Woodsmen of the West

by Martin Allerdale Grainger

  I was steering through the long night, one trip, and old Andy sat with me in the pilot-house. We were taking him up to Carter’s camp, near which, the previous summer, he had found and staked a vein of mineral. Two “monied men” from Vancouver slept in our cabin aft. Andy was hoping that they would buy his claim. He was an old prospector.

  We whiled away the hours in that pilot-house by conversation. I talked of “the West,” and of its spirit.

  “Young man,” said old Andy, “don’t you never say you don’t know how to do a thing. Let the boss find that out and do the worrying. You go ahead every time and tackle the job by your own sense. Nobody’s going to have confidence in you unless you show them you have confidence in yourself. That, sir, is the Western Spirit – the spirit that has made the West what it is.”

  “It’s queer to me,” he went on, “the poor-spirited way Easterners and city folks and Englishmen go about their work. Seems as if the effect of education was to take all the enterprise and natural savvy out of a man. They come across some job they haven’t done before, and they’ll think of course they can’t do it, and they’ll sort of wait for some one to show them how to do it; or else they’ll expect some one to send for a first-class man who’s been at that job all his life. They’re always distrusting their own judgment, and willing to believe that every one else knows better and can give them advice worth following. They’ve got no natural get-up to them.

  “I remember when I was a young fellow – just a boy you might say – I was working down in Oregon, ‘swamping’ in a camp there. I was a stranger in those parts, and I’d only been a day or two in the camp; and it was my first job in the woods. The foreman came to me. ‘To-morrow,’ he sez, ‘I’ll take you off swamping and give you a job barking up at the head of the new skid-road.’ I guess he thought I’d be pleased. Well, I had sense enough not to say nothing. But I went up that road after breakfast next morning expecting I’d be sent down to get my money soon as any one seen me at work. I’d never barked a tree in my life. However, the boss didn’t come round where I was working that day. There was another fellow barking where I was. I watched him out of the corner of my eye to see how he worked, and I just piled in and made the chips fly. I seen the other fellow take a queer look at me once in a while when he thought I wouldn’t notice, but he kept on working and never said nothing.

  “Same next day. I was working like blank (being but a boy with no opinion of myself) to make a good showing before the boss should come round.

  “The third day the other fellow got talking to me. ‘Say, kid,’ he sez, ‘you seem a pretty hard-working sort-of-a-feller. I guess you ain’t never done no barking before – eh?’

  “‘That’s so,’ sez I.

  “‘Well,’ he sez, ‘I’ll tell you. You’re taking the bark off the wrong side.’

  “Then he showed me how to take off the bark just along the side where the log would drag along the ground when being hauled. He useter mark the logs for me on the ‘ride’ and then I’d bark them. After a while I got to have some judgment as to which way up a log would ride, and then of course I was all right.”

  Old Andy, once started in this vein, went yarning on.

  “It’s always the same way,” he continued. “I don’t say but what a follow wants to exercise judgment. But when in the course of my life I have undertaken a new job that I knew but very little about, my experience always told me that I was going to handle that job as well as the next man – good enough; unless the boss should fire me, or unless there should be some accident before I had had a chance to discover what were the difficulties I was up against.

  “No, sir! There’s nothing to it but having a hopeful mind and judgment and observation. How d’you think any work would ever get done up in these uncivilised parts unless there were men here that had hopeful ideas?

  “Look at the mining business; old fellows working away in tunnels all their lives (the storekeepers getting what they make), and hating to die at the finish because they know there is rich pay a few feet beyond the face. Did you ever meet an old placer miner but what knew of one or two little places where a man might put down a shaft or run a tunnel and strike a big thing?

  “How are these here prospectors for hopeful ideas? Getting out into the woods every time they’ve got a few dollars or got some mug to grub-stake them; cracking rocks on river bars; crawling round on mountains all by their lonesome; nosing about in the desolate, howling, ruddy wilderness by the month and by the year; and having a fit every time they see a ledge that looks like it might contain mineral. Of course, most of them take life pretty easy and aren’t in no hurry at their work, and you might think they was loafers. But they’re a hopeful class of men. Just you see the rubbish they pack into the assay offices….”

  I used to be glad to get a stray passenger on board who, like old Andy, would help me to keep awake by talking. For often in that pilot-house the night would pass with painful slowness. Perhaps Bill and I had been up two nights running, and I would be feeling again the tortures of sentry duty, the struggle against sleep. Sometimes I would not dare to put my hands upon the spokes of the wheel, for fear of standing asleep. I would steer with my finger-tips; and then as sleep would make me lose my balance my head would hit the window frame and wake me up. Then I would hear the strokes of the engine becoming slower, feebler, and know that steam was going down – that Bill had been struck into sudden sleep while at his work in the warm engine-room….

  After such nights as this the cold light of dawn would perhaps be showing through the drizzle as we would creep up to the usual anchorage, our trip completed. Weary and sluggard the two of us would dump the anchor overboard, draw the fire in the engine-room, load our freight into the rowboat, and start up coast to Carter’s camp. Breakfast in the camp cook-house, we would feel, would be better than the trouble of cooking on the Sonora and eating the meal of syrup and corn-meal porridge which was our usual compromise with Time. The warm bunk-house would be a fine place to sleep in afterwards – for we would be feeling chilly and wet and washed-out for want of sleep.

  We would reach the camp and open the cook-house door, and feel how good it was to take our seats alongside the boys at breakfast. The lamps would be lighted, for it would be still dark indoors at half-past six; the cook-house would look bright and cosy; – stove-wood stacked all round the walls, breast-high; slabs of bacon hanging from the roof above; canned stuff – peas, beans, tomatoes, fruit, syrup, beef, mutton – bright and shining, neatly piled on shelves; sacks of onions, potatoes, rice, beans, flour, at the far end where Pong Sam in spotless white would be busy at his stove – flapping hot-cakes with swift, sure movements, bringing plates piled with them to table, answering calls for tea and coffee. Some one probably would have been out a few days before and shot a buck. The fried meat would smell good and look good upon the long table among the plates of fried ham, beans and bacon, potatoes, butter, syrup, cream and milk, and good yeast bread….

  Carter would be sitting among the crowd at breakfast. He would scowl at us as we would enter.

  “I thought you was never coming back,” he would say in rat-trap tones; “whad’yer bin doin’ all this time?”

  Men to Carter are distastefully imperfect means that have to be used, unfortunately, in getting work done. They are just tools.

  Whenever Carter thinks of them as human beings his manner becomes sour, hostile, ungrateful.

  STEAMBOATING ON THE INLET

  The Sonora had once steamed from camp to Port Browning in twelve hours – seventy-five miles. So we always thought of the journey to that port as a twelve-hour journey. It became a habit to do so, especially with Carter. And every trip Bill and I would howl to the men working on shore as we would row past on our way to the anchored Sonora, “Bet you we make the round trip in forty-eight hours this time!”

  It came to me as a shock the other day to realise that our trips took five or six or seven days. There was one record trip, done under four.

  The q
ueer thing was that we never lost the hope of making a quick trip – next time. This time our record was plainly spoiled: there had been errors of judgment; we had lost hours and even days by want of forethought, by carelessness that seemed gross when looked back upon, by accidents out of the common. Carter would have reason for sarcasm this trip. We used to pant to get it over, that we might make another trip in the really competent manner that we knew to be natural to us. We felt like the hundred-yards sprinter who has stumbled in his start.

  Perhaps our chief cause of delay, on the Sonora, was the battered old rowboat we towed astern. Whenever the wind would raise the short, choppy sea of the Inlet that boat would become a nightmare worry; captain and engineer would fret uneasily at their work; every few minutes one of them would grope his way over the wood piled on deck and peer out into the darkness astern, and try the feel of the tow-rope, and judge by the sound of thuds and splashes how much water was in the boat behind. Every now and then one man would call for the other’s help, and the two men would haul the boat close enough for one to jump in and bail with a bucket. A cold, wet job, standing shin-deep in water, clothes soaked with the spray, hands chilled by the wind; man and bucket going splashing asprawl at every random jerk of the tow-line.

  There were times, too, when we would forget the row-boat, times when our thoughts were busy over some infirmity of the engines. Then the leaking rowboat would get low in the water, a wave would swamp her, another wave would throw her water-laden mass with sudden jerk on the tow-line; and the next time one of us would come to see, there would be no boat astern, but only an end of torn rope. So we would turn the Sonora and roll and toss, circling and zigzagging over the dark water, searching for a darker patch that should prove to be the lost boat. No matter now if we should waste an hour or two and use up good fuel. As long as any hope should remain we must wander and seek; for without a tender we should soon be crippled – without it no fuel could be got aboard.

  It seems strange, now, that so forlorn a quest should have been so often successful. We lost, as a matter of fact, but three boats all winter; we must have searched, in hard squalls, in darkness, perhaps some twenty times.

  Why not have hoisted the rowboat to its proper place, on the deck-house roof, you may ask? Well, that brilliant idea occurred to Bill and me one stormy night, and we fixed an ingenious system of blocks and tackle to the windlass and gained an enormous power over the soggy weight of the rowboat. The windlass turned, the rope kept coming nicely; only when one of us went to look did we find that the boat had not hoisted. The high arches of the iron davits had bent down instead, and the Sonora, on the starboard side, had gained (for ever, I suppose) a more wreckish air.

  Carter used to boast that his steamboat need never stop on account of wind and sea: a truthful boast. I have known her speed drop to one mile an hour, or even less, against north winds in the Inlet; but she could be depended on, absolutely, for that unless something unusual was the matter with the machinery. If we could have carried enough fuel to maintain these lesser speeds over sufficient distance, and if we had had no rowboat dragging behind and liable to sudden loss, bad weather would never have stopped us. For it did stop us – often. Perhaps you realise how these stops were forced upon us. It was true enough that wood and bark for sixteen hours’ steaming could be carried on board – we would often start from camp with that full load. But once on our way we depended upon small replenishments of our fuel supply. For instance, down at Boulder Point, where the three Frenchmen had been hand-logging, there was a good deal of bark in the woods very close to the beach – the slope was very slight there, and the Frenchmen had had to bark their logs in coaxing them to water. These great, sturdy slabs of fir bark were excellent slow-burning fuel. We would heave them from one man to the other, and then down on to the beach and into the rowboat, and one bailing, one rowing, would ferry the disorderly load aboard the Sonora, and start off again upon our interrupted journey. There were few such beaches in the Inlet. In most places the mountain slopes plunge straight into the sea. But here and there we knew of little spots where driftwood might be found, and where two hours’ axework would give us a boatload or two of chunks and limbs and bits of bark. We would take anything that could be made to burn. Bill, besides, knew of a few places where hand-loggers had barked big fir logs up on the side-hill near the water; and sometimes, by careful watching of the passing forest, we would divine new places. Then one of us would go ashore and climb up the rocks, and pitch slabs of thick bark down into the sea, and so obtain the best of fuel.

  But storms and head-winds spring up on short notice in the Inlet, and how could one man get fuel and load it from the beach into a leaking boat half-aground, and yet save the boat from bumping its bottom out amid the breakers, while the other man was obliged to remain busy as captain and engineer on the Sonora, cruising offshore? And how, without more wood, with perchance but five or six hours’ fuel on board, could a miserable old derelict like the Sonora be expected to bash her way through a head sea to an anchorage that might be thirty miles away? Such problems were not always easy for us to solve in that cold, wet, windy weather – nor pleasant.

  There were times, however, when we had passengers on board, and passengers were welcome. For Bill and I were always sleepy on our trips, as we would try to run both day and night. Passengers could stoke and steer and let us get some hasty sleep. Our only trouble was their carelessness.

  We left Port Browning, for example, one evening about dark, towing a rowboat for two hand-loggers who were returning to their camp. The men were on board. One volunteered to work in the engine-room; the other, Jimmy Hill, went to the pilot-house and steered. Bill and I escaped to the cookhouse to cook an evening meal. We were hungry, and we knew that we should be up all night.

  The night outside was pitch black. The faintest kind of sheen showed on the water just around the boat; by staring hard, straining one’s eyes and twisting them and looking sideways, one could just see the change of hue, the variation in the blackness, where shore came down to water. That was what the steersman could see from the dark pilot-house. Looking from the door of the lighted cook-house we could see black nothing. You understand, of course, that on the Sonora we never carried lights except in the cook-house and the engine-room.

  Jimmy Hill knew those waters well, so Bill and I cooked at our ease. The engine, we could hear, was working in quick time, and a swift tide was running with us. We were going fast. We expected to hear Jimmy slow down soon and turn into that winding, narrow piece of water between Low Island and the southern shore of Western Channel. Steering down that piece of water used to make me sweat gently even in the daytime. In the dark it was far worse – a perfect nightmare of a place. I was glad so good a man as Jimmy was at the wheel…. There came a sudden shock that threw me up against the cook-house wall and sent our pans and dishes flying. Then bump, and scrunch, and bump again. The Sonora shuddered from end to end and became still.

  Bill dashed from the cook-house and ran forward. I followed with the lantern, to find Bill and Jimmy leaning from the bows. Below, framed in the flat blackness, jetty shining surfaces reflected the lantern light. They were the boulders of Low Island beach. We had struck the beach full-tilt, end-on. The tide was falling. Tides always do in accidents. We let ourselves down upon the beach and took our axes with us, and then, by lantern light, went on a search for posts, and found small trees, and cut them of the lengths we needed. We posted the Sonora up. The tide left her high and dry. She rested well upon her posts.

  And now we saw how wonderful was our escape. All sorts of ugly rocks and boulders lay piled and scattered on that beach. Our steamer’s planks were old and rotted. A moderate blow upon them would have smashed a hole. Yet the Sonora by luck had driven up the beach squarely, had struck with her solid steel-shod keel, had nosed between two rounded boulders that had lost their balance easily and fallen apart. There was no damage done. We floated when the tide came up, and went upon our way….

  The Sono
ra had, long ago, lost most of the metal “shoe” upon her keel. Her rudder worked upon a post that came down from the deck above and had no bar of metal, continuing the line of the keel, to keep it rigid (in the water) at the lower end. The missing piece of metal shoe had served this purpose.

  Now it happened one night that in passing we had to put in to the raft at Hanson Island for some freight. There was a sou’-easter blowing across Western Channel full upon the raft – full blast – gust following gust incessantly. So we had some difficulty, after we had loaded freight, in getting clear from the raft in the teeth of the wind, and in the end we went off in a curve. We passed near to the point of rocks that makes one head of the little bay, and began to turn into our proper course in the free water at the mouth of the narrow Twofold Passage that opens there into Western Channel.

  The wind was tearing down the Passage, gusts slatting down from off the mountain, jostling one another, shaking the poor old Sonora. Just then there came a sudden queer easiness, a quiet absence of resistance, in the steering gear. The turning of the wheel, too, seemed to govern the boat’s movements even less than usual. I thought at first it was the Sonora’s habitual submissiveness to wind. Then I realised that the rudder had dropped off….

  The night was villainously dark, the hour about midnight. The Sonora blew down the Passage, plaything of wind and swift-running tide. She blew sideways, broadside to the gusts; lying across the narrow channel. At first we thought to make our escape back into the wider waters of Western Channel. We had three men on board, and two rowboats towing astern. We took one line from the bow up-wind to a rowboat, another line to another boat down-wind from the stern, and by hard rowing in the boats tried to twist the Sonora to point up-channel. But the gusts mocked our efforts.