III
The next morning Bob was awakened to a cold dawn that became still moreshivery when he had dressed and stepped outside. Even a hot breakfasthelped little; and when the buckboard was brought around, he mounted tohis seat without any great enthusiasm. The mountain rose dark andforbidding, high against the eastern sky, and a cold wind breathed downits defiles. When the wiry little ponies slowed to the first stretchesof the tiresome climb, Bob was glad to walk alongside.
Almost immediately the pines began. They were short and scrubby as yet,but beautiful in the velvet of their dark green needles. Bob glanced atthem critically. They were perhaps eighty to a hundred feet high andfrom a foot to thirty inches in diameter.
"Fair timber," he commented to his companion.
Welton snorted. "Timber!" he cried. "That isn't timber; it's weeds.There's no _timber_ on this slope of the mountain."
Slowly the ponies toiled up the steep grade, pausing often for breath.Among the pines grew many oaks, buckthorns, tall manzanitas and thelike. As the valley dropped beneath, they came upon an occasionalbudding dogwood. Over the slopes of some of the hills spread a mantle ofvelvety vivid green, fair as the grass of a lawn, but indescribably softand mobile. It lent those declivities on which it grew a spacious,well-kept, park appearance, on which Bob exclaimed with delight.
But Welton would have none of it.
"Bear clover," said he, "full of pitch as an old jack-pine. Burns likecoal oil, and you can't hardly cut it with a hoe. Worst stuff to carryfire and to fight fire in you ever saw. Pick a piece and smell it."
Bob broke off one of the tough, woody stems. A pungent odour exactlylike that of extract of hamamelis met his nostrils. Then he realizedthat all the time he had been aware of this perfume faintly disengagingitself from the hills. In spite of Mr. Welton's disgust, Bob liked itsclean, pungent suggestion.
The road mounted always, following the contour of the mountains. Thus italternately emerged and crept on around bold points, and bent back intothe recesses of ravines. Clear, beautiful streams dashed and sang downthe latter; from the former, often, Bob could look out over the valleyfrom which they had mounted, across the foothills, to the distant,yellowing plains far on the horizon, lost finally in brown heat waves.Sycamore Flats lay almost directly below. Always it became smaller, andmore and more like a coloured relief-map with tiny, Noah's-ark houses.The forest grew sturdily on the steep mountain. Bob's eyes were on alevel with the tops of trees growing but a few hundred feet away. Thehorizon line was almost at eleven o'clock above him.
"How'd you handle this kind of a proposition?" he inquired. "Looks to melike hard sledding."
"This stuff is no good," said Welton. "These little, yellow pines ain'tworth cutting. This is all Forest Reserve stuff."
Bob glanced again down the aisles of what looked to him like a nobleforest, but said nothing. He was learning, in this land of surprises, tokeep his mouth shut.
At the end of two hours Welton drew up beside a new water trough towater the ponies.
"There," he remarked casually, "is the first sugar pine."
Bob's eye followed the indication of his whip to the spreading, gracefularms of a free so far up the bed of the stream that he could make outonly its top. The ponies, refreshed, resumed their methodical plodding.
Insensibly, as they mounted, the season had changed. The oaks that, atthe level of Sycamore Flats, had been in full leaf, here showed but thetender pinks and russets of the first foliage. The dogwoods were quitedormant. Rivulets of seepage and surface water trickled in the mostunexpected places as though from snow recently melted.
Of climbing there seemed no end. False skylines recurrently deceived Bobinto a belief that the buckboard was about to surmount the top. Alwaysthe rise proved to be preliminary to another. The road dipped behindlittle spurs, climbed ravines, lost itself between deep cuts. Onlyrarely did the forest growths permit a view, and then only in glimpsesbetween the tops of trees. In the valley and against the foothills nowintervened the peaceful and calm blue atmosphere of distance.
"I'd no idea from looking at it this mountain was so high," he toldWelton.
"You never do," said Welton. "They always fool you. We're pretty nighthe top now."
Indeed, for a little space the forest had perforce to thin because oflack of footing. The slope became almost a precipice, ending in a boldcomb above which once more could be glimpsed the tops of trees. Quiteingeniously the road discovered a cleft up which it laboured mightily,to land breathless after a heart-breaking pull. Just over the top Weltondrew rein to breathe his horses--and to hear what Bob had to say aboutit.
The buckboard stood at the head of a long, gentle slope descending,perhaps fifty feet, to a plateau; which, in turn, rose to another crestsome miles distant. The level of this plateau, which comprised, perhaps,thirty thousand acres all told, supported a noble and unbroken forest.
Mere statistics are singularly unavailing to convey even an idea of aCalifornia woodland at its best. We are not here dealing with theso-called "Big Trees," but with the ordinary--or extraordinary--pinesand spruces. The forest is free from dense undergrowths; the individualtrees are enormous, yet so symmetrical that the eye can realize theirsize only when it catches sight of some usual and accustomed object,such as men or horses or the buildings in which they live. Even then itis quite as likely that the measures will appear to have been strucksmall, as that the measured will show in their true grandeur ofproportion. The eye refuses to be convinced off-hand that its educationhas been faulty.
"Now," said Welton decidedly. "We may as well have it over with rightnow. How big is that young tree over there?"
He pointed out a half-grown specimen of sugar pine.
"About twenty inches in diameter," replied Bob promptly.
Welton silently handed him a tape line. Bob descended.
"Thirty-seven!" he cried with vast astonishment, when his measurementswere taken and his computations made.
"Now that one," commanded Welton, indicating a larger tree.
Bob sized it up.
"No fair looking at the other for comparison," warned the older man.
"Forty," hesitated Bob, "and I don't believe it's that!" he added. "Fourfeet," he amended when he had measured.
"Climb in," said Welton; "now you're in a proper frame of mind to listento me with respect. The usual run of tree you see down through here isfrom five to eight feet in diameter. They are about all over two hundredfeet tall, and some run close to three hundred."
Bob sighed. "All right. Drive on. I'll get used to it in time." His facelighted up with a grin. "Say, wouldn't you like to see Roaring Dicktrying to handle one of those logs with a peavie? As for driving astream full of them! Oh, Lord! You'd have to send 'em down one at atime, fitted out with staterooms for the crew, a rudder and a gasolineengine!"
The ponies jogged cheerfully along the winding road. Water raneverywhere, or stood in pools. Under the young spruces were the lastsnowbanks. Pushing up through the wet soil, already showed earlysnowplants, those strange, waxlike towers of crimson. After a time theycame to a sidehill where the woods thinned. There still stood manytrees, but as the buckboard approached, Bob could see that they werecedars, or spruce, or smaller specimens of the pines. Prone upon theground, like naked giants, gleamed white and monstrous the peeled bodiesof great trees. A litter of "slash," beaten down by the winter, cumberedthe ground, and retained beneath its faded boughs soggy and meltingdrifts.
"Had some 'fallers' in here last year," explained Welton briefly."Thought we'd have some logs on hand when it came time to start up."
"Wait a minute," requested Bob. He sprang lightly from the vehicle, andscrambled over to stand alongside the nearest of the fallen monsters. Hecould just see over it comfortably. "My good heavens!" said he soberly,resuming his seat. "How in blazes do you handle them?"
Welton drove on a few paces, then pointed with his whip. A narrow troughmade of small peeled logs laid parallel and pegged and mortised togetherat the ends, r
an straight over the next hill.
"That's a chute," he explained briefly. "We hitch a wire cable to thelog and just naturally yank it over to the chute."
"How yank it?" demanded Bob.
"By a good, husky donkey engine. Then the chute poles are slushed, wehitch cables on four or five logs, and just tow them over the hill tothe mill."
Bob's enthusiasm, as always, was growing with the presentation of thisnew and mighty problem of engineering so succinctly presented. Itsounded simple; but from his two years' experience he knew better. Hewas becoming accustomed to filling in the outlines of pure theory. At aglance he realized the importance of such things as adequate anchors forthe donkey engines; of figuring on straight pulls, horse power and thebreaking strain of steel cables; of arranging curves in such manner asto obviate ditching the logs, of selecting grades and routes in suchwise as to avoid the lift of the stretched cable; and more dimly heguessed at other accidents, problems and necessities which only theemergency could fully disclose. All he said was:
"So that's why you bark them all--so they'll slide. I wondered."
But now the ponies, who had often made this same trip, pricked up theirears and accelerated their pace. In a moment they had rounded a hill andbrought their masters into full view of the mill itself.
The site was in a wide, natural clearing occupied originally by a greenmeadow perhaps a dozen acres in extent. From the borders of this parkthe forest had drawn back to a dark fringe. Now among the trees at theupper end gleamed the yellow of new, unpainted shanties. Square againstthe prospect was the mill, a huge structure, built of axe-hewn timbers,rough boards, and the hand-rived shingles known as shakes. Piece bypiece the machinery had been hauled up the mountain road until enoughhad been assembled on the space provided for it by the axe men to beginsawing. Then, like some strange monster, it had eaten out for itself atonce a space in the forest and the materials for its shell and for theconstruction of its lesser dependents, the shanties, the cook-houses,the offices and the shops. Welton pointed out with pride the variousarrangements; here the flats and the trestles for the yards where thenew-sawn lumber was to be stacked; there the dump for the sawdust andslabs; yonder the banking ground constructed of great logs laid closetogether, wherein the timber-logs would be deposited to await the saw.
From the lower end of the yard a trestle supporting a V-shaped troughdisappeared over the edge of a hill. Near its head a clear streamcascaded down the slope.
"That's the flume," explained the lumberman. "Brought the stream aroundfrom the head of the meadow in a ditch. We'll flume the sawn lumber downthe mountain. For the present we'll have to team it out to the railroad.Your friend Baker's figuring on an electric road to meet us, though, andI guess we'll fix it up with him inside a few years, anyway."
"Where's Stone Creek from here?" asked Bob.
"Over the farther ridge. The mountain drops off again there to StoneCreek three or four thousand feet."
"We ought to hear from the fire, soon."
"If we don't, we'll ride over that way and take a look down," repliedWelton.
They drove down the empty yards to a stable where already wasestablished their old barn-boss of the Michigan woods. Four or five bigfreight wagons stood outside, and a score of powerful mules rolled andsunned themselves in the largest corral. Welton nodded toward severalhorses in another enclosure.
"Pick your saddle horse, Bob," said he. "Straw boss has to ride in thiscountry."
"Make it the oldest, then," said Bob.
At the cookhouse they were just in time for the noon meal. The long,narrow room, fresh with new wood, new tables and new benches inpreparation for the crew to come, looked bare and empty with its handfulof guests huddled at one end. These were the teamsters, the stablemen,the caretakers and a few early arrivals. The remainder of the crew wasexpected two days later.
After lunch Bob wandered out into the dazzling sunlight. The sky waswonderfully blue, the trees softly green, the new boards and the tinypile of sawdust vividly yellow. These primary colours made all theworld. The air breathed crisp and bracing, with just a dash of cold inthe nostrils that contrasted paradoxically with the warm balminess ofthe sunlight. It was as though these two opposed qualities, warmth andcold, were here held suspended in the same medium and at the same time.Birds flashed like spangles against the blue. Others sang and darted andscratched and chirped everywhere. Tiny chipmunks no bigger thanhalf-grown rats scampered fearlessly about. What Bob took for largerchipmunks--the Douglas Squirrels--perched on the new fence posts. Theworld seemed alive--alive through its creatures, through the solemn,uplifting vitality of its forests, through the sprouting, budding springgrowths just bursting into green, through the wine-draught of its veryair, through the hurrying, busy preoccupied murmur of its streams. Bobbreathed his lungs full again and again, and tingled from head to foot.
"How high are we here?" he called to Welton.
"About six thousand. Why? Getting short-winded?"
"I could run ten miles," replied Bob. "Come on. I'm going to look at thestream."
"Not at a run," protested Welton. "No, sir! At a nice, middle-aged,dignified, fat _walk_!"
They sauntered down the length of the trestle, with its miniature steeltracks, to where the flume began. It proved to be a very solidly builtV-trough, alongside which ran a footboard. Welton pointed to thetelephone wire that paralleled it.
"When we get going," said he, "we just turn the stream in here, clampour sawn lumber into bundles of the right size, and 'let her went!'There'll be three stations along the line, connected by 'phone, to seethat things go all right. That flume's six mile long."
Bob strode to the gate, and after some heaving and hauling succeeded inthrowing water into the flume.
"I wanted to see her go," he explained.
"Now if you want some real fun," said Welton, gazing after the foamingadvance wave as it ripped its way down the chute. "You make you a sortof three-cornered boat just to fit the angle of the flume; and then youlie down in it and go to Sycamore Flats, in about six minutes more orless."
"You mean to say that's done?" cried Bob.
"Often. It only means knocking together a plank or so."
"Doesn't the lumber ever jump the flume?"
"Once in a great while."
"Suppose the boat should do it?"
"Then," said Welton drily, "it's probable you'd have to begin learningto tune a harp."
"Not for mine," said Bob with fervour. "Any time I yearn for SycamoreFlats real hard, I'll go by hand."
He shut off the water, and the two walked a little farther to a boldpoint that pressed itself beyond the trees.
Below them the cliff dropped away so steeply that they looked out abovethe treetops as from the summit of a true precipice. Almost directlybelow them lay the wooded valley of Sycamore Flats, maplike, tiny. Itwas just possible to make out the roofs of houses, like gray dots. Roadsshowed as white filaments threading the irregular patches of green andbrown. From beneath flowed the wide oak and brush-clad foothills, risingalways with the apparent cup of the earth until almost at the height ofthe eye the shimmering, dim plains substituted their brown for the darkgreen of the hills. The country that yesterday had seemed mountainous,full of canons, ridges and ranges, now showed gently undulating,flattened, like a carpet spread before the feet of the Sierras. To thenorth were tumbled, blue, pine-clad mountains as far as the eye couldsee, receding into the dimness of great distance. At one point, but sofar away as to be distinguishable only by a slight effort of theimagination, hovered like soap-bubbles against an ethereal sky the formsof snow mountains. Welton pointed out the approximate position ofYosemite.
They returned to camp where Welton showed the clean and painted littlehouse built for Bob and himself. It was quite simply a row of rooms witha verandah in front of them all. But the interiors were furnished withmatting for the floors, curtains to the windows, white iron bedsteads,running water and open fireplaces.
"I'm sick of camping," said Wel
ton. "This is our summer quarters forsome time. I'm going to be comfortable."
Bob sighed.
"This is the bulliest place I ever saw!" he cried boyishly.
"Well, you're going to have time enough to get used to it," said Weltondrily.
The Rules of the Game Page 28