“That’s the _clack-clack_ you hear when the counter detects
radioactivity. Look how sensitive it is.” He held one of the black boxes
near his wrist watch, and it began to chatter vigorously.
“Holy cow!” Jerry exclaimed, leaping backward.
Russ laughed. “That’s the infinitesimal grain of radium in the luminous
dial. So, you can feel secure that it will warn us if we enter an area
where there’s any unusual radioactivity.”
He rummaged around in the carton and pulled out two canvas straps.
“These hook on the ends so the counter can be slung across your shoulder
like a camera.”
Prince came over and sniffed suspiciously at the plastic boxes. “Nothing
to eat there, feller,” Sandy told him.
“Eat! That’s a good idea,” Jerry said. “I’m famished.”
Quiz was disgusted. “Only Jerry could think of food at a time like this.
Who cares about eating when there’s an A-bomb lying right at your
door-step?”
“I hope _not_,” Jerry said, looking around with an expression of
exaggerated horror.
“Jerry’s right,” Russ said firmly. “The first order of the day is to
pack away a substantial breakfast. We may be tramping through the woods
until dark. Let’s go upstairs and see what Ranger Fellows has cooking.”
He gathered up the two Geiger counters and walked to the tower.
Prince whined reprovingly as they left him at the foot of the steps.
“I’ll bring you down a bowl of chow right away,” Sandy promised.
They were halfway up the stairs when a sudden thought struck Jerry.
“Say, Mr. Steele, what would happen if one of those big lightning bolts
hit that atomic bomb square on the nose?”
Russ Steele’s face contracted in a sour grimace. “I don’t know. And stop
trying to spoil my appetite.”
CHAPTER SIX
A Futile Search
Immediately after breakfast, they set out north from the ranger station.
“We’ll be back in three days,” Russ Steele told Dick Fellows. “Using
your station as a base, we’re going to cover all the territory between
the Black River and the Rapid River, from Red Lake to the Canadian
border.”
“Good luck,” the ranger said. “I hope I can be of some help to you.”
Russ shook the young man’s hand. “You have already, Dick.”
As they started through the woods, with Prince crashing through the
underbrush ahead of them, Sandy was pessimistic. “How much ground do we
have to cover, Uncle Russ?”
“One hundred and twenty square miles or thereabouts. I’m not sure
exactly.”
“It seems so hopeless,” Sandy said. “I read in the paper about an
airplane that crashed in the north woods with three men aboard and they
didn’t find it for four months. A bomb—even an A-bomb—must be
considerably smaller than a two-engine plane.”
Russ nodded grimly. “It’s a big order, all right. But don’t forget,
there are, or soon will be, hundreds of teams like ours, each covering
an assigned sector. If we’re all thorough and painstaking, we’ll find
the bomb sooner or later.”
“What about air patrols, General Steele?” Quiz asked. “Why can’t the Air
Force retrace the route of the B-52 with another plane? Maybe they could
spot the bomb.”
Russ Steele jerked his thumb up at the sky as a wedge of pursuit ships
droned overhead. “They’ve been doing that for two days, but it’s a long
shot. First of all, no one knows precisely what route that big bomber
was flying after the radio conked out. Secondly, it’s pretty difficult
to spot objects from the air, especially in heavily forested country
like this. An object can drop through this thick canopy of foliage and
leave no more trace than if it had fallen into the ocean. No, I’m afraid
this is a job for the foot soldiers.”
“FOR-ward MARCH!” Jerry bellowed in a good imitation of a drill
sergeant. “Hut-two-three-four....”
Russ laughed. “I’m afraid this operation calls for a loose formation,
Jerry. Suppose we maintain an interval of about fifteen hundred feet
between each two men. That will keep us within easy hailing distance of
each other. I’ll be on the right flank with one of the Geiger counters.
You boys can draw lots to see who takes the left flank with the other
counter.” He grinned. “That poor guy will have to walk a little more
than a mile before we even get started.”
“I’ll be the fall guy,” Sandy volunteered. “I’m in better shape than
Jerry or Quiz.”
Jerry sniffed. “Show-off! But I’m not proud,” he added hastily. “Go
ahead.”
“That’s settled, then,” Russ said. “Our direction will be due north. You
all have compasses; check them regularly. All right, we may as well get
started.” He unstrapped the walk-o-meter from his leg and handed it to
Sandy. “You better take this to pace off the intervals. Quiz, Jerry and
I will wait until you’ve reached your position. Then you sing out and
the boys will pass the word down the line. If any of you see anything
unusual, sound off and sit tight until I get there.” He pointed to the
black box Sandy had slung over one shoulder. “And if that Geiger counter
begins to chatter, backtrack fast until it stops.”
Time passed quickly for Sandy. He was a little lonely at first, but it
didn’t last long. There were so many fascinating things to be seen in
the forest when you were alert, he realized. Chipmunks and squirrels
spied on him from tree hollows. He passed within two feet of a rabbit
burrowed into a pile of leaves. A lizard that blended so perfectly into
the bark of a tree that it was invisible from more than twelve inches
away didn’t loose its rigidity, even when he touched its tail. After the
first hour, Prince came bounding through the brush to keep him company.
An hour later, the dog went off to join somebody else. At regular
intervals, the boys would call out to each other, though an attempt by
Sandy and Jerry to keep up a running conversation soon left both of them
hoarse. They had no chance to get bored. The enormity and excitement of
the mission they were performing saw to that.
At noon, Russ Steele called a halt for lunch. “Stay where you are,” he
called to Quiz. “Break out a K-ration. Pass the word on to Jerry and
Sandy.”
Five hours later, they rendezvoused on the banks of a small river.
“We’ll camp here for tonight,” Russ said. “We should make the Canadian
border sometime tomorrow afternoon. There’s a logging camp up there,
Quiz, so you’ll get a chance to see lumberjacks at work.”
“If I’m still alive,” Quiz said wearily. “I feel as if I’d walked a
hundred miles today.”
Russ grinned. “Not quite. Maybe twenty.”
Jerry looked up from a heaping mess kit of beef stew. “Twenty miles!
Say, that’s pretty good. Bet you never figured you’d ever be walking
that far, eh, Sandy?”
“I’ll say.” Sandy, who had removed his shoes and socks, lifted one bare
foot and blew on it. “The soles of my feet feel all puffed up.”
“Before you go to bed soak them in the river,” his uncle told him.
“Matter of fact, we can all use a good bath.”
After they had finished eating, the boys teamed up to wash the mess kits
and pans. Then they stripped off their clothes on the river bank.
“Last one in gets KP tomorrow night,” Russ said. He dove off a small
bluff, cleaving the water in a perfect racing dive. Prince was right at
his heels, yelping excitedly.
“Boy, that dog sure loves to swim,” Jerry said.
Russ surfaced and flicked water at the Doberman with the back of his
hand. “He’s a regular porpoise. Come on in, boys; it’s great.”
Sandy walked gingerly down the steep bank and stepped into knee-deep
water. “Wow, is it cold!”
“Sissy,” Jerry laughed and went splashing past him. “Yipes! It’s ice!”
“Well, don’t kick it all over me!” Sandy roared.
Quiz gritted his chattering teeth. “The only way to get into ice water
is _fast_.” He belly-whopped between Jerry and Sandy, spraying them from
head to foot.
“You sneak,” Jerry gasped.
“C’mon,” Sandy laughed. “Let’s duck him.” He dove in after Quiz.
After a few minutes they began to enjoy their bath thoroughly. “It’s not
so cold,” Sandy said.
Jerry flopped on his back and blew a stream of water into the air like a
whale. “We’re just too numb to feel it. Look, I’m turning blue.”
“I don’t care. It feels like heaven after hiking twenty miles through
the woods with the temperature at an even hundred.”
Russ swam over to them. “How do you know it was a hundred?”
“I’ve got a thermometer,” Quiz told him. “In the little glade where I
ate lunch, it was one hundred degrees Fahrenheit at a quarter past
twelve.”
Russ gazed somberly toward the forest. “If it doesn’t rain soon—well—I
don’t know.”
A purple twilight was settling rapidly over the river as they toweled
their bodies briskly and dressed. By the time they finished putting up
the pup tents, it was dark. But even darkness brought little relief from
the heat that night. And the air was alive with mosquitoes, a few of
which managed to penetrate the netting.
“How are we going to get any rest?” Jerry groaned. “It’s too hot to
climb into our sleeping bags and if we lie on top of ’em we’ll be eaten
alive.”
Quiz sat up and searched through his pack. “I considered this
eventuality.” He held up a small aerosol bomb. “DDT. Shut your eyes and
hold your breath for a minute, Jerry.” He pointed it up in the air and
pressed down the button until the little enclosure was thick with white
mist.
“I always knew you were a genius, Quiz,” Sandy yelled over from the
other tent. “How about lending it to us?”
“Help yourself.” Quiz reached under the netting and rolled it over to
his friend.
Jerry sighed blissfully as Quiz lay back. “That did the trick, Quiz, old
boy. You sure saved the day—the night, I mean.”
Quiz grumbled as he rolled over on his side. “If I had _really_ been
smart, I would have brought along an inflatable mattress.” But two
minutes later he was asleep.
The new day dawned as bright and hot as the previous one. They broke
camp shortly after 8:00 A.M. and resumed their trek north at the same
500-yard intervals. The morning passed uneventfully.
At noon, Sandy relayed a question down the line to his uncle: “When do
we eat?”
Russ Steele asked the boys whether they could hold out for another hour.
“I think we can make the logging camp,” he explained. A chorus of “ayes”
answered him.
Shortly after one o’clock, Sandy heard a loud crash in the distance.
Right after that Russ Steele rallied the boys around him.
“We’re approaching the logging camp,” he told them. “That noise you just
heard was a tree being felled. Sandy, we’d better get these Geiger
counters out of sight. No use inviting a lot of questions that we can’t
answer. We’ll wrap them up in our shelter halves.”
When that had been taken care of, Russ led the way forward. Gradually
the trees began to thin out and diminish in size.
“This is a new stand,” Russ explained. “Nowadays, logging companies do
as much replanting as they do cutting. With proper methods of
conservation, they hope to undo some of the mistakes of their
predecessors.”
A quarter of a mile farther on, they emerged into a large clearing in
which a half dozen low, sprawling buildings were situated. There was a
great deal of activity in the camp. Across the clearing, a convoy of
trucks jammed with lumberjacks pulled out of a dirt road and drew up in
front of one building where a long line was forming. Whooping and
laughing, the lumberjacks vaulted the tail gates of the trucks and piled
over the side-boards.
Russ Steele smiled. “Chow time. That’s the mess hall.”
“What’s their hurry?” Quiz asked.
“I guess you get mighty hungry swinging an ax,” Sandy said. “I read once
that a logger eats about five thousand calories a day to keep him going,
as compared with the three thousand that the average man needs.”
Jerry grunted. “My old man says I must eat close to ten thousand a day,
every time he has to pay the grocery bill.”
“Ten thousand dollars’ worth a day?” Sandy said with a straight face.
“That sounds about right for you, chow hound.”
Jerry clipped the tall, slender boy on the arm with his knuckles.
“Calories, you dope! Don’t get smart.”
“I’ll bet neither one of you knows what a calorie is?” Quiz said dryly.
Sandy’s forehead puckered up thoughtfully. “I think I do. It’s a unit of
energy, isn’t it?”
“That’s close,” Quiz admitted. “It’s the amount of heat—heat is
energy—required to raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree
Centigrade.”
Jerry nudged Russ Steele. “Bet you didn’t know that, General Steele?”
Russ smiled good-naturedly. “I had a vague idea it was something like
that. Let’s find the office. I used to know the foreman of this camp.”
The boys eyed the lumberjacks admiringly as they walked by the mess
hall. Most of them were stripped to the waist, their muscles bunching
and rippling in their sun-bronzed arms and torsos as they moved about.
The cuffs of their sweat-blackened levis were tucked into the tops of
hobnailed boots.
“Let’s recruit a couple of these bruisers for the Valley View football
team. Our line would be a stone wall for sure,” Jerry whispered to
Sandy.
Russ took them around the end of the mess hall to a small frame shack in
the middle of the camp. A big collie was sitting in the open doorway.
Instinctively, Sandy reached down and got a hold on Prince’s collar.
“They won’t fight,” Russ told him. “They’re old friends.”
The collie, recognizing Russ, came bounding out of the shack and leaped
up on his chest, trying to lick his face. Russ pummeled him in the ribs
playfully. “Bruce, old feller, how are you?” He looked up as a short,
squat, bald-headed lumberjack appeared in the doorway. “Well, Jonas! I
figured they would have retired you by this time.”
The man’s broad face lit up. “Russ Steele! You old dogface! What are you
doing here this time of year?”
“Brought my nephew and a couple of his buddies up on a camping trip.
Boys, I’d like you to meet Jonas Driscoll, the toughest
bull-of-the-woods who ever swung an ax.”
After the introductions, Jonas took them through the back door of the
mess hall while the two dogs chased each other around the compound.
“I’ll have Cookie fix them up a grand feed from the left-overs,” he
said.
Sandy felt self-conscious as Jonas cut in at the head of the line and
picked up metal compartment trays and silverware for each of them.
“Won’t those other guys get sore?” he asked, as they walked away from
the serving table.
Jonas laughed. “Naw, you’re company. Anyway, they’d be scared I’d
flatten ’em if they kicked.”
There were about twenty wooden tables with benches running down each
side of the mess hall. Jonas led them to a table at the rear that was
almost empty. Salt- and pepper-shakers and clean cups were stacked in
the middle of each table. As they sat down, Jonas motioned to one of the
mess boys, a gangly youth about sixteen. “Let’s have a couple of
pitchers of iced tea here, son.”
Jerry gazed bug-eyed at the five pork chops and the mounds of mashed
potatoes, vegetables and apple sauce heaped up on his tray. “This is
lunch?”
Jonas Driscoll’s blue eyes twinkled. “Just a light snack, son. Wait till
you eat supper.”
“Oh boy!” Jerry breathed rapturously.
“You ought to sign him on one of your crews, Jonas,” Russ suggested.
“He’s light on muscle—except between the ears,” Sandy said, “but he’s
got the appetite for it.”
“I can’t get sore with all this lovely food in front of me,” Jerry said,
as he went to work with knife and fork.
“You been a lumberjack long, Mr. Driscoll?” Sandy inquired.
“Fifty years last May. Started in as a cook’s helper when I was
thirteen. And I expect to be at it another forty.”
Russ looked across at his old friend fondly. “Logging is still a rugged
business, but nothing like it used to be in Jonas’ prime.”
“I’ll tell the world,” the foreman agreed. “Electricity and the gasoline
engine have taken all the work out of it.”
A kibitzing lumberjack at the end of the table held up his hands, thick
with calluses. “Is that _so_! Well, suppose you tell ’em where I got
_these_!”
Jonas laughed good-naturedly. “You’re right, French. Them bulldozers and
power saws don’t help you sawyers much—not in this camp anyway.” He
turned to the boys. “They’re the boys who swing the axes and pull the
big cross-cut saws.”
“Don’t all lumberjacks cut down trees?” Quiz wanted to know.
“Not exactly. There’s a lot of different jobs in logging just like in
any other business. There’s sawyers, high riggers, yarders and river
hogs. After lunch, I’ll take you out to the stand we’re cutting now and
show you around.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Birling Match
In spite of the fact that Jonas Driscoll kept insisting that all the
glamour had gone out of logging, Sandy and the boys found the business
of cutting timber fascinating. The husky lumberjacks were amazingly
thorough and efficient. Jonas pointed out one massive pine, at least
three feet in diameter, that seemed to be the object of heated
discussion among the sawyer gang. Long strings with leaded weights
dangling at the ends were fixed on the trunk at various heights to
determine the tree’s angle to the ground.
“Them plumb lines help ’em figure out which way that old feller would
fall naturally,” Jonas explained. “Then they got to take the wind into
account and the distribution of the foliage, plus a few other things.
After that the gang boss decides how to make it fall where he wants it
to.”
“What difference does it make where it falls?” Jerry asked.
“Well,” Jonas drawled, “a big feller like that could squash a whole crew
if it fell wrong, for one thing. Or it could end up leaning against
another tree, which is kind of messy.” He pointed out a stand of
seedlings to the left of the big tree. “Or it could break up a lot of
those babies; that’d be cheating your grandchildren out of some fine
timber. A good crew boss can drop a tree smack on a little wooden stake
and hammer it into the ground.”
Quiz looked impressed. “I’d say your crew bosses must have a thorough
knowledge of mathematics to be able to predict the angle of fall so
accurately.”
Jonas scratched his bald head. “Well, I don’t know, son. I suppose quite
a few of the boys these days have book learnin’. ’Course, in my day, the
way you made crew boss was to lick the old boss.”
“Did anybody ever lick you, Mr. Driscoll?” Sandy asked.
The old man drew back his lips, displaying two rows of broken teeth. “A
couple of times, as you can see.”
They walked closer to the big pine tree as two muscular sawyers started
to make the undercut that would determine the direction the tree would
fall. The chips flew as their double-edged axes flashed in the sunlight,
and a wedge widened rapidly in the side of the trunk. Their strokes were
rhythmic and effortless. Jonas called their attention to the smoothness
of the undercut.
“Good men,” he said. “The scarf is as clean as if it was cut by a saw.”
When the undercut was completed to the crew chief’s satisfaction, two
other men went to work with a wicked-looking two-handled saw with a
curved blade.
“We better mosey back to the sidelines,” Jonas told them. “Mistakes do
happen.”
From a safe distance they watched until, at last, the tree began to
tremble throughout its length like a live thing. Before the saw was
completely through the trunk, there was a grinding, crackling noise and
the crown swayed and dipped. Suddenly there was a sharp report that
Sandy first mistook for an explosion.
“She’s falling!” Jonas said.
“_Tim-m-ber!_” the crew boss sang out at the top of his lungs as the
great tree toppled slowly and majestically. It landed with a thunderous
crash that blurred Sandy’s vision and jarred his teeth. And then, for a
full minute, it lay there, writhing and groaning like some prehistoric
monster in the throes of death.
The boys were awed.
“I never saw anything like it,” Jerry whispered.
“It sort of gives you a lump in your throat,” Quiz said, his voice
touched with reverence. “That tree was probably hundreds of years old.
Now it’s gone.”
Jonas dropped one hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Not really. That old tree
will help build a lot of fine houses and furnish ’em too. Studding,
shingles, chairs, tables, cabinets, the works.”
Immediately, another crew with light power saws began cleaning the limbs
off the trunk.
“Soon as she’s limbed,” Jonas explained, “they’ll cut up the trunk into
manageable lengths and the dozers and cranes will stack ’em in cold
decks.” He indicated a neat pile of logs at one side of the road. “In
the old days we had to let them sit here until winter when the roads
were iced over, so they’d slide easy behind the horses. Today, we use
trailer trucks.”
“Makes it a lot easier on everybody, doesn’t it, Jonas,” Russ Steele
said. “Now, tell the truth, the ‘good old days’ weren’t really so good,
were they?”
The old man grinned sheepishly. “Well—we got the job done just the
same,” he said lamely.
Tractors, with thresher-like attachments, moved back and forth along the
length of the felled tree, gathering up the lopped-off branches and
chewing them up into smaller pieces. These scraps were later heaped up
into mounds.
“Come winter, we’ll burn a lot of that slash and spread the ashes around
for fertilizer,” Jonas explained.
“Must be quite a fire hazard in this weather,” Russ Steele said.
The foreman’s mouth tightened. “This heat spell has everybody on edge.
It’s getting so I wake up every half hour at night, thinking I smell
smoke. We been posting fire watches out here on our own. Them poor
rangers got their hands full as it is. You really picked a bad time to
go camping, Russ. You going back to Red Lake from here?”
Russ smiled evasively. “Oh, I don’t know. We thought we might go up to
the border and watch your boys run some of these logs down the big
river.”
Jonas shook his head. “Water level’s too low. You boys want to see a
gen-u-wine logging drive, come back up here next spring.”
Sandy was disappointed. “I sure hoped to see that. Do lumberjacks really
ride on top of the logs the way you see it in the movies?”
Jonas raised an eyebrow. “I’ll say they do, son. Why a good river hog
can ride a fresh pine log through the mill tail as pretty as a Hawaiian
on a surfboard. Say, maybe we can put on a bit of a show for you at
that. C’mon.”
He led them down the slope toward a small pond nestling in the valley.
On the way, he called to two loggers stacking logs.
“Pete! Charley! Want to show off your birling for our visitors?”
Wearing big grins, the two husky men fell in behind them.
“Pete and Charley are the camp champs,” Jonas explained.
“What’s birling?” Quiz asked.
“A game the old-timers dreamed up to pass the time on long drives. Two
men set themselves on opposite ends of a log and then they try to shake
each other off into the drink.”
“Oh, boy!” Jerry said. “That sounds like fun.”
“It is fun,” Jonas agreed. “But it’s also become quite a skillful sport.
Wait till you see these boys go at it.”
When they reached the pond, Pete and Charley carefully chose a log about
two feet in diameter and twelve feet long from a pile nearby and rolled
it into the water. Then they stepped onto opposite ends of the log and
Jonas shoved it into the middle of the pond with a long pole. The two
big men, hobnailed boots planted firmly in the bark, rode the bobbing
log like cats, their thumbs hooked nonchalantly in their belts.
“Looks easy,” Jerry said.
“Don’t kid yourself,” said Quiz.
At a signal from Jonas, the contest began. Pete took the offensive at
once. Back-pedaling with short, mincing steps, he sent the log rolling
over and over in the water. Faster and faster his feet moved until the
log was a spinning blur beneath them. But Charley jogged effortlessly
with the spin, never once removing his thumbs from under his belt.
“He must be part fly,” Sandy murmured admiringly.
Suddenly, Pete braked the log with his spikes. Charley hung on nimbly,
though he did have to extend his arms for balance. Pete studied his
opponent briefly, then tried another approach. Facing the other man, he
spread his feet, spikes dug deep into the soft bark. Throwing his weight
to the right, he rolled the log to that side, then jerked it back
sharply in the opposite direction. Back and forth, back and forth, he
went, stirring up waves in the little pond. Charley just crouched low
and rolled with the log.
Finally, Pete abandoned this method too, and began to jump up and down
on his end of the log until it was lurching up and down in the water
like a seesaw. Once Charley’s boot slipped as the log rolled
unexpectedly, but he recovered himself neatly.
“I’ve never seen such a display of balance and coordination,” Russ said.
“There’s a hundred tricks,” Jonas told him. “Every birler has his own
pet twists and turns and stops. Why I’ve seen my old man spend hours
studying a log before a big match.”