Woodsmen of the West

by Martin Allerdale Grainger

  This we did. We found the log and lay anchored to it, near the mouth of the creek that meets the sea just below Adams’ house. Then we went ashore to get some steamer wood that Bill had once stacked there on the beach. As we made the last laborious trip in the leaky, half-swamped rowboat the fog began to darken at the approach of night. It was too foggy yet, we thought, for us to venture forth. We looked out on the incessant rain. Adams’ camp showed cheerless, near-by in the mist. Adams and his partners, in two years’ work, had taken all the easy-got good timber near the shores. The men had gone away for good; their boom was gone, their house had been dismantled. And now without the friendly smoke and evening lamplight of their tenancy, the house gave a last touch of desolation to the bare, ugly scene – to the litter of chips and rotten logs, broken benches and clothes, and rusty cans, to the stumps and fallen timbers of the clearing….

  Bill called me to consider more serious things. There was no oil aboard for the lanterns, it appeared – for the lanterns in the engine-room. As hunger took us we found there was no food aboard – nothing for us to eat except the small remnant of a dried-fruit pie and the shakings of a sack of flour. The pie we ate; the flour we made into a bannock and baked beneath the furnace bars. Bill boiled some tea – leaves and cold water set to boil together, to his taste. Then he turned in to sleep, and left me to keep a sort of watch. He thought the fog might lighten after midnight and let us journey on.

  So by the poor light of a piece of candle I sat writing letters in that warm engine-room. My clothes, of course, were soaked with rain and sea-water. The very paper on which I wrote was all crinkled with smudged drippings from my hair; the pencil marks ran smudges across each line of writing. The engine-room roof leaked strings of water to the floor; drops hissed into steam upon the boiler’s surface. Outside with equal hiss the rain fell down into the sea. And every twenty minutes, in the pitch darkness, I clambered over tangled piles of wood on deck, and made a circuit of the ship. For the tide was ebbing strong; and you understand – the natural uneasiness of a steamboat captain on that the first day of his first appearance upon any stage.

  I remember that I was wishing that I had had some oilskins; though they are uncomfortable and hamper a man at any work. Just about that moment the accident occurred.

  THE GROUNDING OF THE SONORA

  From the bar-room of Port Browning Hotel Bill and I floated wearily into the restaurant – and began to eat. Two days – and we had had almost no food; two nights – and we had had almost no sleep; long-drawn hours of vanity-racking anxiety, working nearly all the time and soaked with rain – I tell you we wanted food that night. We ate good.

  Then, if you must know, we had some whisky; and sat awhile in the comfortable warmth and unearthly brilliancy of the bar-room; and then somehow a magic boat wafted us, like the body of King Arthur, over the black water, through the dark night. Goodness knows when or how or why the Sonora crossed our path. I can only tell you that Bill and I woke up on board, next morning, lying in our bunks – boots on and clothes sopping wet. We were hungry still, and we went ashore and had a good breakfast at the hotel.

  After that we found the sack of castings that Carter had sent us to fetch. We loaded also on to the Sonora stores for the camp – cases of eggs, canned milk, canned cream, canned peas; fresh meat and sacks of cabbage and potatoes; butter and kerosene; smoking and chewing tobacco; working gloves, socks, and rifle ammunition. These we piled upon the deck forward, against the pilot-house. Aft we had a weighty load of boom-chains and supplies for the blacksmith’s shop…. Time was our ceaseless enemy, on the Sonora. Yet Bill must needs go ashore to the store, to the hotel, lounging about in conversations. You in your ignorance might have thought him loafing or engaged in social pleasure; but the fact was that he was attending, most severely, to his business. He was doing what the manufacturer does when he pores over the “City Column” and “Market Movements” in the trade journals. He was gleaning ideas. The casual talk of logging men was his newspaper.

  A man in this country does not walk right into a store or a hotel and ask point-blank questions about what he wants to know. I do that sort of thing sometimes, and very disconcerted I become. That is because I am impatient and want to find out things at once; forgetting that very little can be torn out of a man by a direct question. There is no means of gauging the value of isolated statements made in hasty answer after the mental shock your question gives. You must let conversation grow, not tear it up to see the roots. You see, the logger is not an introspective person. He does not take the faintest interest in his own psychology. Unless he has some very definite reason, he does not at any given moment take the remotest interest in yours. He has not the habit of making rapid wrong pictures of your state of mind and of putting himself in your place; a habit that makes civilised intercourse so much quicker and easier. Besides, if you are a logger yourself, a man occupied in struggles with Nature and natural objects, you do not cultivate the power of cross-examination.

  Therefore, to get the latest news about the demand for logs, the trend of prices, or the rate of wages, or the supply of men, Bill just drifts into the hotel or the store, and sits on a box within spitting range of the stove, and chews. Talk will be going on; all sorts of news that has an important bearing on his business will come out, in casual, desultory fashion, from time to time. Bill may guide the conversation a little; he hears what is said; he can watch the men who argue. Afterwards you find that he has gained impressions and drawn conclusions, and you wonder at the shrewdness that can divine so much from so few spoken words.

  During these labours at Port Browning, and afterwards on our return trip to the camp, both Bill and I had a crushed feeling in our self-esteem. We had talked to one another about that accident, and proved to each other that we could not be held to blame for what had occurred, and yet we felt exactly as if we had blundered from incompetence.

  I had been writing a letter, as you remember, by candle-light in the dripping engine-room of the Sonora as the boat lay moored off the mouth of the creek at Adams’ deserted camp. At intervals I made tours of inspection round the boat, inspired by a nervous fear that something might go wrong. And yet there was nothing to see in the darkness, and nothing to hear but the sizzling of the rain upon the sea and the rustling of the tide. The ebb was running, but for some reason our stern pointed to the shore.

  To be anchored in that unknown place in a big ebb tide – a “long run out” – made me uneasy. I took a long pole from off the deck-house roof and prodded into the dark water at the bows. I could not touch the bottom. So then I fumbled my way aft, over the stacked wood, and tried the water with my pole. Heavens! it came as a shock to find there were but seven feet of water under our stern. We had taken ground that morning at the camp, but I had no clear idea of how many feet of water the steamboat drew. “How many feet? Were we aground?” I asked myself in horror.

  I put my head in at the cabin door and spoke to Bill. I spoke in a tone of cautious anxiety, concealing alarm. I did not shout or show excitement, because I was afraid of making a fool of myself about nothing.

  Bill said, “Oh, give her a prod out with a pole,” and, bored with the incident, turned over in his bunk and slept again. I clambered, rather feverishly, amidships, where I could get good purchase for my poling; and finding bottom for my pole, began to push and squirm and push. The push soon told; the Sonora began to move, and my heart beat again. Then the fog lifted slightly for a moment, and, oh horror! I saw that the Sonora was only swinging round. Her stern was stuck!

  My yelp brought Bill out of the cabin in one jump. He tumbled about in the darkness and found a pole. Both of us rushed aft and got a purchase on the ground and gritted our teeth and pushed desperately. Sweat broke out (as the saying is) on our foreheads when we felt it was no use. Realise if you can Bill’s feelings. There was his steamboat – fond and proud of her he was in his secret heart. She represented hard-earned savings; she represented Success. Her money value was part of the littl
e “stake” he had created and preserved amid the disasters of logging life – the little stake that one day, he hoped, would enable him to stop gambling with Nature on these Inlets and buy him peace and safety on a little farm. There was Carter, too, to think of; and Carter bereft of his steamboat was an ominous figure to think of. Carter dearly loved to gall a man who disliked him by taunting them with his own success. His ownership of the Sonora made a favourite taunt.

  And now the Sonora was in great jeopardy. The Inlet everywhere is very deep. It is but a giant canal, dug like a canyon among the mountains, and filled with sea-water to depths that the Admiralty chart ignores. “So many fathoms and no bottom” is the usual sounding given, even near the shores.

  But where creeks and rivers meet the sea small flats have been built out, continuing, under water, the flat lands of the little wooded deltas at the river-mouths. The seaward edges of these flats break off in steep sudden slopes that drop precipitous to the Inlet’s bottom at the angle that you see in high embankments on the railways. “The drop-off” men call these slopes. In such places a boat coming in to anchor will at one moment get no bottom for her sounding line; at the next moment get a moderate depth; at the next will float, in somewhat shallow water, over the river flat. In our case, you understand, the Sonora had stuck by the stern upon the sand. Forward there was deep water. Thus the steamboat lay across the drop-off’s very edge – half of her keel upon the flat, half projecting out over deep water….

  The tide was falling. Would the boat lurch over, forward and sideways, and fill and sink? The furnace was glowing hot beneath the boiler. What would happen in the engine-room if the cold sea should pour in? Would there be explosions? …

  Realise if you please my own feelings. Here on my first command, on the first day of my captaincy, I had got my boat aground. She might tip over and be gone at any moment. Bill’s boat: remorseful thought. Carter’s boat. I should lose my job. My opinion of myself hurt me. Then there was the mortifying picture of the future; my dear self as a conversational figure, “the man what lost Carter’s boat;” and the brand of incompetency. We had no tide tables – when would the tide cease falling? Gee-sus-gee-sus-gee-sus moaned Bill suddenly. He had voiced his despair first: it was (naturally enough) greater than mine.

  Immediately my opinion of myself rose like a lark. I had not given myself away. I felt so superior to the man who had entertained despair; I felt I could show him how to keep cool and competent. The patronising “Don’t get excited” came to my lips; it was with difficulty that I spared him that. I liked myself immensely in my new rôle…. It certainly was a beastly job. We had to be swift, swifter, swift. There were things that had to be done at all costs, right away.

  Bill dived into the engine-room, and burning faggots of wood came circling out and fell hissing into the sea. He was drawing the fires, that furnace and boiler might have a chance to cool before the catastrophe. By the expiring lights of these floating faggots I could see to draw the rowboat alongside and to bail her with a bucket; with swift spasms of movement we piled into her, with an axe and the butt-end of candle, rowed furiously through the darkness to the shore below Adams’ house. The rain sizzled steadily on the sea.

  There are always odds and ends of wood lying in the slashed timber that lies around a house; we wanted post lengths eight or nine feet long and about the thickness you note in light scaffolding. Imagine if it was an easy job to find them! We tripped and flopped and clambered over logs, and ran into things, and felt with our hands in the darkness. Somehow we found poles that would do, and one man held them while the other chopped them to right lengths with the axe – in darkness.

  Then there was the rush back to the Sonora, now tilted over somewhat to starboard. That tilt served our purpose; we could jam posts under her that side and she would rest upon them solid. We could make her safe sideways. As for the danger of her tipping forward, there was no use worrying about that – nothing could be done to avert it.

  Perhaps you think it sounds easy to jam posts under a steamer. It is not. Imagine yourself alongside in a rowboat. You poke a post straight down into the water. The post does not want to go; it wants to float horizontally. There is a struggle before you get the foot of the post solid against the bottom. Then you press the post against the sloping side of the steamer and try to hammer it tight with the flat of an axe. The foot of the post gets clear of the bottom and up it floats; or your boat moves away with the recoil of your blows – and you lose grip of the post and lose your own balance, and the post is lost in the darkness. Later on you get in several posts, good and solid, and the next one you hammer in too tight, and the others, relieved of the strain, fall out and float away…. Oh, it is pleasant work…. And we were doing this sort of thing while a drumming in our ears said, “Quick, quick, quick,” and the tide kept dropping, and the Sonora leaned more and more solidly over to starboard, and the world was all rain and water and darkness.

  The posting was finished at last; we had done our best. We sat in the warmth of the engine-room waiting for events. When would the tide stop falling? Would the Sonora keep from tipping down the “drop-off” till then? We sat in the darkness waiting, with a tummy-ache feeling inside us, deadly depressed. There was nothing to eat and we were tired….

  The tide did not fall as low as we had feared; the steamer remained settled upon her posts, and in the early hours of the morning we too, like men reprieved, rebuilt the fire in the furnace and felt the Sonora begin to float again. We got up steam and put out again into the foggy Inlet, continuing our voyage to Port Browning. Dawn saw us passing Boulder Point; engines labouring at full pressure; Bill trying to make up for precious hours lost.

  THE SPIRIT OF THE THING

  That Carter and Allen outfit pleased my soul. All my days I have been looking for the strenuous, hoping to find and to work for men who should be really intense in their efforts to do things. Giblin used to say in his argument-annihilating way that the people I dreamed of did not exist. But they do. I found several of them in the northern logging country. There was Carter, now; Carter working his uttermost, plugging sternly at his work, day in day out; developing the energy of two active men. Yet his heroic soul would burst with impatience that he could do no more. I amused myself one day composing Carter’s prayer, or rather exhortation to the powers. I will suppress the text. But it was all about the distressing shortness of daylight, the interruption caused to work (even to Carter’s work) by darkness, the waste of time at meals and sleep, and the appalling listlessness of hired men. The exhortation ended with Carter’s war-cry: “Go to it, then! Do something!!”

  I know now that my judgment of a certain Pharaoh was too hasty. The man who wanted bricks made without straw was a great man – a great hustler. He was of kin to Carter. He wanted efficiency; he wanted men not to depend on others, helplessly. He wanted to instil his own great spirit into them, so that they would say of their own accord: “We possess no means of doing this job; never mind, we can do it all the same.” And he would make the money….

  There was Bill Allen, too, with his – “I tell you a man has got to hustle to make money logging.” His motto for the steamboat was, “Get wood and water by day; run by night; keep-agoing-all-the-time;” a sort of sing-song. You would have failed to give him credit for such spirit had you judged him by appearances, for he was not rude and volcanic, and obviously a man of action, as Carter was. Bill’s manner was subdued and absent-minded, his movements quiet. Nothing about him kindled your imagination. He seemed effaced in character. His face was pretty, framed in fair curly hair. When clean it had a weather-beaten air that had been girlish once; when smudged and engine-dirty it made you think, in ignorance, of a work-weary Willie. In those rare hours when nothing needed his attention you might see Bill poring over book or magazine, lost to the world, his every sense absorbed. The humour of a Sunday paper, Ouida, “The Duchess,” “The Master Christian,” Science Jottings, the Nineteenth Century would carry Bill, all equally, into some weird f
airyland. “The Wrecker” held him spell-bound too. Never, you would feel inclined to say, watching him, lived a man less practical, less of a worker. And Carter used to burn his books on the quiet. But Bill would “keep-agoing-all-the-time.” In a gentle, persistent way he would work straight on, day and night, when needful; steadily on until sleep would drop him. He had a dreamy sort of way of dealing with difficulties and hindrances and pushing them aside without thinking. His sub-conscious mind was always wrapped in the idea of “getting the job done.” …

  I liked the spirit of the thing; the quiet feeling that it is natural and right that a man should never admit that he cannot do a thing; the feeling that things must be done, done “right now,” kept on at until they are done; that one has “got to get a move on” and work quickly. Not if the weather suits, or if circumstances are favourable, or if one’s calculations were correct, or unless one should be too tired…. There was very little if or unless about Carter and Allen. Bill had had a man working on the Sonora the previous summer. Sometimes when dark was coming on the steamboat would be short of wood and near one anchorage and far from the next. The man would say, “Hi, Bill! what do you say if we anchor here? After a proper night’s sleep and in daylight we’ll be half the time getting wood, and we’ll be just as far ahead at the end of twenty-four hours. We’ll have to sleep some time.” I can imagine how Allen would poke his head out of the engine-room door and look at the shore and sky, and pretend, politely, to consider the man’s proposal, and then say in his mild voice, “I don’t think it, Bud. Guess we’d better keep agoing. It might come on a head wind or something might happen. We’ll go ashore with the lantern and chop wood, and then hit right through and sleep afterwards.” That is Bill’s style. He does not put off work. So I liked working for Carter, and working hard. As for Carter, he sized up the part of my work that he saw for what it was worth to him, disbelieved in the rest; apparently found that he was not losing on my wages (or he would have fired me), and did not give a cent how I felt about it.