A Story of the Big Timber

A STORY OF THE BIG TIMBER.

HE snow was six feet deep on the level around Lavery's camp. There was a little opening in the evergreen canopy of the forest overhead, and the stars in the cold zenith shivered as one looked at them through the blast of heat and smoke that rose from the chimney. I stood many a night at the door of the big log shanty and saw the sparks shoot up and crackle in the leeward boughs of hemlock. It was forty miles to the clearing on the southern side of the camp, but at every point in the northern semicircle of the compass there was a trackless and unmeasured deep of timber. At a certain opening in the ridge, near Lavery's, one could look ten miles across a rolling sea of green parted by the frozen waters of the Ottawa that lay like a belt of while in the valley. The “big skid” flanked the river at the end of the trail down which “hawbuck” and teamster started in sulky silence Indore daylight, and up which they came hallooing merrily at supper-time. Then the “hawbucks” stalled their oxen in the big shell, and the teamsters put away the horses that came in hoary with frost. I was the cook's helper at Lavery's and had won fleeting fame in the tossing of flapjacks. My hand had lifted the flapjack to a proud position of indispensability on the upper Ottawa. For the rest, beans and molasses, salt pork and potatoes. bread and butter and apple-sauce were the most popular items in the “filling.” The table was spread before the roaring fire of logs every evening, and the men sat down to eat in their shirt-sleeves. The keen air went to their blood like wine in the work of the day, and the shanty roared with laughter as they ate. Songs were the solace of the evening hours, while the big lumbermen lay lounging on the bunks or sat in easy attitudes around the fire. The brogue of Scotch and Irish and the quaint dialect of Frenchmen mingled in their talk. There was the brute majesty of the lion in these men as they shook the mighty muscles of breast and arm in their laughter or when the furrows moved and tightened on their brows in the stern dignity of anger. There were a number of men who could sing doleful ballads, and one who often harangued them with mock-oratory that provoked noisy applause. The ancient game of “whack Sal,” in which two men, blindfolded, struck at each other with straps, was sometimes proposed, but not unless there had been drinking, in which old grudges were apt to be revived.

These northern woodsmen love the smell of powder and the feel of a gun. It is an inborn, overruling passion with most of them. Generally an idle hand had a gun in it, and the itching palm was one that had long been deprived of its birthright. These godless men of the forest spent their Sundays, in good weather, hunting on snow-shoes, and the roar of their guns rushed through the timber and bellowed in the distant waste. It happened sometimes that a luckless hunter ventured too far from camp and never got back for one reason or another. I heard much of one “poor Tom” who had gone away hunting of a Sunday, the winter before, and met his end somewhere in the great wilderness. Occasionally two or more of the men would wake in the dead of night when the timber-wolves were howling and get up and peer out of the window and speak of “poor Tom.”

One cold Sunday morning in midwinter, I started over snow for Long Pond with a brawny Scotchman known as McVeigh. That was four miles beyond the Ottawa, and hard walking in the light snow. We wounded a caribou on the farther side of the river and followed its trail of crimson for miles to the top of the great ridge in the north, and then westward through the burnt timber. The sky was clouded over and the cold unusually severe. McVeigh seemed to know every tree in the forest, and we were continually coming upon landmarks that reminded him of a story. We had stopped a moment to light our pipes and were striding with long steps through the soft snow. The woods were silent, and I could hear only the creak of our snow-shoes and McVeigh puffing at his pie. He halted suddenly and turned his ear to listen. I could hear then a faint but growing sound in the far distance back of us.

“It's wolves,” said the old woodsman, “an' they're on this line o' blood. We'd better leave it an' make for the top o' the ridge.”

We turned to the south at once, intending to cross the ridge and make our way down the valley to camp. It was a stiffer climb than we expected, however, with the snow-shoes, and even before we got to the top that fearful echo was ringing in the near woods. Little avalanches of snow fell on our heads as we hurried in the underbrush. We strode through the open timber at the top of our speed, and as I turned to my companion I noticed a mighty serious look in his face. He stopped suddenly and looked back a moment.

”They're out for man-meat to-day—that's sure,” he said. ”I'm thinkin' we must 'a' got some o' that blood on our shoes.”

There was a great slash in the timber right before us. The steep southern side had been stripped quite bare by the lumbermen for a distance above and below the track of our snow-shoes. The line of the ridge swerved northward some ten rods at this point and then came back, describing a sort of oxbow, walled with rock, a hundred feet or more in width, and the sides of it fell sharply to the river valley fifty feet below. From Sunday to Sunday the sky had been thick with snow that flew before the dry wind like down. Every flake that fell in the big slash had been driven to this rocky gore by the wind coming up the river out of the east. There was full fifty feet of snow in the deep pit, which, under a slender crust, lay light and dry as a heap of feathers. On the far side the trees stood to their boughs in the drift. The great gloomy cavern under the canopy of the forest was choked with snow. McVeigh picked up a fallen branch of dead pine as we came to the bend, then cautiously stepped out upon the dome-like top of the great drift. I was a mere boy of eighteen, and but for the coolness of my companion I should have lost my head and probably my life.

“Hold there! Step careful, now,” said he, as I came running after him, frightened at the near sound of the wolves.

“Ye might go t' yer ears if ye broke it here,” said McVeigh, and, as he spoke, he thrust the long rod of timber down into the heap of snow.

“See there!” he continued; “the weight o' yer finger sends it down out o' sight. We'll stop an' rest awhile an' ye'll see a bit o' fun here.”

We crept, with shortened steps, to the white summit of snow near the far side of the pit, and its slender sheathing cracked and crumbled under our shoe-frames, though, fortunately, it was strong enough to hold us.

“By the living Lord!” said McVeigh, in a sharp voice, as we turned about, “look there! Stand still now! Don't move!”

There was a fearsome ring and echo in the air as the gray pack wallowed up the top of the ridge in the dead timber. There was near a score of them, so McVeigh claimed—and he would have it always that he had counted them—with legs so long, as I now remember, a fair-sized dog could walk under their bellies, and they ran in a close bunch, the snow-spray flying over them. They were the big, gray timber-wolves. Now that the danger had come close, I was quite cool, and when they stopped at the brink I actually began to count them. It seems incredible as I think of it now after all these years.

“The leaders give a jump an' the whole pack o' them stopped when I hollered,” said McVeigh in telling the story, when we were safe in camp. “Then they made for us, jumpin' clear every move o' their legs. There was a fall o' six feet at the edge o' the pit an' they jumped in a bunch. The big heap o' snow trembled when they hit it an' they sunk as if it had been water. We heard a smothered roar an' seen the splinters o' crust fly an' the white snow shut over 'em. Then it stirred like the boil in a pot an' caved an' ran down at the break like sand in a hollow, an' then, praise God! it was still.” That is the end of the story.

We got to camp as quickly as our legs would take us. and told how we wallowed the wolves. The boys listened with much interest, but not a man would believe us! The first big thaw that came, we took them over and showed them what there was there in the deep of the pit.