A few days after, Dutchie the hand-logger came to seek a helper. Hundreds of logs had been floating past the little bay where Dutchie had his boom. He had gone out, towed in log after log, filled his boom. He had worked right on for fifty hours, he said, until he had dropped exhausted. He had caught two hundred logs. Then the weather had got worse, and Dutchie had sat upon a headland watching a wealth of logs that jostled in the sea and passed to and fro before his bay with the ebb and flow of the tide.
Then talk would turn, perhaps, upon some recent accident. I remember M‘Carty telling us how the log had slipped and caught Pete’s boot and rolled upon him, and pushed his body before it down to water; and how Pete’s arm alone stuck up above the surface. “Squashed he was, flat, like a squashed fruit, from his ribs down,” said M‘Carty sadly. Similar accidents would be recalled, and then we would talk of the hospital and the mission ship and its good work; and what was wrong with missionaries; and how set women, and some men, were on religion – and what a rum thing that was. Then it would be time for me to light my lantern and go out into the rain and row to the Sonora and to bed. Down the harbour anxious search-lights would be flickering where half-a-dozen tugs had lain, this week and more, anchored in shelter from the raging weather in the Straits; tugs moored to huge, long rafts of logs, watching to steal their way south to Vancouver sawmills.
On Tuesday and on Friday nights, however, my sleep would not last long. Perhaps at midnight, perhaps at two or three o’clock, the siren of the Cassiar would sound from down the harbour and wake me with its echoes. Then I would jump from out my blankets, put on my boots, and light a lantern, and row hurriedly through the darkness to the warehouse raft to see if Bill was coming back from town. Then the glare of the search-light from the Cassiar would light up all the water, and show the raft and the hotel and Mitchell’s store in turn. Boat-loads of men would come out from the shore. Soon the Cassiar would tie up at the raft, opening a big doorway in her side for the discharge of freight and mail-bags. Passengers would jump off. Then blankets and bundles would be passed up, and men would climb aboard, and after a few minutes the Cassiar would give a toot and loosen her rope and go off down the bay, Vancouver-wards, while we would row our boats away, and tie them up, and go to bed again.
Hand-loggers coaxing a log: rolling it over with screws and barking it.
Hand-loggers.
Sometimes the Cassiar would take another kind of passenger. There would be helped aboard, perhaps, a man limping with a foot all bundled up – chopped by his axe, most probably. Or a mattress would be lifted in by careful hands, and on the mattress one would see a man lying helpless, his broken leg rough-bandaged. Some of these injured men would have been brought long distances, in open boats, delayed maybe by stormy weather.
“You bet it ain’t no dressmaker’s dream, getting hurt so far away from any doctor,” said a man to me once; and I have known men to avoid the northern camps for that very reason. Unpleasant, to get badly hurt, without antiseptics, bandages, skill or knowledge of the proper care of wounds, four or five or six days’ journey (weather permitting) from a hospital!
I stood upon the raft one night talking to the purser of the Cassiar, asking him for news of Bill. The light streamed on me from the open doorway of the cargo-room, and I was in the way of people entering. Suddenly some one behind me called out “Gangway!” meaning that I should move aside. A queer thing happened….
There must be tones still in the dulled human voice – primeval tones, tones used of old by human animals before the words of speech had come. For example, shouts of “Help!” may merely excite your quick attention, or they may spring you to the rescue, spasm-struck, according to the tone. There was a tone in that word “Gangway!” Hearing it, I did not need to look behind me. I knew, without seeing, what was there! …
I stepped aside, and watched five men advance to put some piece of freight aboard the steamer. “Gently!” said some one … it was a great big box … it was the hand-logger killed the day before in Western Channel, hit by a falling tree. I remembered, then, that some one had told me of the accident. A quiet-looking man, cleaned up for town in rough black woollen clothes, followed the box on board – the dead man’s partner. I fell to wondering what part of earth that hand-logger had come from, and whether his relations would ever know that he was dead. The quiet suddenness, the simpleness of the death of healthy men! I had a choke in my throat, rowing home.
LIVING ON THE SONORA AT PORT BROWNING
The Sonora lay at Port Browning, Bill still delayed in town. I had found, in the lagoon behind the islands, an abandoned log that hand-loggers had cut back inthe woods and worked down to the beach and then had found streaked with rot – a log worth cutting up for steamer fuel. Forty feet long it was, and four feet through at the smaller end; over four thousand feet of board within it; worth, had it been sound, from five to eight pounds sterling according to the market price.
On this log I worked daily, in the rain, sawing it into four-foot lengths. These lengths I had to split into billets; billets that, stacked upon the beach, were fuel for future voyages of the Sonora.
Daily, about dark, the rain would come heavier, in deluge, and gusts of wind would come tearing through the trees, making a belated worker feel lonesome, making him think of warmth and dinner. So I would launch the skiff and row toward the distant lights of the hotel, near which the Sonora was anchored; the skiff, unwieldy, turning circles in the wind, blowing across the harbour. Patient work it was, reaching the Sonora. Then I would persuade the damaged cook-house stove to burn, to cook a meal, and go below and bail the steamboat with a bucket (one hundred bucketfuls), and then find drier clothes and sit at ease eating and warming myself over the smoking stove, avoiding as I could the drippings from the leaky roof. Sometimes I would have visitors.
I found a strange boat astern one evening when I returned aboard. In the cabin, wrapped in Bill’s blankets, lay a man, a stranger whose face I half remembered seeing at the hotel. He was awake, eyeing me, coolly unconcerned to see me enter; he made my anger rise. But it proved to be an ordinary matter. The man had felt the horrors coming on and had fled the hotel, taking refuge on the Sonora, as far as he could get from whisky. He was, one might say, oozing with a hysteria that he could just manage to control; the horrors can seldom get a grip upon these healthy men. Bromide and a meal or two and quiet were all he needed: a day or two later he left Port Browning on his way to work. A case like this, of a kind so often met with, shows one how decent boarding-houses would abolish half the harm of drink. Hotels are now the only stopping places for travelling or idle men; bar-rooms the only places where they may sit and wait; whisky a distraction that is simply forced upon them. A man has no fair chance.
Another evening, Ed Anderson put his head in at the cabin door and “chewed the rag” with me awhile, on his way aboard the ancient, mouldy steamboat Burt, that he and Smith and Dan Macdonnell had raised from where she last had sunk (in shallow water). “I don’t see that a woman would be anyways uncomfortable living up in these parts,” said I, thinking of the problems of my own affairs. “Here’s a feller been writing to me that no decent woman could live near a logging-camp. He ought to know, because he lives in a big town called London – not London, Ontario, but London in the Old Country. There is only decent women living in them English towns, you know.” Ed grinned; his notion of a town was different. He chewed, and considered.
“Naw,” he said – “NAW! I’ll tell you, feller. There’s a rough class of people in this country here – a rough class of people. And there’s not a one of ’em ’ud fail in respect to a lady” (lady = woman; Ed had never heard of class distinctions). “Not a Blank-Blank One” (emphatically). “You can’t say the same of many classes of men,” he reflected.
One afternoon I saw the little steamer Gipsy come tearing up the harbour and make a dashing landing at the warehouse raft, under the critical eyes of the crowd on the hotel veranda. “Ma” was steering: ma steers and cooks for pa an
d Herbert, who hand-log somewhere up Call Creek and use the Gipsy for towing logs. A jolly little bandbox of a boat, the Gipsy; 35 feet long, with newish boiler, steam-pipes the thickness of your little finger, cylinder that would go inside a large silk hat; bought, a bargain, for 800 dollars. I went aboard that evening, and sat in the clean living-room of the pilot-house and held discussion with old M‘Kay. One finds it hard to believe that so effective a worker should be over eighty years of age: wonderful old man! He was a Canadian volunteer in the American Civil War; he served in the United States Navy; he came to the Pacific Coast in ’68 and joined some rush for gold in Cariboo. He gave me anecdotes of a friend of his, a man named Rhodes, who made four fortunes, and once paid the public debt of Something County in Oregon (a matter of 160,000 dollars), and died in a poorhouse somewhere in Washington; the Governor of Oregon coming in person to fetch away the corpse for honourable burial. Then he talked of hard times he had seen, and hard times coming now. This winter would be the worst time the Coast had ever seen, he said. Most of us at Port Browning were of old M‘Kay’s opinion; the news from Vancouver kept getting worse and worse. I felt the situation must be very serious, for Bill was still in town, trying to get money. He did not even write to me.
What on earth would Carter be thinking, up at the camp? Three weeks ago the cook-house had been short of grub, and Carter had expected us to return within a week, bringing a new supply. Unless the boys had had good luck in shooting deer and goat, the camp would be starved out by now. So every time I saw a rowboat rounding the far point of shore outside Port Browning I would stop work and watch – to see if it was Carter coming, in fury at the Sonora’s delay….
One day a boat came into sight – several men in her, one man bailing. It was our rowboat, come from Carter’s camp; it made a bee-line, hurrying to the hotel. That evening Ben Morris came aboard the Sonora, finding me at my supper. He gave me the news from camp. “We came down the Inlet just a-whizzing,” he said (his breath a form of whisky), “howling north wind behind us; showed it a foot of our sail; had to take shelter once or twice. Say! Mart! Carter is talking pretty free about you fellows. What’yer been doing, staying here so long? Carter’s near starved out. Fitz and me and most of the other boys kind of got weary of that ruddy country up there. Wish we’d known times was getting so bad on the Coast; wish we’d stayed at Carter’s camp, now! Well, guess I must be getting back to the ho-tel. Fitz is good and drunk and gone to bed; most of the other boys are pretty full. There’s a card game on and lots of boose. Come along! Well, good-night!”
When Fitz and Ben Morris had sobered up I invited them to live on board the Sonora, Fitz being a great friend of mine. One night Ben came home late, after we had gone to bed. We heard him tie his boat astern. Then he opened the cabin door noisily and began to stumble down the steps. He was “good and drunk.” Fitz felt that my hospitality was being abused; an old grudge, besides, began to rankle. Without inquiry, without remonstrance, without asking or provoking the least word from Ben, Fitz, from his bunk in the black darkness of the cabin, of a sudden began to talk. At the first word Ben stiffened and ceased to move, listening; there was something worth listening to. It was not rhetoric, nor violence of swear-words, nor abuse. It was just the miracle of a plain man inspired (by some happy chance) to tell in simple words his very thoughts. Fitz spoke slowly, reflectively, in an easy, subdued voice. He sketched Ben’s character; he weighed Ben’s moral worth, and found it a poor thing, wanting. As for the actions of a hobo like Ben, they were naturally those proper to inferior men…. Fitz had been saddened by the knowledge that a man like Ben lived in his logging country. I lay awake; I would have given anything to have had that speech in writing. It was of the very essence of true oratory: simple, elegant, unanswerable.
He ceased to talk and there was silence – a long silence. Then the staggered Ben pulled himself together and jumped outside the dark cabin. He had been stunned by what had been said, by what had been implied. The reaction was furious; he shrieked:
“You——! you——! you——! come outside here and fight.”
He used the unpardonable expression that is in itself a command to “scrap.” I thought it time to awake.
“Hullo, Ben,” said I, yawning loud and stretching, “what’s up?” My friendly tone stopped him a little. “G’wan,” said Fitz, “g’home and go to bed.” Ben howled again, “come and fight” the song. “G’wan and be ashamed,” said Fitz, and rolled over to his sleep.
Ben rowed ashore, and then returned to shriek insults from his rowboat, and rowed ashore again and shouted from the beach, hysterical. We laughed till we were weary.
“This comes from being good to that sort of dirt,” moralised my friend; “he’s been treated good both by you and me, and he comes here and acts like that.” So good-tempered is Fitz where many another man would have given way, weakly, to silly violence.
VOYAGING BETWEEN HOTELS
I awoke one morning to a sound of swearing, and looking out, I saw the Prospector. A shanty, you might call it, built upon a sail-boat hull; a steamboat, now, some twenty-five feet long. Engines and bark fuel and drunken Swedish captain were stacked inside the shanty; but my old acquaintance Jim leaned from the door and gripped the bulwark of the Sonora.
“Give us some packing for the engines, Mart,” he whined tenderly; “we’re getting this’yer steamer ready for sea. Sold her to an Australian feller this morning for a hundred dollars. You might oblige us, Mart!”
Jim, I know not why, was sober….
The big sloop motor-boat from Hanson Island Hotel was lying by the warehouse raft. I watched her as I cooked my breakfast; she seemed in difficulties. There was water in her cylinders, I heard, after breakfast, when her engineer rowed over to ask my aid. Fifty dollars he offered if I would tow his boat home with the Sonora, an easy day’s work, he said.
“Fourteen miles’ towing, the labour of getting fuel, fourteen miles’ return trip in the dark,” I said; “and I suppose you know my knowledge of steam is about four weeks old?”
“Why, that’s all right,” he said, smiling at my amiable self-depreciation.
So I took on the job, and got up steam. A young man from the sloop came aboard to steer for me. We hoisted anchor and steamed up the harbour to where our tow awaited us. We took the sloop right square amidships, and dented in a plank – luckily above the water-line. My young steersman observed the scene with so great a calmness that I thought good to take the wheel myself, for the journey; and I rowed ashore and hired the still sober Jim to run the engines in my place. Jim had once worked aboard the Sonora, and knew the weak places in her machinery. Besides, he was the only engineer that I could find….
We made our tow successfully; we tied the Sonora to the Hanson Island landing-stage. Jim went ashore to get a meal. It was about three of the afternoon. I was desperately anxious to get through the narrow place in Western Channel before dark, on our return journey to Port Browning. So I fell feverishly to searching along the rocky shore; chopping tree limbs, splitting driftwood, chipping bark off logs – anything for fuel! At last, weary and furious, I went to see what Jim was doing. I found him in a crowded room, talking and waiting for his meal. He excused his idleness in a wheedling voice: “I’m faint with hunger, boy! I’ll help you by-and-by. Just you wait till I’ve had something to eat, Mart! There ain’t no hurry anyway.” He showed his Cockney origin. As I left the room, the Dohertys and Ed Anderson made true apologies. They were coming with me to Port Browning on the Sonora, they said, and they knew they ought to be helping to get wood, but until they had had their supper they felt too weak to work. They had rowed, down the Inlet, thirty miles since breakfast.
Now working in mines and logging-camps out West, a man will slowly learn a sort of tacit etiquette that Western working-men observe, often, one to the other. In the logger, for example, you may discover some punctilio – punctilio that one never hears defined in words. Listen to a logger yarning, telling about some episode in some man’s li
fe. At any moment you may be puzzled by some touch of the quaint, the unexpected, in the way the man is said to have acted; something you fail to see sufficient reason for in the story. Question the man who tells the yarn, and you learn, from his surprise, that actions that strike you as strangely unnecessary have been related by him with unconscious gusto.
Take, for a poor example, something I heard about a man named Groves. Groves hired on as “second faller” to work at Jenkins’ camp, and Jenkins put him to fell timber with Finnerty. Next day Finnerty walked into the office, asked for “his time,” was paid off, left. Jenkins took no interest in this matter of routine. He put Groves with Oregon. Next day Oregon sloped into the office, asked for his time, was paid off. Curiosity overcame the good manners of the boss. “Why on earth are you quitting, Oregon?” he asked. You may imagine Oregon looking at him with lack-lustre eyes, listless and bored by Jenkins and his question. He drawled, “Oh, well, guess I’m going to town.” Then Jenkins put Groves with Simmons and hid near where the pair were working. He watched them pulling the great long falling-saw to and fro, to and fro, as they stood, high in air, on narrow spring-boards projecting from the tree. And then he saw that Simmons was mad with the man Groves, whose heavy hands were making the saw pull hard, who was turning work to drudgery, who was spoiling the record, hurting the jaunty vanity, of a swift and clever “faller.” Then Jenkins understood why the other men had gone away, and in a dim way I understand it, too, myself; but I have hinted at the reasons with a crude lack of subtlety.
Woodsmen of the West Page 13
