The trail (it was not a road) ran like a graceful furrow over the hills, around little lakes covered deep with snow, through tamarack swamps where the tracks of wild things thickened, over ridges of tall pine clear of brush, and curving everywhere amid stumps, where dismantled old shanties marked the site of the older logging camps. Sometimes they met teams going to the store. Sometimes they crossed logging roads--wide, smooth tracks artificially iced, down which mountainous loads of logs were slipping, creaking and groaning. Sometimes they heard the dry click-clock of the woodsmen's axes, or the crash of falling trees deep in the wood. When they reached the first camp, Ridgeley pulled up the steaming horses at the door and shouted, "Hello, the camp!" A tall old man with a long red beard came out. He held one bare red arm above his eyes. He wore an apron. "Hello, Sandy!" "Hello, Mr. Ridgeley!" "Ready for company?" "Am always ready for company," he said, with a Scotch accent. "Well, we're coming in to get warm." "Vera wal." As they went in, under the roofed shed between the cook's shanty and the other and larger shanty, Mrs. Field sniffed. Sandy led them past a large pyramid composed of the scraps of beef bones, eggshells, cans, and tea grounds left over during the winter. In the shed itself hung great slabs of beef. It was as untidy and suggestive of slaughter as the nest of a brood of eagles. Sandy was beginning dinner on a huge stove spotted with rust and pancake batter. All about was the litter of his preparation. Beef--beef on all sides, and tin dishes and bare benches and huge iron cooking pans. Mrs. Field was glad to get out into the sunlight again. "What a horrible place! Are they all like that?" "No, my camps are not like that--or, I should say, _our_ camps," Ridgeley added, with a smile. "Not a gay place at all," said Field, in exaggerated reserve. But Mrs. Field found her own camps not much better. True, the refuse was not raised in pyramidal shape before the front door, and the beef was a little more orderly, but the low log huts, the dim cold light, the dingy walls and floors, the lack of any womanly or home touch, the tin dishes, the wholesale cooking, all struck upon her with terrible force. "Do human beings live here?" she asked Ridgeley, when he opened the door of the main shanty of No. 6. "Forty creatures of the men kind sleep and house here," he replied. "To which the socks and things give evidence," said Field promptly, pointing toward the huge stove which sat like a rusty-red cheese in the center of the room. Above it hung scores of ragged gray and red socks and Mackinac boots and jackets which had been washed by the men themselves.