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The prey of the strongest
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Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #69014.
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My Dear Baker,
Of all the men I worked with on the Canadian Pacific Railroad in the Kicking Horse Pass and on the Shushwap, when you and men like you were hustling to put it through, I am not, nowadays, in touch with one. They are, doubtless, distinguished or have gone under. Some of them, perhaps, lie in obscure graves beside the track of other roads, which, in their parlance, "broke out" when the C.P.R. was finished: when End of Track joined End of Track: when the very bottom of their world fell out because two Worlds, East and West, were united by our labour, yours and theirs and even mine. Others of them are perhaps famous. They may have some mighty mountains and a way station named after them, as you may have, for all I know: they may even be Managers! And what so great as a Manager of a Through Continental Road, after all? There are Ministers and Monarchs and other men of note, but to my mind the Managers top them all. That is by the way, and you shall not take it as flattery: the humble worker with the pick and shovel and hammer and drill and bar, like myself, cannot but think with awe of the cold clear heights in which they dwell.
Years ago, when I was toiling on another grade, in another sort of rock-cut, hewing out a trail for myself in the thick impenetrable forests of which the centre may be Fleet Street or where Publishers dwell, I came across you. And it is to my credit that I never let you go. Most men represent other men or shadows, but you represented yourself and a great part of my old life: you stood for the Grade, for the Mountains, and the Passes, for the steel rails, for the Contractors with whom I worked, for the Road, for all Railroads, for Canada and British Columbia, linked and made one at last. You know what Colonial fever is: that disease of desire which at intervals afflicts those of us who have come back out of the Wilderness. You were often the cause of it and the cure of it. Perhaps I owe you one: perhaps but for your giving me a chance of vicarious consolation in our talk, I might have laid my bones by some other railroad in the West on the illimitable fat prairies of our Canada. Therefore I offer you this book. I offer you only a sketch, a rough and incomplete sketch, of certain obscurer aspects of life in one of the finest countries in the world, a country for which I have as much hope as I have affection. I have not tried to put the Pacific Slope into a pannikin. To cram British Columbia into a volume is as easy as trying to empty Superior with a spoon. For it was a full country when I knew it: when your Big Bosses came along with drills and dynamite and knocked the Rockies and the Selkirks into shape to let your Railroad through. In those days the World emptied many thousand of its workers into your big bucket, and in that bucket I was one drop. I had as partners, as tilikums, men from the Land of Everywhere: not a quarter, hardly a country, of the round world but was represented in the great Parliament of the Pick and Shovel and Axe that decreed the Road, the Great Road, the one Great Road of all!
I have seen many countries, as you know, but none can ever be to me what B.C. was when I worked there. It fizzed and fumed and boiled and surged. It was in a roar: it hummed: it was like the Cañon when the grey Fraser from the North comes down to Lytton and smothers the blue Thompson in its flood. We lived in those days: we worked in those days: we didn't merely exist or think or moon or fool around. We were no 'cultus' crowd. We lit into things and dispersed the earth. Some day, it may be, I shall do another book to try and recall the odours of the majestic slain forests and the outraged hills when your live Locomotives hooted in the Passes and wailed to see the Great Pacific. In the meantime I offer you this, which deals only incidentally with your work, and takes for its subjects a Sawmill and the life we lived who worked in one on the lower Fraser, when we and the River retired from the scene that to-day ends in busy Vancouver and yet spreads across the Seas.
It is possible that you will say that there is too much violence in this story, seeing that it is laid in British Columbia and not South of the Forty Ninth Parallel. Well, I do not hold you responsible for the violence. Even in law-abiding B.C. man will at times break out and paint the Town red without a metaphor. There is a great deal of human nature in man, even when suppressed by Judge Begbie: and Siwashes will be Siwashes, especially when "pahtlum," or drunk, as they say in the elegant Chinook with which I have adorned a veracious but otherwise plain story. Take it from me that there is not an incident, or man, or woman in it who is not more or less painted from real life. That amiable contractor for whom we all had quite an affection, whom I have thinly veiled under the name of Vanderdunk, is no exception. He will, I feel sure, forgive me, but some of the others might not and they are veiled rather more deeply. This I owe to myself, for I may revisit B.C. again and I cannot but remember that, for some things I said of folks out there many years ago, I was threatened with the death, so dear to the Western Romancer, which comes from being hung by the neck from a Cottonwood. If ever I do see that country again, I hope it will be with you. As my friend Chihuahua would have said, "Quien sabe?" My best regards to you, tilikum! Here's how!
Your sincere friend, MORLEY ROBERTS.
As Pitt River Pete spoke he entered the humming Fraser Mill by the big side door chute down which all the heavier sawed lumber slid on its way to the yard. He had climbed up the slope of the chute and for some moments had stayed outside, though he looked in, for the sun was burning bright on white sawed lumber and the shining river, so that the comparative gloom of the Mill made him pause. But now he entered, and seeing Skookum Charlie helping the Wedger-off, he spoke, and Skookum, who could not hear in the uproar, knew that he said "Klahya."
The Mill stretched either way, and each end was open to the East and the West. It was old and grimed and covered with the fine meal of sawdust. Great webs hung up aloft in the dim roof. In front of Pete was the Pony Saw which took the lumber from the great Saws and made it into boards and scantling, beams and squared lumber. To Pete's right were the Great Saws, the father and mother of the Mill, double, edge to edge, mighty in their curved inset teeth, wide in gauge and strong whatever came to them. As they sang and screamed in chorus, singing always together, the other Saws chimed in: the Pony Saw sang and the Great Trimmer squealed and the Chinee Trimmer whined. Every Saw had its note, its natural song, just as naturally as a bird has: each could be told by the skilled hearer. Pete listened as he stepped inside and put his back against the studs of the wall-plates, out of the way of the hive of man, he only being a drone that hour. And the Big Hoes, Father and Mother of the Mill, droned in the cut of logs and said (or sang) that what they cut was Douglas Fir, and that it was tough. But the Pony Saw said that the last big log had been Spruce. The smell of spruce said "spruce" just as the Saw sang it. And the Trimmers screamed opposing notes, for they cut across the grain. Beneath the floor where the chorus of the Saws worked was the clatter of the lath-mill and the insistent squeal of the Shingle Saw, with its recurrent shriek of pride, "I cut a shingle, phit, I cut a shingle, phit!"
The whole Mill was a tuned instrument, a huge sounding board. There was no discord, for any discord played its part: it was one organic harmony, pleasing, fatiguing, satisfying; any dropped note was missed: if the Lath Mill stayed in silence, something was wanting, when the Shingler said nothing, the last fine addition to the music fell away. And yet the one harmony of the Mill was a background for the soloes of the Saws, for the great diapason of the Hoes, for the swifter speech of the Pony, for the sharp cross note of the Trimmers. The saws sang according to the log, to its nature, to its growth: either for the butt or the cleaner wood. In a long log the saws intoned a recitative: a solemn service. And beneath them all was the mingled song of the belts, which drove the saws, hidden in darkness, and between floors. Against the song of the Mill the voice of man prevailed nothing.
When any man desired to speak to another he went close to him and shouted. They had a silent speech for measurements in feet; the hand, the fingers, the rubbed thumb and finger, the clenched hand with thumb up, with thumb down, called numbers for the length of boards, of scantling, what not.
"Eleven feet!" said the rubbing thumb and forefinger.
If any spoke it was about the business of the Mill.
"Fine cedar this," said Mac to Jack, "fine cedar--special order--for----" a lost word.
But for the most part no one spoke but the saws. Men whistled with pursed lips and whistled dumbly: they sang too, but the songs were swallowed in the song of the Saws. They began at six and ran till noon unless a breakdown happened and some belt gave way. But none had given this day and it was ten o'clock. The men were warm and willing with work, their muscles worked warm and easy. It was grand to handle the lever and to beat in the iron dogs: to use the maul upon the wedges as the Saws squealed. They worked easy in their minds. They looked up and smiled unenvious of idle Pitt River Pete. They knew work was good, their breath felt clean: their hearts beat to the rhythm of the Mill.
As mills go it was a small one. It could not compete with the giants of the Inlet and the Sound who served Australia, which grows no good working wood, or South America. It sent no lumber to Brisbane, no boards to Callao or Valparaiso. It served the town of New Westminster and the neighbouring ranches: the little growth of townships on the River up to Hope and Yale. Sometimes it sent a cargo to Victoria or 'Squimault. A schooner even now lay alongside the wharf, piled high with new sawed stuff, that the saws had eaten as logs and spewed as lumber.
As logs! Aye, in the pool below, in the Boom, which is a chained log corral for swimming logs, a hundred great logs swam. Paul (from nowhere, but a tall thin man) was the keeper and their herder. He chose them for the slaughter, and went out upon them as they wallowed, and with a long pike stood upon the one to be sacrificed and drove it to the spot whence it should climb to the altar: a long slope with an endless cable working above and below it. He made it fast with heavy dogs, with chains may be, and then spoke to one above who clapped the Friction on the Bull-Wheel and hove the log out of the water, as if it were a whale for flensing. It went up into the Mill and was rolled upon the skids, and waited. It trembled and the Mill trembled.
"Now, now, that log, boys. Hook in, drive her, roll her, heave and she's on! Drive in the dogs and she goes!"
Oh, but it was a good sight and the roar was filling. Pete's eyes sparkled: he loved it: loved the sound and the song and itched to be again on the log with the maul. Those who speak of sport--why, let them fell a giant, drive it, boom it, drag it and cut it up! To brittle a monarch of the forest and disembowel it of its boards: its scantlings: its squared lumber: posts, fences, shingles, laths, pickets, Oho! Pete knew how great it was.
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