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She pants and thirsts for living green, she stays not for the snags,
She’s charged the steep embankments and she’s gained the higher crags;
Her Devil’s dance leads ever up—exultingly she swings
Her wild red arms out toward the heights—she sizzles and she sings;
With dragon-spit she hisses, a maniac in her wrath,
She laughs to scorn the human things that try to block her path.
On yonder crest they’ve made their stand—hark to the timber fall,
Again the winds have veered around—the bosses curse and call
Through driving blasts of pitch-pine heat and pitch-pine smoke and smell,
“She’s turned again—hang to your tools—and damn you—run like Hell!”
It takes a canny general whose eye’s a weathervane,
A mighty canny general with seamed and schemy brain,
To meet the gay manoeuvers and the unconventional ways
That a breeze kicks up at noonday in a crown-fire forest blaze.
