Woodsmen of the West

by Martin Allerdale Grainger

My idealistic schemes and plans of life, like those of other people, are apt to be upset by the small motives – of pique, ill-temper, nervous distaste – with which my every day decisions are often swayed. But as long as I can stand the disagreeable other qualities that he may possess, I like to be in contact with a great man. I like to work for a man who has real thoroughness.

  Of course, the main reasons why I worked for Carter were my desire for some money and my pleasure in that mode of life. But, like other men, I should soon have left his camp in anger had I not had a feeling for Carter’s superb quality. I liked to work for Carter. I liked his romantic battling with work, with nature, with the hostility of his fellow-men. I liked his ascetic lack of compromise, and he and I worked many days together in that camp of his and did not quarrel.

  One Sunday morning, as we came out from eating breakfast, we saw, with joyful eyes, a steamboat making for the usual anchorage – about a mile down-coast. It was the Sonora, Carter’s steamboat, returning from Port Browning with the repaired machinery and a new gang of men. We watched a rowboat filled with men that left the steamboat and came unsteadily towards our camp. The boat reached the seaward side of our raft, and men began to disembark.

  I saw how things were, and went across the logs to give some help. “Pleased ’make y’ ’quaince, ol’ boy,” said the first man I hoisted by the arm; “avadrink!” and poked an uncorked bottle full at my face. Whisky spilled down my shirt. His hand was shaky. They were all drunk in that boat – all faint from drink – their movements sluggish and uncertain. But none were paralysed, and all contrived to walk, leaning upon my arm, into the haven of the bunk-house. Pong Sam, the new Chinese cook, was sober. He fell to work at once and lit the cook-house stove.

  Carter was impatient to get the heavy pieces of machinery ashore and take them up the hill to where the donkey-engine stood, and get the mechanism into working order. But he saw at once that the new crew could do no work that day. He left me to saw the broken ends of logs, and took his rifle and went up on the hill to hunt for meat. So I sawed all day, and men, revived by little sleep, came staggering, from hour to hour, from the bunk-house to offer me a drink and “get acquainted.” The bottles were all empty by the afternoon. In the evening, as the whisky left them, men began to “feel bad.” Then I returned their hospitality by serving out some bromide. That bunk-house was a depressing sight.

  On the morrow several men turned out from their uneasy beds when Pong Sam banged the gong for breakfast. But they were sick, their heads were sore, and when Carter led the way up the hill to work none of the new arrivals followed. All that morning Carter worked in a fury; but he realised how foolish it would be to try to make men go to work. New men are not expected to reach a camp sober…. At dinner-time Carter and I and the old engineer that Bill Allen had hired to work as donkey-man were alone at table. The boys had already gone back to their beds after a sick pretence of eating.

  “Guess I’ll have to lay off this afternoon,” quavered the old man; “my nerves don’t feel good enough for work yet.” It was an apology.

  Carter was doing business on his plate, bolting his grub in savage haste. He looked up as the donkey man spoke; suave and good-humoured, with a gleam in his black Irish eye that made me remember a purring panther at the Zoo that once, in boyhood, I had tried to stroke through the bar. His voice was sweetly sympathetic.

  “All right, boy – all right,” he said affectionately. The old man was soothed.

  Carter’s hand came down swift upon the table and made the dishes jump. His voice crashed.

  “But JOHNNY-ON-THE-SPOT in the mornin’,” he rasped, “or, MIND, you take the steamboat down the Inlet. I’ll have no blank-blank fooling in MY camp. WORK OR GET TO BLAZES OUTER HERE!” He bawled.

  I wondered at the unnecessary brutality. The poor old cockney engine-oiler quivered like a frightened rabbit. But after dinner I went into the bunk-house and found the old fellow relating his interview to the listening crowd.

  “You don’t want to worry, dad,” said I, to comfort him; “that’s only Carter’s way of talking. He don’t mean no harm.” But the story had made its impression on the boys.

  “Gee whiz!” said one, “this is Swift Camp. Hired and fired in five minutes! …” And then understanding of Carter’s guile dawned on me. He had simply made use of the donkey-man’s meekness of spirit. He had dropped upon him hard, knowing that the old man would repeat the interview, and so contrived to tell the other boys that they were really required to work next morning. Carter knew that if he had spoken sternly direct to the hook-tender, that chieftain would have flared up, rolled his blankets – and quit!

  That afternoon, as I worked near the camp, I had another taste of Carter’s diplomacy. I heard him go to the bunk-house and ask for the donkey-man.

  “Come out,” said he in a pleasant voice; “I want to speak to you. You’ll find me in the blacksmith shop.”

  A few minutes later I heard a peremptory voice saying: “Here! take a drink of this. Hi!! that’s enough. Take that sledgehammer. Are you ready? Now strike! Hard! HARDER!! … Get your breath now. Whad’yer mean by coming to a man’s camp drunk? … Strike! strike! Let her have it. Go on! strike! … Take another drink. That’s the last you’ll get. Now strike! GO TO IT!! … You oughter be ashamed of yourself coming here in that filthy state. Strike! … Sweat that blank-blank whisky out of you….” There was a sound of uncertain blows as the poor old fellow sweated himself back to health and work, helping Carter to forge some logging hooks. I should have liked to have seen some one try to bulldoze my friend Fitzsimmons, who slept in the next bunk to me, in that manner. But it is a fact that the boys all went to work next morning.

  Fitz was talking to me that evening as we lay, heads near together, in adjoining bunks. His voice was a quiet murmur.

  “There’s worse places than a logging-camp,” he said. “After a fellow’s got over the first two days and can begin to eat life looks good enough to him. Of course, them first two days is bad.

  “I don’t hold with all this taking of dopes. Some fellows are holy terrors the way they will mop up pain-killer when they’re trying to brace up as the booze leaves them. Ginger, too, and scent, and cayenne pepper, and all them things. I’ve seen Siwashes get drunk on essence of ginger.

  “Did you hear about that fellow last week at Charlie Hunt’s camp? Charlie hired him at Hanson along with some other fellows, and brought them all to camp Sunday morning. The same night the fellow began to feel terrible bad. There wasn’t no whisky in camp, nor no pain-killer, nor nothing. The fellow went and hunted in the cook-house to see if he could steal some essence of vanilla from the Chinaman, and he found a strange-looking bottle. Smelt all right to him anyhow, and he drank her off, not knowing that the Chink had a sore arm and this was his carbolic liniment. Stiffened him out in good shape. Yes! sir! corpsed him good.

  “No, sirree, when I have quit boozing I just take Nature’s remedy. I go and lie on the beach and take a good drink of sea-water, and make myself good and sick, and stand it. It’s healthier for a man that way, and he will be fit for work before fellows what uses dopes has got their nerves to stop shaking.

  “I’ve no use for a camp where there’s whisky brought in. ’Course a bottle once in a while don’t do no harm. But lots of fellows are stopping in camp to keep away from the booze. Besides, when a man’s working he wants to work. Work and booze don’t mix.

  “Ellerson’s is the best built camp I know of: spring beds in the bunk-house, and good buildings, and a white cook that knows his business. Fine pies he makes, and the finest kinds of cakes, and there’s always good syrup, and none of your cheap dried fruit, but good canned pie-fruit.

  “In some of these small camps the grub’s not much account. When a fellow’s paying five dollars a week he expects to get white man’s food. I know the bosses say that it costs them more than five a week to feed a man, taking into account the wages of the cook and flunky. But that’s no reason for poor grub. I’ve been in
camps where there was no eggs ’cept once in a while, and sometimes no fresh beef, and no syrup. I don’t work for no blank-blank cheap outfits. I said that once to Billy Sayers when I quit him. Gee! but he was mad!

  “Camp is all right if you get a good set of boys.

  “Summer-time, of course, when there’s work everywhere, a fellow can keep shifting every week or two until he finds a camp where the company suits him. But when winter is coming on, and so many camps is shut down, a fellow wants to get into any sort of camp he can and stay there; unless he likes to lie around the hotels dead-broke. Not that he’ll make any money, not to amount to anything, in winter anyway. Laying off so much for the rain will only leave fifteen or sixteen days’ work in the month – I’ve known it as low as twelve. Wages will be low too, and after paying for board a man will only be a few dollars a month ahead. It’s kind of tiresome sometimes in winter; lying on your bunk reading magazines or them dime novels by the Duchess and Mary Corelli; or playing black-jack or seven-up; with the bunk-house all steaming with clothes hung up to dry, and a steady drizzle-and-drip outside. Young fellows think they can work out in all weathers and never hurt themselves or get the rheumatiz. But I know better, and I won’t work out in the rain, not for any blank-blank logging boss that walks.”

  Fitz’s recent history showed me once more how little real chance the logger has to forget, and escape from, whisky. Fitz is a good fellow and not at all a “drinking man.” But it happened that at the last camp where he had been working a hook, a sharp, heavy logging “dog,” had lost grip of a moving log under the strain of hauling, and flicking round, had ripped a great wound down Fitz’s leg. He had been carried down to camp, put in a rowboat, and taken to Port Browning, to the hotel. There he lay sleepless day after day in an upstairs bedroom, listening to the ceaseless din from the bar-room underneath. Sympathetic men, more or less drunk, would pay him visits, and bring up glasses and bottles, and press him to drink with them in kindly fashion. So Fitz began to drink, and got drunk, and stayed drunk – his wound undressed and festering. Then Bill came round to hire men, and hired Fitz, knowing nothing of the wounded leg.

  Fitz told me, as I washed and dressed his leg with antiseptic at the camp, “Things are looking awful queer down the coast, feller. I tell you I was glad to get this job from Bill, even to work with Carter. You mark my words – bad times are coming.”

  THE CAPTAIN OF THE SONORA

  I was just dropping off to sleep, for I had turned in early, when Bill Allen pushed open the bunk-house door. He woke me up.

  “Say, Mart!” he said, “there’s a sackful of fittings for the donkey-engine been left down at Port Browning by mistake the last trip. Carter wants you to come along with me and fetch that up right away. I’ll go aboard and get steam up. See if you can get a few loads of wood aboard.”

  I put on my boots, and lit a lantern, and went out on the raft to where, upon the seaward side, the steamer wood was piled. The night was very dark; rain soon soaked me to the skin. For the autumn rains had begun, and up in that northern logging country it rains steadily through the hours, night and day, day in day out, week after week. At least, that is the impression that a man gets when working in the open, though doubtless there are rainless mornings. But Vancouver in the south has a rainfall of seventy inches; and Point Grey, somewhere up north, has a fall two hundred inches greater; so the fall on Coola Inlet must reach a high figure, half-way, perhaps, between these numbers. In such a country one became so used to rain that one became almost forgetful of it. Dry clothes became a rare luxury. One’s feet, of course, were always wet. To take one’s boots off and empty out the water became an unconscious habit….

  You know the sort of thing one meets with on the prairies, on big farms where every one is occupied with wheat or cattle, with large labours. There is no time, people say, to grow vegetables or to milk cows, or to do a thousand other minor things. Condensed milk is good enough.

  In logging-camps like Carter’s you will find the same spirit. There is no time to mend this or paint that, or to put things away or keep them ship-shape. Some persons may think it poor policy to set men to work with damaged tools; but Carter had his own stubborn view of the matter. “I know the boats want caulking, and the houses want new roofs, and half the tools in the blacksmith shop are broke,” he said. “I could put the whole gang on to fixing things for a solid month and still have a lot left undone. But I ain’t going to. I find if things are just left alone men will do the work with them one way or another. They only spoil good tools and good things, and I don’t believe they lose so much time, either, from not having things fixed good.” That was why Carter’s rowboats leaked like sieves, and why the bunk-house was left in its half-collapsed condition, and why the Sonora looked dingy as a London slum, and why our clothes hung on us ragged. Every minor thing in Carter’s neighbourhood had to give way to the essential – getting work done that would lead directly to “getting out logs.”

  So that night as I began to load wood for the Sonora I had to use a damaged rowboat, a boat that oozed water at every seam, and that leaked in little jets at every badly mended hole. In that sinking boat my journeys to the Sonora, a mile down-coast, were slow and laborious. I would row a few strokes with the work-eaten, defaced oars, gently – because the half-rotten rowlock cleats had drawn their nails and threatened to come loose; then I would bail furiously with a large bucket, standing boot-deep in the water; and so, rowing and bailing, contrive to make my dark passage to the light that showed on board the Sonora. Then Bill would leave his engine-room repairs and help me throw my load of wood on to the steamer’s deck.

  The falling of the tide stopped these dismal journeys through the black deluge of the midnight rain. Bill and I went down into the engine-room and there dozed, before the furnace doors, warm and steaming in our rain-soaked clothes…. Dawn woke us. We got up steam and waited awhile for the thick rain-fog to lift from off the water’s surface. When the shore and Carter’s camp had come dimly into sight Bill and I heaved up the heavy anchor (after some panting), and Bill gave me a short lecture on the winding course that I must take among the shallows of the tide-flats. For he had decided to run the steamer up to camp, and to throw the remaining wood direct from the raft on to the Sonora. So he went back to his engines, and I entered the little bow-windowed room, the pilot-house, in which stood the shaky steering wheel – and was a steamboat captain for the first time in my life.

  I suppose I was a trifle worried – full of anxiety about my course; for I have but a confused memory of that next half-hour. The current of the ebb, I remember, kept sweeping me from the path I meant to take; and then the steamer’s stern (that I could watch through a small window behind my head) kept swinging irresponsibly and forced me, nilly-willy, to go in mortifying curves. The turning of the wheel, the winding up of slack yards of steering chain, would seem to produce no effect upon the boat’s direction. Then of a sudden she would yaw and point elsewhere; and I would spin a frantic wheel the other way – and so repeat my blunder. Behind all this immediate occupation of my faculties and strain of my attention there were nightmare thoughts busy at argument in some back region of my brain. I saw that I should have to come away from the camp stern foremost. How in the name of common-sense did you steer a steamer backwards – how turn your wheel? It seemed obvious enough afterwards, and you may think that, with a mathematical degree, I should have understood the trifling matter at a glance. But I had never given the matter a thought until that sudden moment of confusion, and as I tried to convince myself of the obvious truth – the Sonora went bump upon the sands! The tide had failed us.

  Now it appeared that the way the Sonora steamed backwards depended in a very slight degree upon the use I made of the steering gear; the rudder was too small, too little rigid, I supposed. So we bumped our way about those shallows, made desperate efforts to escape, pushed and strained our hardest with long poles – and by bare luck found our happy way again into deep water. I ceased to jangle signals
on the engine-room bell. I wiped my face. My first attempt at steering a steamer had finished without actual disaster. Carter will some day notice, and wonder at, a fresh-looking dent in the Sonora’s bows. I did that on a corner of the raft.

  So we fell again to loading wood with our old row-boat tender, and got our full supply. Wood was stacked beside the boiler, from floor to roof, in the engine-room; wood was piled on deck all round the house – forward around the pilot-house, aft around the towing posts. The Sonora, as one might say, bristled with cord-wood. I jangled the bell and took the wheel, and off we went down the Inlet into the fog….

  I had a chart of the Inlet beside me in the pilot-house, and there was a compass swinging in a small box by the wheel. But the chart was in several pieces, frayed and effaced and coffee-stained; and the compass needle, as I soon found, had ceased to point towards the north. Also my ideas about the conduct of a steamer in a fog were second-hand – conventional.

  So Bill left his noisy engines and came up to me after awhile.

  “You don’t need to go so slow,” he said; “keep a hundred feet off the beach when you see it, and let her go full-tilt. Make your miserable soul happy. What does the fog matter? There ain’t no rocks.”

  It was a new point of view for me – as far as steamboat steering went. But this same fresh lack of self-distrust, this simple-minded willingness to face every problem in life, every emergency, and to deal with it directly by the light of Nature, is a thing that one is always meeting in the West. Men trust their own judgment; their minds are not honeycombed with doubts of it.

  We must have made wondrous zigzags from side to side of Coola Inlet. Dark mountain masses would loom up from time to time, at times to port, at times to starboard. Occasionally I would find myself steering end-on against some cliff. Or gaps would come now and then in the upper fog and give me direction – a glacier or one of the old discoverer’s “high stupendous mountains” showing. But the hours passed and our progress down the Inlet was tedious and slow. So Bill asked me to steer round Kwalate Point and to run in to Adams’ place. There was no anchorage in that little bay, should either of the winter winds come up, but in the quiet weather we could tie the Sonora to a log that Adams had anchored out, and wait for the fog to thin.