Slade ate and ate. He was approaching middle age, but had never felt so strong, so powerful. This was truly the prime of his life, a time of intense happiness, and it came from the straightforward task of felling gigantic trees. Slade had toppled Douglas fir and Sitka spruce and Ponderosa pine up and down the Pacific coast, but he believed himself fulfilled only as the agent of destruction for the redwood. This was the giant, the tree of trees, and he felt he had earned for himself a place at the bole of the earth’s mightiest living thing, ax in hand.
It was the apex of his work among the limitless forests of the far west, this bringing down by sweat and toil of the high and mighty. Slade was a proud man, smart enough to base his pride on actual accomplishment. He pictured himself among these ancient colossi forever, or until such time as an accident took him. He could not conceive of himself as old, infirm, incapable of performing the work that made him a king within the limited realm of his kind. It would be a mercy, he sometimes thought, for a dislodged bough to come crashing down and crush him instantly, rather than to endure the humiliation of physical weakness, the gradual degeneration of his notion of himself.
He doubted that his fellow workers brooded on such topics. Slade knew his thoughts were of a far more complex nature than those of his fellows. He had never fit in, wherever he worked, and this fostered in him a sense of his own uniqueness. He ate his ham, wolfed down his bacon, drained cup after cup of gritty coffee like a god quaffing ambrosia.
Slade always walked ahead of the rest. The current felling area lay almost a mile from the camp, more than three from the mill. Morning was the best time, with mist still thick around him, and sometimes the faint salt smell of the ocean at Mendocino. If he got far enough ahead of the rest, he could barely hear their few words of talk.
The forest was capable of swallowing just about any sound man could make. Even the biggest sound, when a tree came crashing down, would reverberate for only a short time, then be gone. The sound of axes was puny, the bellowings of the oxen that hauled log sections down the skid road to the mill were as nothing. Slade’s voice was considered the loudest of any tree faller, but as it warned of another giant’s imminent collapse, it was only a squirrel squeak in the deep woods.
Every tree required two fallers working as a team to bring it down; every tree except the one Slade chose to work on. He worked alone, the only man in the company allowed to do so. He could not topple a redwood in the same time it took two men to do so, but he was never more than a day or so behind any regular team, and this in a field of work that often required a week’s solid work per tree. One man, performing the work of one and three-quarters men, but paid only one wage; it was an arrangement that made fiscal sense to Slade’s employers. He was too arrogant to be made a bull of the woods, or logging boss; Slade neither gave nor accepted orders. He would work in the same general area as lesser men, but never consent to be one of them. It was not company policy to allow exceptions to their rules, but in Slade’s case they relented; he was, after all, a legendary figure in the industry, therefore something of a bristling feather in their cap.
Slade’s tree of the moment was a monster of around two hundred feet, not the biggest he’d ever felled, nor the smallest. He had worked four days already on the undercut, the huge wedge-shaped bite taken from the bole near the redwood’s base. An ordinary team would deepen its axed-out undercuts with double-length crosscut saws and wedges before tackling the backcut, the smaller chunk, taken from the opposite side, that would cause the tree to topple. Not Slade; he required nothing but his double-bladed ax for both cuts.
Today he would begin the backcut. He had already directed the layout crew to prepare a long bed of boughs leading away from the trunk, in the direction Slade intended it should fall. He had placed a stake in the ground for them to work toward, and if his calculation and skill were of the usual order, this stake would be driven into the ground by the upper reaches of the descending redwood. The crew had done a good job, he saw, arranging the lopped boughs and covering them with great swaths of bark peeled from previously felled trees, to make a soft landing bed for Slade’s latest conquest. With a little luck and several buckets of sweat, it would hit the earth before daylight was done.
The work was performed as art, as self-expression. Slade poured himself into every swing of the ax, working with rhythm, no movement wasted, taking each bite from the precise spot he aimed for. He was aware at every moment of what he was about, allowed no thought to distract him, not even the simplest. He knew this ability to empty his mind completely was as important to his skill as the superior strength in his arms and back. He knew of men who had died horribly because of wavering concentration. To Slade’s way of thinking, those men had betrayed themselves, revealed their inferiority, and paid the price. He had no sympathy for them, nor would he have sympathy for himself if he should ever let his attention wander. That was a fate for others. If he should die in the woods, it would not be any fault of his own; the tree that killed him would be brought down by almighty God, no less.
He drank often from the two-gallon jug that accompanied him each day, felt the water flood through him and out his pores minutes later, a constant irrigation or oiling of the engine within. When the sound of other axes was stilled around noon, Slade drove his blade lightly into the trunk below the narrow springboard he stood upon to work, jumped to the board below that, and from there to the ground, where his lunch pail stood beside the jug. Inside were the usual two-inch-thick beef sandwich and the heavy oatcake or sweet bread Bruno and his assistant prepared for the pails that every faller collected on his way out of the cookhouse. It never varied beyond the oatcake/sweet bread alternate, but Bruno received no complaints.
When he was done with eating, Slade contemplated his place in the universe, and found it satisfactory. His primitive state of bliss renewed, as it was over every lunch, Slade allowed himself a brief nap, into which no dream intruded. He awoke at the first thud of a distant ax, raised himself up and stretched like an animal well content, without enemies, a creature belonging body and soul to its time and place in the natural order of things. He leapt to the first springboard, and to the next, yanked his ax from the tree and drew it slowly back for the first of the final series of blows that would bring it down.
He worked without pause until the backcut had been deepened to a dangerous extent, then cupped both hands around his mouth and bellowed at his loudest, “She faaaaaalls …!” This was a phrase of Slade’s own invention; let the rest of them holler “Timmmm-berrrrr …” like so many echoes of each other; Slade had his own holler, because he had his own way of making a redwood fall. The cry he gave was a summons to anyone in the vicinity to come see an event such as they would see nowhere else in the tall woods, the thing that had made the name of Slade synonymous with daring and bravado and—the ingredient guaranteeing legendary status—a touch of magic.
They were already running through the trees to be nearby when the tree came down. It gave Slade pleasure to see them flocking toward him this way, like so many ardent followers answering his call from the tower, adherents to the creed of Slade. Soon there were three dozen or more, standing at a respectable distance from Slade’s tree.
He jumped down from the backcut boards, marched around to the undercut and launched himself up the boards remaining below it until he could stand in the cut itself, the sloping roof of the missing wedge several feet above his bushy head. He stood with hands on hips, his back to the narrowed waistline of wood still supporting the two hundred feet of tonnage above. The redwood could begin to fall at any moment, depending on the winds, and the recess in which Slade chose to stand was the most dangerous, since a toppling tree could shatter at its narrowest place and drive splinters ten feet long into the region cleared by the faller’s ax, or if it did not, the ragged end of the separated trunk could spring back into that same space when its upper branches hit the ground so far away and sent a reciprocal, gargantuan twanging back along its own length to the point of in
jury and despoilment.
Nonetheless, Slade chose to stand there, smiling at his audience, and when he judged the moment was right, he looked up at the partial vault of wood above, its sap bleeding in droplets onto his beard. This was the time of Slade’s magic, the conjuring of the right wind from just the quarter he required, a gentle stirring among the high treetops that soon was causing his redwood to groan and squeal like a mast bent on unstepping itself before the elements. The wood behind Slade began to splinter. Another faller would have jumped for safety then, but he remained as before, beaming his rigid smile, and moved his boots not an inch. If the wind shifted, if it happened to reverse itself then, he stood a fair chance of being caught in the undercut’s closing maw: but the breeze favored Slade as always, and pushed his ailing giant in precisely the direction he wished.
The massive trunk began its protracted fall, the fulcrum of its descent mere yards behind Slade’s heedless back. Now the length of it was quivering as if in pain, as the crown arced downward past the tree’s own offspring, gathering speed at the forty-five-degree mark, accelerating from there to the forest floor, where it smashed itself down along the prepared alignment of boughs and bark, its arrival tossing earth and matter into the air, the ground itself buckling and recovering itself in a series of shudderings that were felt through the boots of every onlooker. Their eyes were on the jagged splayings of wood at the trunk’s end, horizontal splinters liable at a second’s notice to spring backward, impaling him. But they did not, and while the dust of impact hung in the air still, and the earth seemed to vibrate inside their legs, Slade’s admirers watched as he executed a stiffly mocking bow to their faces.
Tomorrow the peelers would strip the giant’s foot-thick bark: then the buckers would attack it with their crosscut saws, dividing the trunk into manageable lengths; the choker setters would follow in turn, to lash the truncated sections with cable so the bullwhackers could harness each section to their teams of oxen and haul it down greased skid roads to the millyard.
There the redwood would be further reduced by an assortment of screaming metal blades, its bulk halved and quartered by endless bandsaws; then would come the series of belittlings that rendered a colossus into squared railroad ties, or so many board feet of planking; at its most humbling, the tree’s great bulk became roofing shingles a mere twelve inches long. All of this, tie or board or shingle, would be dumped into the stream-fed flume that would carry it to the coast along forty-three miles of man-made water road, a narrow rushing rivulet contained within banks planed from the most serviceable lumber around—redwood.
Slade knew little and cared less about this end result of his handiwork; the sawing and dicing of timber was a task for little men. Once the living tree was down, Slade’s part in its termination became an event from yesterday, a thing to be proud of, surely, but not to be contemplated overlong. Slade knew the men who owned the mill, and others like it from San Francisco to the Canadian line, were millionaires, but he could never bring himself to consider them more important than himself. They were puny fellows, he supposed, with whitened skin and dry coughs; one strong breath from Slade’s lungs would have knocked the lot of them off their pins. Slade had no wish to earn vast sums of cash; no amount of wealth could have brought him the one thing he already had, a reputation as the best faller in the western woods. He had earned it. It was his, and he wore it like a crown.
Hartley and Hubert Louther owned the Northern California Timber Company. Hartley was the older brother by six years, and made a habit of reminding Hubert of his inferior status. Hartley tended to make the larger business decisions on behalf of them both, but was prepared to leave the bookkeeping and accounts entirely in Hubert’s hands. Hartley was content with the arrangement; Hubert was not. Transplanted New Englanders, they ran the tightest and most profitable logging operation in Mendocino County.
Neither their admirers nor their detractors were fully aware of the bad feeling that existed between the Louther brothers. Their mill and lumber shipping concerns had been developed by their father, Hartley Senior, and his firstborn had always known himself to be the true heir. Hubert might disagree, and often did, but was silenced each time by an offer to buy him out. Hubert didn’t want to leave the company or the Louther mansion outside Ukiah; he wanted to own it all and throw his bullying older brother out on his pompous ear.
The rift between them widened when Hartley married a young lady who happened to conform almost exactly with Hubert’s notion of the ideal woman. Susan was not perfect, of course, since she had accepted a boor like Hartley for her spouse, when she could just as well have chosen Hubert instead, but Hubert forgave her; Susan was very young, hardly responsible for the magnitude of her error.
Hubert made love to his sister-in-law with his eyes for months before confessing his feelings toward her. Susan stared at him, then laughed at the expression of anguish on his pudgy face and said, “Oh, Hubert, you are such a silly boy. Now I won’t say a thing to Hartley, because he may not understand you were only making a joke, but just you keep your silly jokes to yourself in future, or I might change my mind, and then where would you be?” She capped this with a lighthearted laugh.
Crushed, Hubert slunk into Ukiah to find solace at his favorite den of low vice, an unpretentious brothel run by a Mrs. Clancy. After sobbing onto the breast of Mrs. Clancy’s newest girl, Hubert went downstairs to get very drunk.
Toward evening, he looked up from his mug to see before him the largest man God was capable of assembling without recourse to the term “giant.” He was alarmingly, stunningly, unavoidably large, and Hubert could not help but stare at the fellow’s sheer massiveness. He watched as this Goliath began climbing the stairs behind a girl who appeared quite inadequate for the work in store, and heard the woodwork groan beneath his Brobdingnagian boots. What a creature! It could only be a logger.
Hubert fell to musing, suddenly uninterested in his beer. Several years earlier, brother Hartley had hired a man with the reputation of being able to perform the work of two ordinary fallers, a muscular but otherwise unremarkable-looking axman by the name of Slade. Hartley had done it because he wanted the Northern California Timber Company to have on its payroll the acknowledged best in the business. Slade hired on, and had stayed in the logging camp all this time, never coming down from the mountains with the rest of the men to blow off steam in establishments such as Mrs. Clancy’s.
He was considered something of a mystery man, this Slade, one whom no amount of questioning could tempt to answer the simplest question. It had been a sharp move on Hartley’s part to bring Slade into the fold, even Hubert agreed, since Slade’s mere presence granted the falling team a glamour it might otherwise not have had. Contenders for the woodsy laurels Slade wore had come forward from time to time, and what Hubert referred to as “hacking contests” were held to determine which was the better man. Slade had won all of these without real effort.
Hubert knew, as if the fact had been whispered in his ear by angels, that the hulking creature whose footsteps could at that moment be heard above was a foe worthy of Slade, just as Hubert was himself a worthy successor to Hartley at the company helm. The unrelated nature of these clashes was already blurring in Hubert’s imagination, becoming as one.
He ordered a fresh beer, in a celebratory mood, but ignored it when it arrived; he must keep his head clear for the bargaining and cajolery that undoubtedly would be required to convince even so large a man as the one directly above him (Hubert could hear the bedsprings now, and changed tables) that he could beat the company’s reigning champion.
A whisper traveled up-country to the mill, and from there to the camp: a new man was coming, a big man, a veritable giant, and a mean master of the double-bladed ax. When every ear had received the rumor, and every mind digested it, every eye turned to Slade for his reaction.
True to form, he said nothing, although it was clear he had heard the whisper around him, and was mulling it over in his own imperturbable fashion. The team
would have been disappointed had he spoken of this topic that seemed to fill the cabin. Slade’s response was the appropriate one: say nothing, wait and see. It could well be that the whisper had exaggerated the new man’s size and prowess, as whispers often did.
Bruno noticed, next morning, the increased appetite of nearly everyone. The logging team scoffed their food and looked at each other often, as if sharing some obscure joke among themselves. He knew it was the whisper that had done this, stimulated them to eat more than their usual heaped portions. For the first time since he could remember, he was obliged to make second helpings of almost everything, and that did not sit well with Bruno, for whom the art of estimating in advance the needs of the communal belly was a source of professional pride.
There had been other whispers, other new men who came with the specific intent of besting Slade. Bets were placed, axes sharpened; wood chips flew like angry bees, and closely tallied scores were kept, sometimes for days on end, as the contender kept pace with Slade. But in the end these aspirants faded, their strength gone, seemingly sucked from them by Slade, who never once appeared to tire. There had been a close-run thing some years ago, when a big Swede came closer than any man before him to breaking the magical hold Slade had on winning, but even that one had given out in the end, in a most spectacular manner; gouts of blood had suddenly spewed from his mouth, and he fell from his springboard to the forest floor, stone dead before the nearest man could even reach him. Slade had continued hacking until his tree came down, then wandered over to witness the sorry fate of the Swede. Naturally, he said nothing.
It would have been gratifying, Bruno thought, if Slade could be brought to his knees just once, to teach him a lesson in humility. Bruno had experienced a great many of these lessons in his life, and resented Slade’s apparent ability to escape the vicissitudes, great and small, that bedevil the affairs of ordinary men. Slade’s reputation appeared bulletproof, a permanent fixture around the man, like the unearthly glow Bruno had seen around holy personages in illustrated Bibles.
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