Woodsmen of the West

by Martin Allerdale Grainger

  It is not easy for a stranger to make his way about this northern country, or find out what is going on. He has to “get acquainted” and learn the art of listening. This was brought home to me on the Tuesday afternoon when I learned, by purest accident, in overhearing talk, that Carter’s steamboat had been lying all this time at anchor in Port Browning, and that Carter’s partner was expected back from town by the Cassiar that very night. Port Browning was but a few miles away. A man was going there to fetch the mail, and so I rolled my blankets and took them to the man’s boat and held myself in readiness to start.

  I had not done so badly at Hanson Island. True, I had been extravagant, eating three meals a day, and I had lost half a dollar and spent one modest dollar at the bar, six men and the bar-keep sharing my invitation. But in the dining-room they had protested against my paying for my meals; and for the last two days had refused, blankly, to take my money; and so I had twelve dollars left.

  Now that he heard I was about to leave, the hotel proprietor took me to the bar and, roll of bills in hand, asked how much he owed me for the wood that I had cut. He became very pressing, but I refused stoutly to take payment; an altruistic-looking act born of cold calculation on my part. So, over a friendly drink, he gave me advice and talk about the ways of the logging country; about employers and camps and the various troubles a man might have in getting his wages. “For,” said he, “these boss loggers have their business affairs in a hopeless mess as a rule. Young man,” he said impressively, “always keep your money drawn up to date!” I was to come to him again, he said, should I be out of work, for there were jobs for me in camps near by. And so I left the hotel with a comfortable feeling about the future and a zestful consciousness of my success as an advertiser.

  Al escorted me to the boat. “Say,” he said, “how are you fixed for dollars? Have you plenty of dollars? I insist that you should tell me if you’re wanting any….” I had to assure him fervently that I was well fixed. But any time I want help I understand I am to apply to Al Hoskins. He is my friend and “don’t know what to do for me.” So you see what a little antiseptic dressing will do, at no expense of effort…. The other man and I launched the boat, rowed down the channel and round into the lagoon, and reached the end of the land trail that goes to Port Browning.

  AT PORT BROWNING

  There is a big dead cedar that overhangs the sea just where the land trail starts from the lagoon shore. Near this tree the other man and I made fast our boat. A number of other boats were already anchored there; their owners gone to get mail or small supplies at the Port Browning Store, or to get themselves drunk at the Port Browning Hotel. The other man hid the oars and rowlocks of our boat some way off in the woods, carefully. Then he took my bag, friendly-like, and carried it. I shouldered my pack and followed.

  There was good walking on the trail; good footing and little climbing over fallen timber. The way wound up and down on small hillsides; past pools of water, past small bubbling creeks, past clearings where the slideways and the high stumps of big trees and the small shattered timber showed that the logger had been at work. But we took scant notice of such forest sights. My companion, who came originally from Tennessee, was deep in questions about Australia, a country which he thought he would much like to visit, by way of changing his present life. I was wholly disconcerted by the speed at which he walked and by the awkward stepping of my damaged foot. And this went on until we met two men, and stopped awhile to talk to them and take a drink of whisky, neat, out of their bottles.

  “There’s quite a dose of them down at the hotel,” they said, and grinned, “just a-coming in from all parts…. No, not drunk yet … about ten o’clock to-night – at least, that’s the time we got drunk last night. Where do they all come from? It’s a wonder! … Well, boys, we’ll push on; we’ve got to get across the Inlet to-night if the west wind don’t come up….”

  Two miles of trail brought us to Browning Harbour, and then the woods ceased and we came out upon a small clearing by the beach. We passed tree stumps and rubbish piles, outhouses and a log-pen, a meat-house and the shack where the proprietors and bar-keeps live, and came round the back of Port Browning Hotel to the veranda and the bar-room door.

  It was “steamer night” – men had come in to meet the Cassiar – and so the bar-room was crowded full. Men sat all round the walls on chairs and benches; men lined up across the strong breast-high barricade of the bar, two ranks deep (some one was spending money!). A fiddler worked, and another man gave an accompaniment of tom-tom by tapping on the fiddle-strings with chop-sticks. Within five minutes of my entry there arose a dispute that burst into a sharp, sudden fight (and one man down), and a long, slow-subsiding growl of argument afterwards. This was a mere incident in one corner of the room. Altogether there was a pleasing, lively clack and movement in the bar-room scene; and every one seemed happy. Outside the door there was a gentleman “coughing his toenails up” in pangs of whisky sickness. But the drinking on the whole was very moderate, and there was little to offend.

  The noisiest man in the bar-room was a hideous, great hulk of a hobo1 from the States, an overgrown kid like the comic countryman of the stage. “Look bad but feel good” was his motto, and certainly his face did look horrid. I thought it was due to drink, and possibly kidney trouble, but they tell me the man got into trouble one day with one of the hotel proprietors. The hotel man took a chair and laid him out, and while he lay upon the ground André the Frenchman came and jumped upon his face with spiked boots … and the man lay there stunned and drunk and bleeding for hours. “Interfere? Well, I guess we was all drunk. Besides, we didn’t know but what André might have had something against him.” A queer example of the apathy that sometimes falls upon a crowd of spectators.

  Later in the day the hobo did a clog-dance, the floor being for the moment clear. “I’m a bob-cat with tousles in me ears,” he howled and bawled. He was a nuisance. Little Jem, the bar-tender, lifted the flap of the bar, came quietly out, caught the hobo by the seat of his pants, and slung him out through the door. It was a great relief.

  There were men in the bar-room who had been at Hanson Island and had seen me there. Some of them nodded to me and called out questions, and I began to feel more at home and less under critical observation. Of course one or two had probably sized me up as being strange; “splendidly educated,” perhaps. Who knows? I may even have been held capable of keeping books – that crowning achievement of educated men. For although one’s gait and dress and manners may pass muster, although one may even catch the intonation of voice and the cadence of swear-words and swear-phrases, yet one uses like a foreigner wrong words and expressions. “Yes, certainly!” is a queer way of saying “sure thing!” – to give a small example.

  Accent and foreign speech make one conspicuous. I find it convenient to be as unobtrusive as I can be with comfort, whether I live in London or in Port Browning. An English air is new and queer to Western men who meet it for the first time. It is offensive to those who have met it before, and who have rankling suspicions of what it may (and too often does) imply – the conscious mental superiority the partly educated person carries with him. You have got to be straight if you want to make friends with men of less intellectual training than your own. Patronise the humbleness of a man’s attainments in your heart, and he (if he is worth anything) will feel the falsity you conceal. Heavens! we see the second-rate in our own souls, and see it without emotion; tolerating such old habitual defect. And yet to see the same second-rate, the same limitation, in men of less active brains gives us excuse for conscious superiority. The moment we think we look downwards upon, and understand, the workings of another’s mind we feel a mild contempt for him….

  The logger cannot stand a missionary. It must be rather a dreadful thing to be a convinced missionary and to have to mix with your fellow-men, not frankly (you and the others, just human beings together), but as a man exploiting the forms and even the spirit of friendliness for a more or less secret pur
pose of your own….

  I enjoyed my evening in that bar-room thoroughly. I liked “the boys.” It was pleasant to see men of all ages active and light-hearted, unconscious of their years and of the future, free of the West. Many of them might be commonplace in nature; but the average of character seemed high, as averages go; and there were some fine, virile-looking men, decided personalities, amid the crowd. All the men were firm of flesh and weather-stained. And if whisky was their bane, better this, to my mind, than that dreary scheming to indulge in Comfort that meets one everywhere in city life.

  1. “Hobo” is rude for “tramp.”

  AT CARTER’S CAMP

  The scene now shifts to Carter’s camp, where accident had played havoc. A log, hooked to the wire cable used for hauling, had broken loose upon the steep hillside, and charging down, had smashed into the donkey-engine and broken some of the machinery. Carter at once “shut down” – that is to say, he discharged all his men. I reached the camp the very day the men were paid off, and the steamboat Sonora, that had brought me up, turned round at once and took the whole crew down to Port Browning. The smashed machinery was sent to Vancouver for repairs. Carter and I were left alone at his camp at the head of Coola Inlet – seventy miles from anywhere. Carter had hired me, and I went to work.

  Now there were about three hundred logs floating about inside the line of boomsticks that was stretched across the mouth of the little bay in which Carter had his camp. Carter decided to occupy himself, and me, in “rafting up” these logs – that is to say, in massing the logs together in a firm raft fit for a tug-boat to tow away to the sawmills down south. So we set to work to bore holes in the ends of long logs called boom-sticks; and these boomsticks we chained together. This chain of logs we then anchored out to form a floating enclosure on the surface of the bay. The enclosure could open at one end.

  The work, for a practised boom-man, was now to take a long, light pole, and jumping upon a floating log, to stand upon the log and pole it into the boomstick enclosure. This he would have to do with log after log until all had been poled inside and all lay tight together, parallel, in ranks, the width of the enclosure. Then he and his mates would have to chain this mass of logs across, solid, and so obtain a raft that would keep its oblong shape under the strains of movement and of towing.

  The practised boom-man, alas, would do all this. Carter, for example, did. He went hopping from log to log, poling one here, one there; poling half-a-dozen at a time. He had worked upon the rivers “back East” in his youth, where logging men learn early to “ride a log.” He had the perfect balance of a mountain goat, and the logs obeyed his will.

  Now there are many men who never learn to ride a log, and at the best of times I should not for a moment pretend to be able to do so myself. So with a damaged foot I found myself, on Carter’s boom, a figure of hopeless incompetence. I would jump upon a log, a good big steady log chosen on purpose. The log would begin to roll under my feet, as logs will. I would keep walking up and up; the log would roll faster and faster; soon I would be running up. Then my balance would begin to go and I would take a flying leap for any log that floated near – or else, splash! go headlong into icy water. The water was ice water from a glacier-fed stream.

  Carter fished me out three times in one day, and there were times when I fell in and kept the fact to myself. For it was most mortifying that I should be making so futile a first appearance. Here I was working under the very eye of a new boss! I dreaded to think what disrepute might come upon my powers of work. I shuddered at the risk of that blighting verdict “He don’t know nuthin’; he can’t do nuthin’.” Suppose that should be said behind my back as I have heard it said of other men. Vanity suffocated at the thought!

  “There’s worse places than a logging-camp.”

  Other troubles I had too. My muscles had recently become soft from enforced disuse; my hands were soft; my power of muscular endurance had suffered woefully. And now I had to become acquainted again with that instrument of torture, the four-inch auger, that bores a hole a man can push his fist into. Oh, the back-breaking job of boring boomsticks when your auger keeps biting into stubborn knots. Oh, sore and puffy hands!

  Carter had always work for me to do even when the tide was out and “rafting up” was interrupted. I could take the big cross-cut saw and saw off the shattered ends of logs that had shot violently upon the rocks of the sea-bottom when diving from their downhill run. I could split long billets of “cord-wood” for fuel for future voyages of Carter’s steamboat Sonora.

  Besides all this I cooked our meals. About my cooking, of course, I was not shy; for like most other men I knew, in my heart, that I was the “finest kind” of cook – that I could “slap-up a meal” with any man; and Carter would stand anything rather than cook himself.

  So I was hard-worked enough, and happy too. For it is good to be at healthy work with clean Nature around you. There are worse occupations than working for wages in a camp….

  I find that “working for wages” suits me well enough – suits me, that is (like any other work), for some period of my life on earth. If I have dry underclothes to start out in, and if my boots are not too much worn out, and if my hands and feet are warm, I can turn out at the standard hour of seven o’clock on any morning with a happy day ahead. There will be plenty of work to do, plenty of occupation for mind and body, plenty of soul-satisfaction. There is no need to bother oneself as to whether this thing or that thing is worth the doing, or whether it is going to be of real use or lead to anything or satisfy ultimate standards. The boss settles all that. He is a fellow-being who really wants certain things done, things essential to his happiness. He has private reasons for this, reasons beyond my interest or concern. The simple fact that here is a man who is really keen to have some rather interesting things done and wants me to join him at once in doing them – this makes a great appeal to me. It gives me a motive – an immediate simple object in life – for the time being. There is definite work to be done: Nature and natural obstacles to be struggled against (and not one’s fellow-men); and there is, besides, the vanity of not being seen to be incompetent. There is the great charm of life in uncivilised parts – what Higgs calls the “perpetual pleasure of small achievements;” the backing yourself to beat all sorts of difficulties by the ingenious use of the few simple means you possess. Conditions and surroundings are so varied and changeful that you are always dealing with something new: you are the delighted amateur experimenting. Even if you get stuck at a monotonous job – long spells of rowing, sawing and splitting cord-wood, using pick and shovel, or breaking rocks with a hammer – there is still the great pleasure of working up the intensity of effort, trying (vulgarly) to beat time, or to beat some other man’s performance, or simply to see how long one’s own endurance will hold out; playing games with one’s work and with one’s own body and character, as small children play with their food. Then, too, there is the athletic and artistic pleasure in trying to develop effortless accuracy in the swinging of an axe, or in the delicate, light-handed movement of the big saw. There is plenty of call upon one’s physical endurance and upon one’s moral qualities. The needs and sudden emergencies of the work, and the presence of other men’s standards of achievement right before one’s eyes, give one stimulus, and check self-indulgence and the fatal sliding-down of feeble man to ease and comfort. There is call upon one’s reasoning powers, too, and upon one’s goodwill to help one’s fellow’s work. One is made to think over the commonplaces about education, and to realise that a man can get well trained in his more generous character without troubling the books very much. In days of depression, in days when one does not like the job one has – still, by supper-time one will be so many dollars to the good, dollars that are nett profit. How much nett profit is there in many a genteel job in England! Take away the necessary “expenses of the position,” the cost of clothes, holidays, and small amusements and sports (that avert decay and death!). How much is left, nett money profit?

/>   And if my balance-sheet for the year is no great affair, in your sophisticated eyes; if I spend, in idleness in bad winter weather or in wandering to fresh fields of effort, much of my yearly profit; if, in fact, my year’s work has inevitable interruptions – still, is not the best, most satisfying work work that is intermittent, that gives one rest after toil, time for recuperation? Work such as that is a more buoyant affair than the deadly treadmill work that goes on, soogey-moogey, day in day out, for forty-nine perfunctory weeks of the year.

  The “expenses of one’s position” in a camp are working gloves and working boots, dungaree trousers that cost a dollar, underwear and shirts that one can patch or darn; and soap. One does not have to bother how one looks, nor whether one lives at a reputable address. As long as one does one’s work, nobody makes it his business to care a cent about the correctness of one’s demeanour or of one’s morals, or to dictate to one, impertinently, about one’s private affairs. One does not have to submit to anything – not even from public opinion. There is a toleration that surpasseth all understanding of the old-country English.