The Sel barkskins saw the poll ax give way to the double-bitted ax, the double-bitted ax give way to the crosscut saw, the old up-and-down gang saws give way to circular saws and double circulars, to immensely long steel band saws that could cut the moon in half if they loaded it on a conveyor, saw the steady oxen give way to smart horses, horses replaced by stinking donkey engines and Shay-geared locomotives. As roads punched into forest distant from water, the tumultuous river drives ended in favor of trucks and roads. Loggers began to tend whirling, thumping, boiling, crashing machinery. The Sels suffered accidents and deaths in a profession where a man had to be watchful and lucky to live more than seven years.
The huge trees of the west were hard for puny axmen. It took years to learn how to handle the big stuff and slow learners did not have time to stay alive. But technology shaped crazy daydreams into real hissing screaming machines that leveled the last of the ancient forests on the continent.
After the talking stick had been thrown into the fire the young men left to take up woods work. Etienne Sel and Mike Jacko tried to watch out for their sons, but the boys resented a parental eye and escaped to more distant camps. Mike Jacko’s son Blony, fifteen winters, and his younger brother, Pollo, started on a cutting crew for an outfit in Queens County. Blony had an inborn knack for the ax. When he wasn’t chopping, Blony and a young Swede named Erto peeled bark with spudding irons made of old carriage springs, handled and honed. On his first drive Blony discovered he liked the dodging, leaping river work. He quickly understood the geometries of jams and relished picking them apart. Twice he fell in among the churning logs but knew better than to fight toward the shore — better to travel downstream with the sticks.
But still the hateful, cramping reservation was too close and Blony and Pollo moved west, worked for a winter in Idaho, where driving on cranky, twisted rivers was still the way to get logs to a sawmill. In the spring some men in the camp kept going to California, Oregon, Washington, where they said the trees were three hundred feet high.
A man he only knew as Shirt said to Blony, “Sonny, I’ll learn you about them trees. The first Maine logger sailed up the coast and come near the shore seen a solid wooden wall a hunderd mile long with green stuff up around the clouds. Couldn’t believe what he seen, fell down in a fit. He couldn’t believe it. Nobody could believe it. But it was true. And that’s where I’m goin.”
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Blony and Pollo were frightened the first time they saw the donkey engine at work. The engine was lashed to several stout trees and its steel haul cable lying loose and quiet on the ground. Five men stood casually around the engine. A signal came from somewhere distant and the puncher threw his lever; the donkey engine came to life. They watched the cable drum turn and the cable itself begin to wind on, tightening and tightening. The engine roared louder and there was a distant snapping of branches, a few faraway shouts, and in minutes the crackling and ground-shaking thumps grew louder and then out of the slash came a monstrous thirty-foot log springing into the air like a decapitated chicken in its final manic leaps, smashing down on stumps so hard they splintered, rebounding and coming straight for the donkey engine. “Holy Jesus!” yelled Blony to the delight of the puncher — the two greenhorns ran for their lives, followed by the haw-haws of the donkey crew. They looked back. The terrible log rested quietly a few feet short of the donkey engine. Pollo never imagined that a few months later he would be assigned as one of the steam kettle’s crew and that an hour after he began work, ignorantly standing near a lazy curve in the cable already fastened to a faraway log, his left foot would be amputated by the tautened wire minutes after the engineer hit the lever with the heel of his callused hand.
His brother, Blony, and the engineer carried him spouting blood down to the bunkhouse. The second cook, Andre Mallet, served the camp as medic. He rested Pollo’s leg on a junk of wood to elevate it, bound the bleeding stump above the ankle with a clean dishtowel soaked in melted lard, gave Pollo copious amounts of his medicinal whiskey for the pain and said he’d look in after the dinner hour. He sent Blony back with a cup of hot partridge broth and half a whiskey-soaked cake. This, in addition to certain Mi’kmaw sedatives — crinkleroot and lady’s slipper root — that their mother had given Blony “just in case,” and the shock, shut Pollo down like a dry oil lamp. He slept. There followed weeks of pain and whiskey but slowly he began to heal.
“You stay here until you get around, but then I need your bunk for a workingman,” the boss said. One of the choppers whittled out a pair of crutches. He was moving around the bunkhouse when Andre Mallet came in. “Hey, kid, boss cook cleared it so’s you can help in the kitchen.” What could he do but say yes? After a year he could scuttle around wearing a logger-whittled prosthesis. He was becoming a cook and some kind of permanent job might be there. But then Blony’s death hit hard and he was the one who had to write the letter home.
Blony had wanted to be a river driver, but water work in Washington was salty, herding and corralling logs in tidewater. Because he was young he was a choker setter, the lowest job in the camp. After a few weeks in the high-lead logging camp he discovered a job even more daring than river work. He watched Napoleon Tessier, a skinny little Frenchman wearing climbing spurs and laden with saw, ax and rope, rush ten or twelve feet up the trunk of a big Douglas fir, dig in and casually flip his climbing loop to a higher position, scamper on again toward the top of a two-hundred-foot-tall tree. As he climbed he cut the limbs as flush as possible with his long-handled double-bitted ax, finally stopped thirty feet below the leader. His rope secure around the naked trunk and himself, his spurs jammed deep, he axed off the top (as large as a second-growth Maine pine); it tipped down with a crack and hiss, the wind rushing through the needles of the falling section. The bare spar, with Tessier hanging on, whipped back and forth. Tessier let out a screech and waved one arm, like a wild horse rider. Then he slid and kicked down so swiftly he blurred. On the ground he took a swig of cold tea, ate a handful of sugar and went back up to rig the pulley block, for Tessier was a rigger as well as a climber. When the job was done and the pulley block and guy lines in place they were ready to move giants.
Blony wanted to do this, to become a climber. He begged the boss to let him try. This man, a big perfect Swede with a mouth full of tobacco, did not like Blony or Pollo because they were East Coasters as well as half-breeds. But Blony kept asking, and finally Tessier said aloud that he ought to let the kid try, climbers were not plentiful, and finally the boss said, “Go ahead, Pocahontas.”
Blony put on Tessier’s spurs, buckled on the belt, tied his ax to it, got the climbing rope around the tree and himself, stuck his spurs into wood and tried to move up as Tessier had, to flip the loop up as Tessier had. Higher and higher, jamming in, flipping the rope and he reached the first branches.
Tessier, who was coaching, called up, “Don’t cut your rope.” Men had been known to make a quick misplaced slash and cut their own loop, a one-time-only mistake. Blony kept on, strong quick blows, paying no attention to the feathery scratching branch tips, up again, flip, chop, continue.
“High enough,” yelled Tessier. “Top it.” Blony topped it. The swinging ride as the limber spar swiped back and forth was the reward. He could see the distant ocean, he was above the world.
“Très bien! Done pretty good for a first climb,” said Tessier. “Slow, but you done good.” Blony couldn’t get enough spar-tree climbing, and the more he did the faster he moved, trying to beat Tessier, who lately had struck a pose standing atop the fresh-trimmed spar while it was still quivering. So Blony had a stunt in mind as he climbed his last tree. Up he went, as squirrel-like as Tessier and about to do a trick that would show up the mustachioed Frenchman. He planned to top his tree, lift himself on top, stand on his head and whistle, but as the heavy-branched top he had just cut hinged over, the spar split and caught Blony in the cleft as a clothespin grips a tea towel. His scream was short, the air squeezed out of his collapsed lungs. It was Tessier’s dreadful job to climb up and cut the spar a second time, this time below the dead boy, whose urine-drenched boots dangled in his face. Blony fell, still in the clasp of the Douglas fir, and they buried him that way.