Woodsmen of the West

by Martin Allerdale Grainger

  Carter bought all these leases; dirt cheap, of course, for Billy was no match for him in cold business duels. And thus it was that Carter came to own, among other claims, the two square miles of timber at the head of Coola Inlet. When the cruise was over and he was back at logging work his thoughts would often dwell upon those two square miles. For the sea-front timber there was very good.

  There is talk enough of Coola Inlet elsewhere in this book, and after reading it you may have some respect for Carter’s courage in the great enterprise he now undertook, after deep thought upon the recent purchase of Billy Hewlitt’s leases. Remember that Carter, after all, was a “small man” – a man in a small way of business. His little capital was new-made; he might have given way to reasonable fears of losing it; he might have made a cautious choice of safe investment for it; he might have kept on working as he was doing, under moderate risks. He might have known that he was forty-six years old, and getting older after a hard life. Instead of that, by one Napoleonic stroke, Carter decided to take a risk that would have daunted a young man with five times his capital, that would have made a rich speculative company think twice. He decided to shift his camp and donkey and to log the timber at the head of Coola Inlet, up among the feet of mountains, sixty miles of storm-swept water away from anywhere.

  CARTER IN APOTHEOSIS

  With Carter established in his camp at the head of Coola Inlet, Bill comes into prominence in the story. Bill himself liked working in the woods; he was a good axeman and loved chopping. But Carter made him stay aboard the steamboat, the Ima Hogg; keeping communication open between the camp and Port Browning. And Bill did that work with quiet faithfulness, journeying up and down the Inlet without much interruption for months at a time, and doing distasteful things in jeopardy of storm, discomfort, and indeed of wreck. A man I know told me about this steamboat work of Bill’s, and I will repeat as much as I remember in the man’s own word.

  “The Ima Hogg was a god-forsaken-looking tub. Her hull some way or other looked to be sort of lop-sided. It used to give a fellow a sort of uneasy feeling just to look at it. On top she had a rickety old box of a pilot-house with two bunks in it, and the engine-room was all boarded in like an old busted chicken-house, and patched with driftwood and strips off grocery boxes. Carter never cared how things looked so long as they did the work.

  “Logging at the head of Coola Inlet kept Bill busy all the time bringing men and supplies up to the camp. Men wouldn’t stay more than a week or two with Carter at the best of times; but when he’d shifted his camp up there, to hell-and-gone among them ruddy mountains, he simply couldn’t get fellows to stay at all. I tell you I hand-logged one winter myself up round Kwalate Point, and I had all the Inlet I wanted before spring came. What with that gloomy scenery to look at all day, in winter, and what with lying awake at night listening to the roar of them rock slides and snow slides echoing back and forward from one mountain to another, it fair made me bughouse.1 Then the snow lies heavy in the woods up there, and men in Carter’s camp could only work about fifteen days in the month in winter-time, and after paying for their board they made no money worth having, even if Carter did pay big wages. Of course in summer-time it ain’t so bad up the Inlet. But work is plentiful everywhere then and men are scarce. So Carter was short-handed summer and winter. Holy suffering Mackinaw! don’t you talk to me! Carter had the finest kind of nerve to start that camp of his up there!

  “That Coola Inlet is a son-of-a-dog for wind. There’s the west wind in summer, and the north wind and the sou’-easter in winter. They’re all mean, and there’s next to no anchorage. You get forty fathom right off the rocks most places. Then it’s about sixty-five miles from Hanson Island, where you get into the Inlet up to the head, and next to no shelter. I tell you Bill had some fancy times with that steamboat of his. He used to run at night and get wood and water by day. He used to sleep when the weather would let him. Sometimes he’d get anchored and go to bed, and find himself ashore when he woke up. Other times the anchor would drag and he’d wake up in the middle of the Inlet. When he was running he would look at the fire and throw in bark, and get things straight in the engine-room. Then he’d run forward to the pilot-house and see where he was going, and take the wheel until he had to go and put in some more fire. It was a mean job for a man all by himself.

  “I tell you the sea gets up terrible quick on that blank-blank Inlet. It is bad enough in a rowboat, but it was a damn sight worse on the Ima Hogg. You see, she had a fine upright boiler, but it was put in much too high. The least sea would make that old tub roll so’s it would put the fear of God into you. Bill put in some fierce times jiggling her up and down all night behind some sheltering point of land when he’d been surprised by the wind and couldn’t get to any anchorage. Sometimes it was lucky for him that he had passengers on board. One trip a gust of wind caught him unawares before he could skip to shelter, and it laid the Ima Hogg over on her side and the water came in through the rotten decks. There was a gang of fellows on board, going up to the camp. They jumped out of the pilot-house (pretty slick, you bet!) and sat as far over as they could on the other side, and Bill got the steamboat turned so that the wind blew her upright again.

  “Early this present summer Carter wanted Bill to run the donkey for him at the camp. So they put a young fellow named Cully on the Ima Hogg, and he ran her for a while. I don’t pay no attention to talk myself. I know they used to fill the Ima Hogg’s tank with river water at the head of the Inlet, and my idea is that the water was brackish and that was what eat up the flues. Some says it was from being careless and firing up too quick that the flues got burnt out. There was a yarn, too, about some one putting blue vitriol into the boiler to spite Carter. All I know is that the last time Cully started up the Inlet one of the boiler flues was leaking. After a mile or two something blew out. Cully got it plugged and went on. As he was passing round Protection Point two or three more pieces blew out, and put the fire out. Cully just had enough way on to turn the Ima Hogg in to the bay beyond the Point and drift with the flood tide to where he could get anchorage. Before next morning he had everything plugged solid, and he put in a fire and got up steam. Then, pop! the whole works blew out…. Cully stopped in that place for two weeks, good and hungry, before Carter came down in a rowboat to see what the blank had happened. Carter saw that the Ima Hogg was out of business for a while, and he knew he couldn’t afford to wait while she was being mended. He’d just got to have a steamboat taking men and grub up to the camp all-the-time. That’s why he went on down to Hanson Island and bought the Sonora from Andy Horne for seventeen hundred dollars….”

  As you may imagine from this account, the quiet, unassuming Bill has useful qualities. You would be vividly convinced of that were you to see the steamboat that he ran and then see Coola Inlet. And should you wish to get new thrills from life, go you and buy the Ima Hogg yourself. She lies today mouldering at anchor at Port Browning, awaiting her next brave purchaser. Carter will ask six hundred dollars, but you might beat him down to three.

  Now my story comes to the time last summer when Higgs and I went timber-cruising up Coola Inlet. We had a fine west wind one day, and we ran our sloop before it up to the Inlet’s head. There we coasted round the tide-flats that spread seawards from the river Kleen-a-Kleen, and suddenly we saw puffs of white steam upon a mountainside, and heard a donkey-engine toot. We anchored soon off Carter’s camp, and went ashore to seek the usual hospitality.

  It was a fine sunny day, and a man’s eyes were pleased by the forest-green of the great mountains and the snowy whiteness of glaciers showing against the blue sky. The sea was sparkling in ripples against the gleaming line of Carter’s boom, that lay across a little bay. In the still waters of that haven floated the rafts upon which the camp buildings stood – lake dwellings, as it were; and round them drifted logs; hundreds of logs, a carpet on the water; huge logs of fir and cedar. As we looked shoreward the air became filled with a rumbling, booming noise, and bumping down a hi
llside chute there shot into sight another log. It was fine to see the water shoot up in lofty jets and sunlit spray, as the log dived to join its fellows in the sea. Ten dollars more in Carter’s pocket!

  We tied our rowboat to the boom, and made our way over floating logs to a building from where stove-pipe smoke was rising. Within we found the China cook, a spotless white-clad figure, engaged upon the work of dinner. John told us that “him bossy man” was working on the hill, and we went ashore to present ourselves to Carter.

  After fires, or when some big building has collapsed, or when tornadoes have battered tropic forests into piles of fallen timber, men may have to work, walking and crawling, high in air among tangled beams and wreckage. In just such fashion men were working upon the mountain-side near Carter’s camp. As we slowly worked our way uphill we saw a sight that could not have been beaten in any logging-camp along the coast. The “fallers” had worked along the slope, slope that was almost cliff; and all the trees of value had been felled crisscross, upon each other and upon the mass of smaller trees their fall had shattered. The “buckers” had then wormed their way among that giant heap of trunks and limbs and matted boughs, and sawn the good timber into lengths. It was a fine piece of work, on ground so steep and rough.

  We came to where the “swampers” were at work chopping limbs and brush, preparing the cut logs for hauling. Beyond them we could hear the shouting and the clank of metal blocks and the tap of a sledge-hammer where the rigging-men were making fast a log to the wire rope with which a donkey-engine hauls. And then I became aware of Carter.

  His coal-black hair stuck through the crown of a ragged old felt hat. His eyes, his beard, were black. Sweat dripped and glistened on his cheeks. A flannel shirt, all rents and tears, hung on his body. His dirty overalls had lost one leg below the knee; torn underwear was fluttering there. His spiked boots were good, as loggers’ boots must be; so also were the stout leather gloves upon his hands.

  Carter did not see me, and I watched him as he worked furiously. He stood upon a log some ten feet in the air. His active body showed in fine balance as he swung his double-bitted axe. His muscles sprang at each swift movement. He whipped his axe into the log he was cutting – chop, chop, chop – the hurried working against Time, not the leisurely chop that you may hear from a man felling timber. His breath was making the noise that hammermen affect – hiss, hiss, hiss – loud and sharp between each dig of the axe. I was wondering how many hours a man might hope to work at the pace Carter was going, when the booming of the dinner-gong sounded from the cook-house down below. Carter, looking up, saw me for the first time, and we became acquainted….

  Higgs and I stayed several days that summer at his camp.

  It was boom-time then all up the coast, and speculation was ballooning higher than men had ever known before, and still no sign of bursting showed. Logs were up to ten dollars per thousand feet, board measure. Loggers and hand-loggers were doing desperate work, fighting against Time, to put in logs and sell completed booms while prices were so high. And so we saw great Carter, in apotheosis.

  “One million feet I put in for me last boom,” he said, with pomp, one evening as we sat talking in his office; “ten thousand dollars for the work I done in forty days!” And then he sneered angrily at the softness of hired men, and the monstrous wages he was paying to keep a crew at work upon his side-hill. “Now’s the time I want good work done,” he said, “while logs are high; and none of the men I get are worth a dam. ’Tis poor creatures they are; scared of a steep place; afraid of hard work and accidents.”

  But Carter had other business besides the logging done at his own camp. Men all down the Inlet were selling logs to him that he resold, in bulk, to sawmills at Vancouver. And the seashore round the head of Coola Inlet was dotted with the tents of hand-loggers; men outfitted, grub-staked, as one says, by him.

  Carter, you understand, was living strenuous days; his mind scheming, his body toiling, to get logs quickly down his hillside to the sea. He had no time to give to other matters, and yet he gambled right and left in speculative ventures, on which he could not keep his eye. A sort of child’s carnival of business reigned in his disordered office.

  Men in rowboats were always coming to the camp to get supplies. “I’m too busy to attend to it now,” Carter would say to them; “go and get what you want from the cook-house, and ask the Chinaman to keep track of what you take.” Piles of clothing and boots and tools and tobacco and other stores were lying littered on the office floor. “Take what you want,” Carter would tell a purchaser, “and tell me some other time what you’ve taken. I’ve got to get back to my work now.”

  Bill was supposed, by Carter, to keep accounts; but he was rarely at the camp. He would come into the office before going to Port Browning on the steamer and tear a handful of blank cheques out of the book. As he needed them he would fill these up in pencil. Neither he nor Carter would know what cheques the other issued, nor take the least note of cheques drawn by himself. It was an anarchy. No Rake’s Progress could have shown a worse confusion in money matters; and it was evident that, as in other logging-camps, there was a definite limit of prosperity beyond which Carter & Allen’s business could not go. Carter knew this too. “Me business is getting too big for me to attend to all by meself,” he lamented to me. His success had been due, under luck, to his great blind force of perseverance, of strenuous personal activity. Simple work, done in his presence and by his aid, succeeded well. But now his business was calling for more complicated thought, for more organising power, and Carter, having not these to give, felt a loss of grip.

  It was queer, then, to find Carter vain of his capacity as a business man. Under rum he bared his soul to me one evening.

  “I can make a deal with any man,” he said. “Buying and selling is what I was built for. This here logging doesn’t give me a chance; it ain’t suited to me like what business is. Buy from them that has got to sell, and sell to them that is obliged to buy; and cinch ’em all good and hard – that’s all the secret these is to business!” Carter, you might almost say uncharitably, oozed with desire to trade beneath three golden balls.

  There was a certain narrow shrewdness, however, in Carter’s careless methods. For these methods had the effect of encouraging carelessness in the men he dealt with. Hand-loggers around the Inlet, for example, would never know how much Carter was charging them for food and tools, nor how much he would, in the end, pay them for their logs. Sometimes they felt it would be rude to ask too many suspicious questions about small sums, small prices of their groceries; sometimes they did not give such matters thought. The future and its days of payment do not weigh heavily upon the logger’s mind; he lives much in the present. He expects to meet hard treatment from “business men” – men of more active acquisitiveness than himself; men with whom he runs his bills. He does not, however, expect them to sack his pocket (as Carter sacked the woods) upon the first onset, upon the first account. So these loggers trusted all to luck, to Carter, and to vague verbal understandings, the exact shape of which, in Carter’s mind, they did not clearly ascertain. They did not realise that Carter took short views in making money; that he did not care a rap for their future custom, or for a friendly name.

  Carter in the end was bitter hard to all these men. For he made bad debts occasionally, in such long-drawn-out transactions, and burning to revenge himself upon the human race, he would fall savagely upon his debtors and their debts. Revenge it was. Carter in these money dealings had motives other than the itch for money.

  Lust of power over men it was that hag-rode Carter in such matters, to his own hurt. He liked to feel his hands upon other men’s affairs, diverting them, compelling them to suit his own will. Debtors were playthings for his egoism – egoism that had a fell malicious side.

  The last evening that Higgs and I spent at his camp Carter was drunk upon some whisky that Bill had brought up on the steamer. Carter had been filling the office with his loud talk, and as we left to go abo
ard our sloop he came outside the door with us. He stood upon the raft, swaying unsteadily, and looked up at the moonlit mountain and waved his hand around.

  “All MINE,” he croaked – “my donkey, my camps, my timber, my steamboat there! Fifteen square miles of timber leases belong to me! Money in the Bank, and money in every boom for sixty miles, and hand-loggers working for me, and ME the boss of that there bunkhouse-full of men! Tell them swine at Port Browning I done it all! I and the donk! I!!”

  1. Bughouse=crazy.

  THE ARRIVAL OF THE NEW GANG