V
In mid-September, Dan and Mat and his father started up-river, to be gone all winter. Will had finally decided to stay at home.
Dan, despite himself, felt a deep relief when at last they were upon the road, as though a load he bore had been lifted; and his father was happier too. No sooner had they set out than in a sudden exuberance John was full of things to say. He spoke jubilantly of the prospect of a fine market for the pine they would cut this winter. Two years before, a hundred and twenty-three million feet of pine lumber had been surveyed in the port of Bangor; but a year ago the figure fell to a hundred and two million, and this year was less.
‘There’ll never be another year when a hundred million feet of pine will come down to Bangor,’ John predicted. ‘But that means better prices for us now.’
In Old Town he had business to do before they went on; and he rejoined them, laughing at something he had just heard. ‘I was talking to George Sewall,’ he said. ‘He’s a lawyer here, went to Congress in ’51. They tell about him that when he was in Congress, some long-winded speaker kept taking a drink of water during his speech, till Sewall rose to a point of order, said he’d never before seen a windmill run by water!’ They laughed, as much at his own enjoyment of the jest as at his words, and he went on: ‘He was just telling me about a trick he played on old Colonel Rollins, a few years ago. They were neighbors, and they both needed some cedar posts. Colonel Rollins proposed to cut them on Bingham land. He was to do the cutting, and Sewall the hauling. They went out to locate some cedar and Sewall led the way to a big cedar swamp, and the Colonel cut a lot of posts and a big pine too—Sewall took the butt log of the pine and the Colonel took the rest—and the Colonel didn’t find out for three months that they were on his land, stealing his own lumber instead of ours, all the time.’
That was the first of many tales he told them through the long, easy days of their journey. He told them about Jonathan Farrar, who tapped both ends of a rum barrel and sold the rum from one end for forty cents and from the other for fifty. ‘And everyone agreed that the fifty-cent rum was better,’ he declared. He told them about old Isaiah Powers who said of an extremely loud-voiced orator that he was like a bell, with a noisy tongue and an empty head; and he told them about the drunken Indian who went to sleep in his canoe and went over the falls at Old Town unharmed; and he told them about Jim Percival who was never bested in the game of pinch, till he tackled Eb Husted when Eb had a bullet mold in his hand and Jim failed to realize this till he was pinched black and blue; and he told them about Judge Howard who when a culprit was brought before him and asked whether he needed counsel said: ‘Counsel be damned! I’ll fine you two dollars and all the counsel in the world won’t do you any good’; and about Asa Wadleigh who when his tail crew let a drive of logs get hung up told the men they ought to work for nothing a day and be cheated out of their pay every night. He told about old Jonathan Bridges, who came to Deacon Hannon’s store one cold winter day, sent by his wife to buy some butter. The Deacon was busy at the time, and Jonathan went to the rear of the store where the butter and the rum barrel were side by side. He thought no one was watching him, so he clapped a ball of butter into his hat, drew a jug of rum, and tendered payment for the rum without troubling to mention the butter. But the Deacon had seen the butter disappear, and he made old Jonathan sit by the stove to warm himself and kept him there till the butter melted and ran down his cheeks in streams so conspicuous that some notice had to be taken, and the Deacon said:
‘Well I declare, you’re hog fat, Jonathan! You’re sweating pure grease.’
And he reached out and snatched off Jonathan’s hat and the half-melted lump of butter fell into the old man’s lap, and Jonathan stared at it and said in innocent surprise:
‘Well, I’ll be switched! Now where in time did that come from?’
John had an inexhaustible supply of these tales, drawn from the accumulating folklore of the town along the river; and Dan and Mat laughed with him at the telling. But his tales were not all of the river. Sometimes he talked of his own boyhood; and one night when they huddled under the overturned batteau to escape a cold driving rain, he told them about that night on Coetue when he and their mother fought bitter death and won; and often he spoke of incidents in their own boyhood, which they themselves could not remember. Jenny was always in these tales; and when he spoke of their mother they saw her through his eyes as young and tender and beautiful. Afterward, rolled in his blankets, Dan might lie awhile awake, summoning his own bright memories of her, wondering wretchedly and hopelessly what it was which had changed her so.
John spoke of her daily, and always loyally, on that long trip up-river. They travelled alone, three stalwarts, the two sons each taller than their father, in a light batteau with setting poles to negotiate the rapids and paddles for the quieter reaches of the river and for the lakes. They saw dams and piers and booms built by the Penobscot Log Driving Association, and John explained to them the uses of each one. He told them tales of tremendous pines so huge that even the men who laid them low wondered at their size; of a Mattawamkcag tree that was eighty-two feet to the first branch; of another which required fourteen yokes of oxen to haul it, and sawed six and a half thousand board feet of lumber; and he told them of one tree he himself had cut.
‘It was an old punkin pine,’ he said. ‘I dropped some small trees to make a cradle for it first and then went at it. It was better than six feet through, where I tackled it, about four feet from the ground, and I was an hour and a quarter bringing it down. That pine was sixty-five feet to the first branch. It made five logs; and a six-ox team took three trips to handle it. At that, the butt log was so big that we couldn’t float it in the spring, had to leave it behind. That one log would have been worth fifty dollars at the boom.’
Dan smiled and said: ‘Father, you like to remember old times, don’t you; to talk about them.’
‘Why—yes.’ John assented, and he tried to explain. ‘You see, Dan, the things men remember together become a part of their common strength. The fact that a group of men know and love the same tales unites them. There’s no stronger force than the bond of a common tradition. Any tradition is a good thing, a steadying thing.’ He added, suddenly grave: ‘We’re going to need all these unifying forces in the Northern states one of these days, Dan. You see, the South has a common tradition, the slave tradition; and it makes them all think in the same way. We in the North are nowhere near being united, not even in opposing slavery. Some of us—even in Bangor—sympathize with the South. Senator Hamlin thinks it may come to the point of fighting; but while the South will fight in a minute to keep their slaves, the North won’t fight—not yet, anyway—to free them. Some man will have to come along who will find a way to unite the North as the South is united; to give us up here a common loyalty. And it will be hard, because we’re a big country.’ He chuckled and said: ‘If the whole North was in the lumber business, it would be easy, because we’d have these common traditions, this trick of laughing at the same things, of being proud of the same things.’
VI
They carried for provisions some ship’s bread, salt pork, tea, sugar and molasses, and a gun and fishing lines to supplement their rough fare. Their blankets, a teakettle, a tin dipper, a frying pan and an axe completed their equipment. At night if the weather was stormy, the overturned batteau gave them shelter. Otherwise a few boughs laid across a frame of poles was cover enough. They made camp each day in time to be secure before dark, were up and about at first gray dawn. They followed the main river for eleven days, turned aside at last to ascend a considerable tributary stream that came in from the north, and when they stopped for the night John said:
‘Well, we’re here. From now on we’ll foot it, scout the land, lay out what we want to do.’
The days that followed were for Dan pure delight. On the first morning they climbed a horseback which traversed the lower lands for miles; and about mid-morning John said:
‘Now
it’s time to take a sight.’
He selected a tall spruce whose limbs were some thirty feet from the ground and undercut a smaller tree to fall and lodge against it as a sort of ladder. ‘You go up, Dan,’ he said. ‘Climb high enough so you can see all around. You’ll be able to see any clumps and veins of pine for miles across the low lands, because they stand up fifty or sixty feet above the spruces. Shout down to us what you see.’
So Dan began the climb, ascending the smaller tree till he reached the larger, where the branches were a ladder to help him higher. When he had climbed as high in the spruce as he could safely go, he hooked his knee over a branch and began his survey of the leagues of forest which surrounded them. There were mountains, some not distant, some far away, all uniformly clad in spruce and hemlock and cedar and pine; but since the best pine was likely to be found in the lower lands, it was to the nearer scene that he gave the most searching scrutiny. He saw a dozen groups of pines, some including only half a dozen trees, some apparently covering acres; and he called to those below:
‘There’s pine everywhere, father.’
Tick out the nearest big vein,’ John directed. ‘What direction is it?’ Dan said: ‘There’s a big one about four or five miles away, but I don’t know the direction.’ The day was cloudy and overcast so that he could not locate the sun. ‘It’s over that way.’
He pointed, but the ground was far below, the intervening branches thick, and they could not see him. At his father’s instruction he broke off a small branch, stripped it of twigs so that it would not catch on the lower foliage, and threw it as far as he could toward the stand of pine he had chosen. John, far below, marked where it fell and shouted up to him: ‘All right, we’ve got a compass bearing now! Come along down.’
So Dan descended, and following the compass they made their way to the tract Dan had spied. During the days that followed they located in this fashion all the nearer veins of pine, and John taught his sons how to calculate the number of trees in each one, how to recognize concussy pines which, rotten at the heart, were not worth the cutting, and how to appraise the task of getting logs from each tract to the nearest water. At the end of a week he had determined where the winter’s work should centre, and had chosen the sites for three camps, so located that a plentiful supply of meadow hay could be cut from intervales along the river to feed the oxen, with water and firewood near, and never too far from the trees that were to be cut nor from the landings where the logs would be accumulated against the break-up in the spring.
By the time this was done the first of the men came up-river and John set them to work putting up hay, stacking it on staddles made by driving poles into the ground and laying other poles across them to keep the hay clear of possible flood waters. When the hay was cut, it was piled in cocks on two poles and men carried these cocks between them to the growing stacks. Since in the process their hands were both engaged, the flies and mosquitoes had free play on them; and each day’s end saw their faces converted into swollen, bloody smears.
Day by day more men arrived, and the camps began to be built. John—and Dan under his instruction—directed this work. The ground had first to be cleared and levelled; then walls were raised, built of notched spruce logs, eight feet high in front and half that in the rear. The camps were roofed with poles and split shingles of spruce or cedar, held down in turn by other poles, and covered for greater warmth with fir and spruce and hemlock boughs. The walls were calked with moss. The beds along the rear walls were no more than a shelf of split planks on which boughs were thrown, and the men slept there side by side. The bunks, the kitchen—John had a cook stove as well as a box stove for each camp—and the dining room were all under the same roof; and the deacon seat, a hewed plank high enough to serve as a comfortable bench, ran along the foot of the long bed.
Before the camp was ready, the last bateaux arrived with the winter’s supplies, flour and beans and pork, potatoes, coffee and tea and molasses. John had warned the men when he hired them that there would be no rum in camp. The hovels that would house the oxen were thrown up; and as cold weather came and the river closed, the teams began to arrive. They had come by way of Moosehead, made the last stages of the long journey on the frozen river. Road-building was already under way; and Dan and Mat worked with the men, cutting brush and trees to clear roads a dozen feet wide, filling holes, hauling great boulders out of the way, and as the first snows came watering the roads every night till they were paved solidly with ice as hard as iron.
By that time the work in the woods was organized; choppers, swampers, barkers, loaders and teamsters were each hard at his particular task. Dan saw the first tree come down. Bed pieces had been laid to break its fall; and after it was undercut, a smaller tree was toppled against it to knock it over. It tipped a little with a splintering groan as every fibre in the huge trunk complained at the new stresses suddenly imposed, then crashed down upon the bed pieces with a tremendous, ground-shaking impact that Dan could feel in the soles of his feet. At once the men swarmed upon it, some of them knocking off the smaller branches and severing the tip while the barkers stripped down to the white wood that smaller end which would drag upon the ground.
Dan watched while with skids and rolling chain the butt was rolled upon the sled; and then six yokes of oxen, straining at the load, began to drag it to the iced road and off to the landing. It seemed to him incredible that any number of oxen could move that tremendous mass, almost four feet through at the butt. He measured it, found it was twenty-one paces long; yet the oxen hauled it along the well-iced road to the landing where it was cut into four shorter logs, ready for driving in the spring that was still months away.
VII
There was about that winter in the woods a certain fine monotony, in which small incidents assumed tremendous proportions. Once they found a hibernating bear and killed it; and venison was a regular addition to their fare. With the venison-or rabbit meat if deer were scarce-the cook made a studio, a meat and potato stew; and if there was no fresh meat in camp, dinner was dunderjunk, bread and pork and molasses all baked together. But usually game was plenty, and several times they heard wolves, and though Dan himself never saw one, others did. At the west camp a teamster named Jeff Hazard was killed. His loaded sled outran his oxen on a mild grade, and it was assumed that he had tried to swerve them off the road; but in doing so he himself fell, and the sled crossed his body and pinned him down. He was on a haul of a mile or more, and it was some time before—when he failed to return—men came to look for him. They found him still alive, but in the agony of his efforts to be free he had gnawed halfway through the stout spruce pole that made the railing of the sled. He died almost at once, but that was the only case during the winter where a man was killed.
Dan liked the work, and he liked too the long idle Sundays, when men slept, or mended their clothes, or went tramping off through the woods to hunt spruce gum or on some other pretext. This might be to find white ash or rock maple, or elm or hornbeam useful for axe helves. Some went hunting, and a few men ran a line of deadfalls, visiting the traps once a week. But if the weather was evil, everyone stayed in camp, the teamsters mending harnesses or yokes or tending their oxen—a good yoke of oxen was worth a hundred dollars or a little more, and their owners gave them every care—the men telling long tales or singing come-all-ye’s in roaring, surprisingly tuneful voices.
For the last month before the break-up, John put Dan in full charge of the east camp. It was Dan’s first experience in handling men; and since his gang knew their jobs and did them, he had wit enough not to interfere. For three weeks John did not come to the camp at all; and when he did, Dan was at the cutting so he did not see his father till night. John had by that time a full report of him, and he said approvingly:
‘You’ve pulled your weight, Dan. The work’s kept up, and the men like you. I’m pleased with you, son.’
Dan grinned with pleasure. ‘But it’s no credit to me,’ he said. ‘I haven’t tried to drive th
em, or to interfere at all. I just gave a hand where I could. They’d have done as well without me.’
John smiled. ‘Then you’ve learned the first lesson in how to be a good boss,’ he said. ‘To leave well enough alone.’
That winter there had been scant snow in the woods, so their operations were handicapped; but despite this they had a good cut of pine at the landings. John explained to Dan the necessary preparations for the break-up. From this east camp the logs would have to go down a stream that was not much more than a brook till they readied the main river; and Dan put men to work at once to cut a channel through the ice and roll the logs into it as fast as room could be made for them. The channel was made wide enough to take three or four logs abreast, and men extended it downstream day by day, not only cutting out the ice and hauling it clear, but removing trees and bushes which tended to hang the logs. To get the logs into the channel was hard, driving work; and the men, with pries and handspikes and swing dogs were sometimes waist-deep in the icy water for most of the day. Mat came to help with this work; and Dan, quick to give a hand at the worst spots, inspired the men, leading them more than he drove. Before the break-up of the main river, the brook was choked with logs from the landings down. Well ahead of time, on his own initiative, Dan had set the men to build a rude dam above the landing, holding back the water so that the logs were barely afloat. When the river opened he broke the dam a little at a time, and out of the winter’s cut at this east camp not a log was hung and lost in the bushes along the brookside or upon the occasional bars.
Once in the river, the logs passed into the hands of the driving crews, and the great bulk of the men headed for Bangor to spend their winter’s pay; but John and his sons followed more slowly, watching the drive, marking how each hindrance to its progress was met and solved. Dan enjoyed this easy trip down-river, savoring every hour of every day, trying not to admit to himself that he was reluctant to come home again. He reminded himself how fine and sweet his mother had used to be, and assured himself she would be glad to see them; but secretly—and more and more as they approached journey’s end—he dreaded seeing her, dreaded living once more under the daily sting of her acid tongue.
The Strange Woman Page 54
