market hunter named John Underwood, who, with his two brothers, had been carrying on a private resistance movement against the Union occupation ever since the Confederate Army had moved out ...
— Rebel Raider • H. Beam Piper
... sport for the morning to take the early rabbit trails and see what has become of their maker. Some woodsman may have seen the rabbit making these tracks unconscious of supervision, but I will confess that I never have. Up North I have often watched the varying hare about his business when he had no idea that I was one of the party, but the sophisticated Massachusetts ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... melting pine gum and elk tallow into a dressing for our boots. I took a mean advantage of him, his hands being in the tallow and the tent-flap down, and tried on him a little of—now, don't deride me!—'Wood Notes.' It is seldom one can get the comment of a genuine woodsman on Nature according to ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... along the road, and after we get there. But it was the Sheriff's idea to get Rattlesnake Mike to guide us, and hire him to cook while we are in camp. Mike is an honest Indian, you know, Mary, and we may need one who is as good a woodsman as ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... woodsman, in the clearing stood, Hemmed by the solemn forest stretching round; Stalwart, ungainly, honest-eyed and rude, The genius of that solitude profound. He clove the way that future millions trod, He passed, unmoved by worldly fear or ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... The woodsman looked from the knot of gentlemen to the troop of hardy rangers, who, with a dozen ebony servants and four Meherrin Indians, made up the company. Under charge of the slaves were a number of packhorses. Thrown across one was a noble deer; a second bore ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... huntsman having placed the bugle to his lips, and blown a strike with two winds, a short consultation was held between him and James, who loved to display his knowledge as a woodsman; and while this was going forward, Nicholas and Sherborne having come up, the squire dismounted, and committing Robin to his brother-in-law, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... on the beer barrel. The thirty-three millions a year" (which was the revenue in 1877 derived from "complicity with distillers and brewers"), "are to every Ministry like the proverbial wolf which the woodsman holds by the ears. To keep him is difficult, to let him go is dangerous. Their position is becoming worse than embarrassing when the best men of every class, and all the women who see the public miseries, ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... hatred grew dark in the giant's face, and the stranger saw the big hands clench and the huge frame grow tense with passion. Then, as if striving to be not ungracious, the woodsman said in a somewhat softer tone, "You can't see much of it, this evening, though, 'count of the mists. It'll fair up by morning, I reckon. You can see a long way from here, of a ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... such progresses may advantage us," said the Abbot; "having an especial eye that our venison is carefully killed by some woodsman that is master of ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... not in the woodsman to be demonstrative at any time, but here was work demanding attention. Without a pause for breath or congratulation they turned to the necessity of the moment. The jam, the whole jam, was moving at last. Jimmy Powers ran ashore for his peavie. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... still, but though they shriek aloud to him to desist, he rains lusty blows with his axe, like one who has come upon the open for the first time in his life, and likes it. He is as yet far from being an expert woodsman—mark the blood on his hands at places where he has hit them instead of the tree; but note also that he does not waste time in bandaging them—he rubs them in the earth and goes on. His face is still of the discreet pallor that befits ...
— The Admirable Crichton • J. M. Barrie
... belonging to plants which the creole physician calls Bromeliacoe; and a plant like the Guy Lussacia of Brazil, with violet-red petals. There is an indescribable multitude of ferns,—a very museum of ferns! The doctor, who is a great woodsman, says that he never makes a trip to the hills without finding some new kind of fern; and he had already a ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... course straight into the west, the ground, fortunately, being soft and the hoofs of the horses making but little sound. Although the darkness hung as thick and close as ever, the skillful woodsman found the way instinctively, and neither stumbled nor trod upon the fallen brushwood. Young Clarke, just behind him, followed in his tracks, also stepping lightly and he knew enough not to ask any questions, confident that Boyd would take them ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... and that he could imitate to perfection the call of every game bird that inhabited the mountain glens. Sweet-tempered he was not; but so reliable, skilful, and vigilant, and moreover so thorough a woodsman, that the boys could well afford to put up with his ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... breath, and at the end of an hour were glad to lay down their hammers. Dias was comparatively fresh; his practice as a woodsman ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... whole Middle West. It may be called the 5 American house, the Western house, the Ohio house. Hardly any other house was built for a hundred years by the men who were clearing the land for the stately mansions of our day. As long as the primeval forests stood, the log cabin remained the woodsman's home; and not fifty years ago 10 I saw log cabins newly built in one of the richest and most prosperous regions of Ohio. They were, to be sure, log cabins of a finer pattern than the first settler reared. They were of ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... this year," said Francois. "It was the spring frosts that killed the blossoms." He brought to the berry-seeking his woodsman's knowledge. "In the hollows and among the alders the snow was lying longer and ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... wife picked it up and stroked its sleek fur. The neutral children were out in the garden abusing the flowers and breaking pickets from the fence; and one had an old saw and was sawing at the trimmings of the cottage like a woodsman sawing down a cedar ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... cabin of some woodsman, and she seemed alone in it with the woodsman and his dog, a tawny collie—the wild animal of her awakening. Quietly alert, he lay now beside her, his grave, bright ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... Audubon was blessed with good health, length of years, a devoted and self-sacrificing wife, and a buoyant, sanguine, and elastic disposition. He had the heavenly gift of enthusiasm—a passionate love for the work he set out to do. He was a natural hunter, roamer, woodsman; as unworldly as a child, and as simple and transparent. We have had better trained and more scientific ornithologists since his day, but none with his abandon and poetic fervour in the ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... "but they may reach Sheffield if they have good luck, and that is as fit a place for them. I am not so bad a woodsman as to show the dog where the deer lies, if I have no ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... with a big woodsman, beat him down and turned as the shot rang out. The Governor was standing apart, oddly and strangely alone it seemed to Archie, and he was an eternity falling. He raised himself slightly, carrying his rifle high above his head, and his face was uplifted ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... he said, "I want you to know one of our new men, young Mr. Orde. You've worked for his father. This is Jim Tally, and he's one of the best rivermen, the best woodsman, the best boss of men old Michigan ever turned out. He walked logs before ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... and Wild Water, with the clever hand and eye of the woodsman, split the egg cleanly in half. The appearance of the egg's interior was anything but satisfactory. Smoke felt a premonitory chill. Shorty was more valiant. He held one of the halves ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... bull's pride and temper somewhat cooled. He waited, moreover, for the day to come—along towards midwinter—when those titanic antlers should loosen at their roots, and fall off at the touch of the first light branch that might brush against them. This, the wise old woodsman knew, would be the hour of the King's least arrogance. Then, too, the northern snows would be lying deep and soft and encumbering, over all the upland slopes whereon the ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... passed through the milk yard, climbed the hill, hastened across the pasture, dotted with the feeding cows, and soon were lost to sight in the woods that fringed the line of settlement on both sides of the valley, and farther on widened into the great forest that was traversed only by the woodsman and ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... small towns and villages. The weathercock on the spire and the barometer on the back piazza are studied as they are not studied by dwellers in cities. A habit of keen observation of trivial matters becomes second nature in rural places. The provincial eye grows as sharp as the woodsman's. Thus it happened that somebody passing casually through Nutter's Lane that morning noticed—noticed it as a thing of course, since it was so—that no smoke was coming out of Dutton's chimney. The observer presently mentioned the fact at the Brick Market up town, and some of the bystanders ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... I'm only a greenhorn at this sort of thing," laughed the busy worker, patting a telltale footprint until it was merged with the surrounding soil; "I'd be reckoned a bungler by any experienced woodsman, you know. But in this case it's an easy job to pull the wool over the eyes of ...
— In Camp on the Big Sunflower • Lawrence J. Leslie
... hard that first winter and spring, and his physical condition showed that I had no need to fear for his health. And when the autumn came I decided to bring him face to face with nature when she is most difficult. I was a good woodsman, having been born and bred in the northern part of the state, and until I went to the University had spent a part of each year in the wilderness. We left Horsham Manor one October day, traveling light, and made for the woods. We were warmly clad, but packed no ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... while the woodsman plied his knife with rough but perfect skill. The thick fur rolled under his hands. The snick, snick of his knife alternated with the sound of tearing as he pulled the pelt from the under-flesh. Aim-sa watched, interested, then, as Nick made no further remark, she went ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... rubber dunnage sack out of the canoe. Suddenly he stopped, his eyes staring at the smooth white floor of sand. A bear had been there before him, and quite recently. Weyman had killed fresh meat the day before, but the instinct of the naturalist and the woodsman kept him from singing or whistling, two things which he was very much inclined to do on this particular day. He had no suspicion that a bear which he was destined never to see had become the greatest factor in his life. He was philosopher enough to appreciate the value and importance of ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... game may be taken by tactics of moderate cunning, larger and more wary animals must be hunted by artful measures. Deer, still abundant in our land, and properly safeguarded by game laws, test the woodsman's skill to the utmost. To learn the art of finding deer, or successful approach and ultimate capture, one must study life in the open. Let him read the work of Van Dyke on still-hunting [1] [Footnote 1: The Still-hunter, by Van ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... either were the hostile Indians. The settlers were filled with terror of these stealthy foes. At home and abroad they kept their guns ready for instant use both night and day. Many a hard battle was fought between the Indian and the pioneer. Many an unguarded woodsman was shot down without warning while busy about his necessary work. Among these was Abraham Lincoln. The story of his death is related by Mr. I.N. Arnold. "Thomas Lincoln was with his father in the field when the savages suddenly ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... go-cart; a title which the proprietor does not always esteem significant of its manifold virtues and accommodations. With a capacious stomach, it is wisely estimated for all possible purposes; and when opened with a mysterious but highly becoming solemnity, before the gaping and wondering woodsman, how "awful fine" do the contents appear to Miss Nancy and the little whiteheads about her. How grand are its treasures, of tape and toys, cottons and calicoes, yarn and buttons, spotted silks and hose—knives and ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... and ready to go to sleep, Max fixed their fire after the manner of a woodsman, so that it would burn for hours, yet never threaten to get away into the woods, should ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie
... sufficiently convenient fire-place, and a storehouse, at hand; all placed near the spring, and beneath the shade of a magnificent elm. In the storehouse he kept his barrel of flour, his barrel of salt, a stock of smoked or dried meat, and that which the woodsman, if accustomed in early life to the settlements, prizes most highly, a half-barrel of pickled pork. The bark canoe had sufficed to transport all these stores, merely ballasting handsomely that ticklish craft; and its owner relied ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... woodsman's shaft, master!" quoth Roger, turning the missile over in his hand ere he gave it to Beltane, "no forester ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... the "goings of God in the tree-tops." The charcoal-burner fronts an oak for finding out how many cords of wood are in it, as the Goths of old fronted peerless temples for estimating how many huts they could quarry from the stately pile.[1] But an artist curses the woodsman for making the tree food for ax and saw. It has become to him as sacred as the cathedral within which he bares his head. It is a temple where birds praise God. It is a harp with endless music for the summer winds. It fills his eye with beauty and ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the house, we saw the whole garrison assembled before the door. It consisted of a dozen dwarfish, spindle-shanked Mexican soldiers, none of them so big or half so strong as American boys of fifteen, and whom I would have backed a single Kentucky woodsman, armed with a riding-whip, to have driven to the four winds of heaven. These heroes all sported tremendous beards, whiskers, and mustaches, and had a habit of knitting their brows, in the endeavour, as we supposed, to look fierce and formidable. They were crowding round ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... in Lafayette county, Missouri, lived Mr. Duncan, a sturdy woodsman, who emigrated thither with his father, while the Mississippi valley was still a wilderness, inhabited by wild beasts, or the still more savage Indians. His grandfather was an eastern man; but had bared his brawny arm on many a battle field, and had earned the ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... led a trembling party to the spot, and, sure enough, there was a blackened circle in the bracken and the charred bark and singed leaves of the tree to testify to the truth of his tale. Neither swineherd nor shepherd nor forester had dared to pass the tree from that hour. The woodsman's story was not all exaggeration. He had actually stumbled upon the two villains, Basil and John, trying the kindling properties of the bracken, and he had promptly fallen in a swoon from sheer terror. By the common folk his account was believed ad ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... that grinder of hostile hosts in battle,—mounted on his car, and alone will crush by his mace crowds of superior cars and entire ranks of infantry, seize by his nooses strong as iron, the elephants of the hostile army, and mow down the Dhritarashtra's host, like a sturdy woodsman cutting a forest down with an axe, then will Dhritarashtra's son repent for this war. When he will behold the Dhartarashtra's host consumed like a hamlet full of straw-built huts by fire, or a field of ripe corn by lightning,—indeed when he will behold his vast army scattered, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... a willow wand about six feet in length, perfectly straight, and rather thicker than a man's thumb. He began to peel this with great composure, observing at the same time, that to ask a good woodsman to shoot at a target so broad as had hitherto been used, was to put shame upon his skill. "For his own part," he said, "and in the land where he was bred, men would as soon take for their mark King Arthur's ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... unconquerable by men who have not his training. A hardy soldier, accustomed only to war in the open, will become a good cragsman in fewer weeks than it will take him years to learn to be so much as a fair woodsman; for it is beyond all comparison more difficult to attain proficiency in woodcraft than ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... sitting on the green at the cross-roads, with their paddles and axes and bundles beside them. I knew at a glance that they were ready and all right: Sam Dam, an old experienced, seasoned guide, and Harry, a good-looking young woodsman who had worked in lumber camps and on "the drive," but had never been "guiding" before. He was none the worse for that, for he belonged to the type of Maine man who has the faculty of ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... not. I know you, what you are—born woodsman. No, I trust you to care for yourself in any wild country, my son, and to come back. And then—to go back again into the forest. When will it be, my son? Tomorrow? In two days, or four, or six? Sometime you will go to the wilderness again. It draws ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... human, an' I tell you when you hear a man brag that he never was lost, I know he never was far from his mother's apron string. Every one is bound to get lost, but the real woodsman gets out all ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... made, leading up from the river tilt and along the creek which flowed from the first lake, was plainly marked; and they proceeded with the long, swinging stride characteristic of the woodsman, rapidly and without a halt, to the point where the trail entered the lake. Here a wide circuit around the lake shore was necessary, and it was nearly noon when they fell again into the trail at the farther end and ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... comprehension; real clearness can be attained only by knowing the witness's habits of thought in regard to all the circumstances of the case. I remember vividly a case of jealous murder in which the most important witness was the victim's brother, an honest, simple, woodsman, brought up in the wilderness, and in every sense far- removed from idiocy. His testimony was brief, decided and intelligent. When the motive for the murder, in this case most important, came under discussion, he shrugged his shoulders and ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... say, no sooner did the Siwanois leave his post and go a-roving than I went after him, with infinite precaution; and I flatter myself that I made no more noise on the brookside moss than the moon-cast shadow of a flying cloud. Guy Johnson was no skilful woodsman, but his Indians were; and of them I learned my craft. And scout detail in Morgan's Rifles, too, was a rare school to finish any man and match him with the ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... youths rode a little farther back with Colonel Winchester, the regiment of Colonel Bedford bringing up the rear. Just behind Dick was Sergeant Whitley, mounted upon a powerful bay horse. The sergeant had shown himself such a woodsman and scout, and he was so valuable in these capacities that Colonel Winchester had practically made him an aide, and always ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... General Wolseley took him for chief of his band of voyageurs, who got the boats up the Nile in Kitchener's Khartoum campaign. He's steadier than a clock, and the boys are safer with him than anywhere else without him. My other man, Moise Duprat, is a good cook, a good woodsman, and a good canoeman. They'll have all the camp outfit they need, they'll have the finest time in the world in the mountains, and they'll come through flying—that's all ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Trail • Emerson Hough
... at sundown with a pair of fine turkeys! but Bailey failed to come in. However, as they all knew him to be an experienced woodsman, no one showed much anxiety until darkness had settled over the camp. Then they began to signal, by discharging their rifles; the officers went out in various directions, giving "halloos," and firing at intervals, but there came no sound of ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... Tom," the reckless woodsman called out from within the building—"here's your tenement, safe and sound; ay, and as empty as a nut that has passed half an hour in the paws of a squirrel! The Delaware brags of being able to see silence; let him come here, and he may feel ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... ripening; near them are stacked the tender young trees, ready for spacing, and the billets of wood piled up and half covered with thistle and burdock leaves; and a little farther away, half hidden by tall weeds, teeming with insects, rises the peaked top of the woodsman's hut. Here one walks beside deep, grassy trenches, which appear to continue without end, along the forest level; farther, the wild mint and the centaurea perfume the shady nooks, the oaks and lime-trees ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... more curious or startling to the reader than to the writer when he first discovered them. They are, almost entirely, the records of personal observation in the woods and fields. Occasionally, when I know my hunter or woodsman well, I have taken his testimony, but never without weighing it carefully, and proving it whenever possible by watching the animal in question for days or weeks till I found for myself that it ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... complex. Nekhludoff readily and joyfully recalled that time and his acquaintance with Bogodukhovskaia. It was on the eve of Shrovetide, in the wilds about sixty versts from the railroad. The hunt was successful; two bears were bagged, and they were dining before their journey home, when the woodsman, in whose hut they were stopping, came to tell them that the deacon's daughter had come and ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... "Some woodsman, you are!" snorted Phil in purposely exaggerated disgust. "When you skulked through the brush the limbs could be heard popping for a mile. How many times ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... underbrush when the smoke was densest, or take advantage of its momentary lifting, and without uncertainty, mistake, or hesitation glide from tree to tree in one undeviating course, was possible only to an experienced woodsman. To keep his reason and insight so clear as to be able in the midst of this bewildering confusion to shape that course so as to intersect the wild and unknown tract of an inexperienced, frightened wanderer belonged to Low, and to Low alone. ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... liberty of quoting Secretary Lane's inspiring words given at the opening of the Exposition - a fine retrospect that we must not lose sight of when we look upon the determined woodsman of the ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... a woodsman. He knows nothing at all about woodcraft, a necessary accomplishment in one who is going to pilot a party of girls across such mountain territory as ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders Among the Kentucky Mountaineers • Jessie Graham Flower
... is fittingly named, for it is a denizen of pine woods only; most common in the long stretches of pine forests at the south and in New York and New England, and correspondingly uncommon wherever the woodsman's axe has laid the pine trees low throughout its range. Its "simple, sweet, and drowsy song," writes Mr. Parkhurst, is always associated "with the smell of pines on a sultry day." It recalls that of the junco and the social sparrow ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... easily see the marks. Some one had been crouching there in the bushes, and spying on the camp. That he could not be an honest woodsman it was easy to guess, for as such he would have stalked straight into camp, sure of the warm welcome that is always extended to a stranger who ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... at a camper's fire tells what kind of a woodsman he is. It is quite impossible to prepare a good meal over a heap of smoking chunks, a fierce blaze, or a great bed of coals that will warp iron ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... visit save Some idle lover of sylvan haunts Who trod, perchance, this hallowed spot, And cast a pensive eye upon This lovely glade, thy sole abode (Full lost in these continuous woods), And brooding o'er thy lowly lot, Oft thus did muse: "This cabin lone Here stands to tell the tale of him, Back-woodsman brave, who having scaled The mystic mountains ne'er returned To them, though loved yet left behind; But here he chose his last abode, These gloomy woods whose blackness stands Up hard against horizon's slope; Grim, spectral, dreaded, ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones
... poplar logs, hewed and dovetailed at the corners with the skill of the Ontario woodsman. It was about twelve by sixteen feet in size, with collar-beams eight feet from the floor. The roof was of two thicknesses of elm boards, with tar-paper between. The floor was of poplar boards. The door was in the east side, near the south-east corner; the stove stood about the ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... drawing-knife, united firmly together with wooden pins, hung upon wooden hinges, and fastened with a wooden latch. Not a nail nor any particle of metal enters into the composition of the building—all is wood from top to bottom, all is done by the woodsman without the aid of any mechanic. These primitive dwellings are by no means so wretched as their name and rude workmanship would seem to imply. They still frequently constitute the dwelling of the farmers in new settlements; they are often roomy, tight, and comfortable. If one ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... forest, as the sun peeped over the tree-tops far away down river. The party soon after divided, I keeping with a section which was led by Bento, the Ega carpenter, a capital woodsman. After a short walk we struck the banks of a beautiful little lake, having grassy margins and clear dark water, on the surface of which floated thick beds of water-lilies. We then crossed a muddy creek or watercourse that entered the lake, and then found ourselves ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... retreat by his cowardice; while Sing Sing, the runaway cook, who knew that he had forfeited his wages at Gangoil, was forced to turn over in his heathenish mind the ill effects of joining the losing side. "You big fool, Bos," he said more than once to his friend the woodsman, who had lured him away from the comforts of Gangoil. "I'll punch your head, John, if you don't hold your row," Boscobel would reply. But Sing Sing went on with his reproaches, and, before they had reached Boolabong, Boscobel had punched ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... natural and proper to follow the camp as it grows until it develops into a somewhat pretentious log house, but this book must not be considered as competing in any manner with professional architects. The buildings here suggested require a woodsman more than an architect; the work demands more the skill of the axeman than that of the carpenter and joiner. The log houses are supposed to be buildings which any real outdoor man should be able to erect by himself and for himself. Many of the buildings have ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... length arrested by recently-made marks in the snow. He was woodsman enough to understand that some one was travelling that way, evidently under considerable difficulty. Several times he stopped to examine where the wayfarer had floundered about in the snow in desperate efforts to regain the trail. He wondered who it could be, so he hurried ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... can awaken from the submerged sleep of relapse as quickly and keenly as a woodsman throws ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... settled back with the shadow of a smile on his lips, and bent on the woodsman that swift inspection which discomforted so many. It embarrassed Baudette not at all. He was rather small and of slight build, but he was constructed in the manner of a bundle of steel wire that enfolds a heart of inflexible determination. On casual inspection he did ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... shape of slight sketches in illustration of the matter. Scaliger's notes converted a classic into a new and precious edition of one example. Casaubon's, on the other hand, were mere scratches and mnemonic lines and blurs, with which he marked his passage through a book, as roughly as the American woodsman "blazes" his way through a forest. "None could read the comment save himself," and the text was disfigured. We may be sure that Montaigne's marginalia are of a very different value. As he walked up and down in his orchard, or in his library, beneath the rafters engraved with epicurean maxims, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... be just as Steve had prophesied. They soon discovered a bunch of birches growing from the stump of a larger tree that had long ago fallen under the ax of a woodsman. ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... the way you go about it: First, you take a large and healthy woodsman with an axe, who cuts down a tree—a substantial tree. Because this is the frame of your bed. But on no account do this yourself. One of the joys of a bough bed is seeing somebody ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... valuable, as it can be employed for many different purposes; he is an excellent dog for the woods, for the woodsman and hunter who uses only one dog for different kinds of game. The intelligence of the German pointer is very great, but he does not develop as rapidly as the English dog, which has been raised for generations for one ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... be because the wind has been getting stronger all the time we've been gone; and even now you notice the trees begin to thin out. Tell me, isn't that our sandy stretch right ahead there, and am I a good woodsman or not?" ...
— The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire - or, Scouting with the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... individual betokened the hunter, but at the same time one who followed it for pleasure, rather than as a means of support. This was evident from his dress, which although somewhat characteristic of the time, was much superior to that generally worn by the woodsman. He had on a woolen hunting frock, of fine texture, of a dark green color, that came a few inches below the hips. Beneath this, and fitting closely around his shoulders, neck and breast, was a scarlet jacket, ornamented with two rows of round, white ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... whom have been dead these twenty years—used to lay their traps for the monsters of the forest, and trudged back from the timber before breakfast, in winter, bringing home redbirds, and rabbits and squirrels. Sometimes a particularly doughty woodsman would report that there were wildcat tracks about his trap; but none of us ever saw a wildcat, though Enoch Haver, whose father's father had heard a wildcat scream, and had taught the boy its cry, would hide in a hollow ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... the woodsman lived on animals and the plainsman on vegetables mostly. So the woodsman traded skin clothing with the plainsman for grains and herbs, and this ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... As a woodsman, Alexander acknowledged few peers but this was to her, unfamiliar country. She was moreover pitting her skill against one who was her equal if not her superior, and who knew every trail and by-way hereabouts. ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... wonderful forests cast upon one a potent spell. To have seen them once thus in gala dress is to yearn thereafter to see them again and still again and grieve always in the knowledge of their inevitable death at the hands of the woodsman. ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... popular sensation. Johnny sends over a "team," evidently in his judgment a whole one, to "shoot the American continent." His next deputation ought to be sent, after vanquishing the "blarsted" Gothamites, to the recesses of the Alleghany, and pitted there against the woodsman with his ancient weapon carrying a round ball of seventy-five to the pound, five feet long and decorated with tin sights, double trigger and mayhap flint-lock. The adventurers would beat in the long run, but they would go home not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... positive that he had learned a host of valuable things calculated to make him take higher rank as a woodsman, and a true scout. And no doubt in the annals of the Hickory Ridge Boy Scouts that little hike to Munsey's mill would always be read and re-read with the keenest interest, and take rank with the greatest of ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... fire streaking across the black bowl of Astra's night sky. A light so vivid, so alien, that it brought him to his feet with a chill prickle of apprehension along his spine. In all his years as a scout and woodsman, in all the stories of his fellows and his elders at Homeport—he had never seen, never heard of the like ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... ridge, thinking of many things that the woodsman's appearance had stirred up in her. She knew nothing of her early life, and had never felt any curiosity about it: only a sullen reluctance to explore the corner of her memory where certain blurred ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... purchased a horse, constructed a pack saddle with my own hands, and made every preparation that was deemed necessary. On the 6th of November I set out. Mr. Ficklin, my good host, accompanied me to the outskirts of the settlement. He was an old woodsman, and gave me proper directions about hobbling my horse at night, and imparted other precautions necessary to secure a man's life against wild animals and savages. My St. Louis auxiliary stood stoutly by ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft |
