The next morning Bob was awakened to a cold dawn that became still more
shivery when he had dressed and stepped outside. Even a hot breakfast
helped little; and when the buckboard was brought around, he mounted to
his seat without any great enthusiasm. The mountain rose dark and
forbidding, high against the eastern sky, and a cold wind breathed down
its defiles. When the wiry little ponies slowed to the first stretches
of the tiresome climb, Bob was glad to walk alongside.
Almost immediately the pines began. They were short and scrubby as yet,
but beautiful in the velvet of their dark green needles. Bob glanced at
them critically. They were perhaps eighty to a hundred feet high and
from a foot to thirty inches in diameter.
"Fair timber," he commented to his companion.
Welton snorted. "Timber!" he cried. "That isn't timber; it's weeds.
There's no _timber_ on this slope of the mountain."
Slowly the ponies toiled up the steep grade, pausing often for breath.
Among the pines grew many oaks, buckthorns, tall manzañitas and the
like. As the valley dropped beneath, they came upon an occasional
budding dogwood. Over the slopes of some of the hills spread a mantle of
velvety vivid green, fair as the grass of a lawn, but indescribably soft
and mobile. It lent those declivities on which it grew a spacious,
well-kept, park appearance, on which Bob exclaimed with delight.
But Welton would have none of it.
"Bear clover," said he, "full of pitch as an old jack-pine. Burns like
coal oil, and you can't hardly cut it with a hoe. Worst stuff to carry
fire and to fight fire in you ever saw. Pick a piece and smell it."
Bob broke off one of the tough, woody stems. A pungent odour exactly
like that of extract of hamamelis met his nostrils. Then he realized
that all the time he had been aware of this perfume faintly disengaging
itself from the hills. In spite of Mr. Welton's disgust, Bob liked its
clean, pungent suggestion.
The road mounted always, following the contour of the mountains. Thus it
alternately emerged and crept on around bold points, and bent back into
the recesses of ravines. Clear, beautiful streams dashed and sang down
the latter; from the former, often, Bob could look out over the valley
from which they had mounted, across the foothills, to the distant,
yellowing plains far on the horizon, lost finally in brown heat waves.
Sycamore Flats lay almost directly below. Always it became smaller, and
more and more like a coloured relief-map with tiny, Noah's-ark houses.
The forest grew sturdily on the steep mountain. Bob's eyes were on a
level with the tops of trees growing but a few hundred feet away. The
horizon line was almost at eleven o'clock above him.
"How'd you handle this kind of a proposition?" he inquired. "Looks to me
like hard sledding."
"This stuff is no good," said Welton. "These little, yellow pines ain't
worth cutting. This is all Forest Reserve stuff."
Bob glanced again down the aisles of what looked to him like a noble
forest, but said nothing. He was learning, in this land of surprises, to
keep his mouth shut.
At the end of two hours Welton drew up beside a new water trough to
water the ponies.
"There," he remarked casually, "is the first sugar pine."
Bob's eye followed the indication of his whip to the spreading, graceful
arms of a free so far up the bed of the stream that he could make out
only its top. The ponies, refreshed, resumed their methodical plodding.
Insensibly, as they mounted, the season had changed. The oaks that, at
the level of Sycamore Flats, had been in full leaf, here showed but the
tender pinks and russets of the first foliage. The dogwoods were quite
dormant. Rivulets of seepage and surface water trickled in the most
unexpected places as though from snow recently melted.
Of climbing there seemed no end. False skylines recurrently deceived Bob
into a belief that the buckboard was about to surmount the top. Always
the rise proved to be preliminary to another. The road dipped behind
little spurs, climbed ravines, lost itself between deep cuts. Only
rarely did the forest growths permit a view, and then only in glimpses
between the tops of trees. In the valley and against the foothills now
intervened the peaceful and calm blue atmosphere of distance.
"I'd no idea from looking at it this mountain was so high," he told
Welton.
"You never do," said Welton. "They always fool you. We're pretty nigh
the top now."
Indeed, for a little space the forest had perforce to thin because of
lack of footing. The slope became almost a precipice, ending in a bold
comb above which once more could be glimpsed the tops of trees. Quite
ingeniously the road discovered a cleft up which it laboured mightily,
to land breathless after a heart-breaking pull. Just over the top Welton
drew rein to breathe his horses--and to hear what Bob had to say about
it.
The buckboard stood at the head of a long, gentle slope descending,
perhaps fifty feet, to a plateau; which, in turn, rose to another crest
some miles distant. The level of this plateau, which comprised, perhaps,
thirty thousand acres all told, supported a noble and unbroken forest.
Mere statistics are singularly unavailing to convey even an idea of a
California woodland at its best. We are not here dealing with the
so-called "Big Trees," but with the ordinary--or extraordinary--pines
and spruces. The forest is free from dense undergrowths; the individual
trees are enormous, yet so symmetrical that the eye can realize their
size only when it catches sight of some usual and accustomed object,
such as men or horses or the buildings in which they live. Even then it
is quite as likely that the measures will appear to have been struck
small, as that the measured will show in their true grandeur of
proportion. The eye refuses to be convinced off-hand that its education
has been faulty.
"Now," said Welton decidedly. "We may as well have it over with right
now. How big is that young tree over there?"
He pointed out a half-grown specimen of sugar pine.
"About twenty inches in diameter," replied Bob promptly.
Welton silently handed him a tape line. Bob descended.
"Thirty-seven!" he cried with vast astonishment, when his measurements
were taken and his computations made.
"Now that one," commanded Welton, indicating a larger tree.
Bob sized it up.
"No fair looking at the other for comparison," warned the older man.
"Forty," hesitated Bob, "and I don't believe it's that!" he added. "Four
feet," he amended when he had measured.
"Climb in," said Welton; "now you're in a proper frame of mind to listen
to me with respect. The usual run of tree you see down through here is
from five to eight feet in diameter. They are about all over two hundred
feet tall, and some run close to three hundred."
Bob sighed. "All right. Drive on. I'll get used to it in time." His face
lighted up with a grin. "Say, wouldn't you like to see Roaring Dick
trying to handle one of those logs with a peavie? As for driving a
stream full of them! Oh, Lord! You'd have to send 'em down one at a
time, fitted out with staterooms for the crew, a rudder and a gasoline
engine!"
The ponies jogged cheerfully along the winding road. Water ran
everywhere, or stood in pools. Under the young spruces were the last
snowbanks. Pushing up through the wet soil, already showed early
snowplants, those strange, waxlike towers of crimson. After a time they
came to a sidehill where the woods thinned. There still stood many
trees, but as the buckboard approached, Bob could see that they were
cedars, or spruce, or smaller specimens of the pines. Prone upon the
ground, like naked giants, gleamed white and monstrous the peeled bodies
of great trees. A litter of "slash," beaten down by the winter, cumbered
the ground, and retained beneath its faded boughs soggy and melting
drifts.
"Had some 'fallers' in here last year," explained Welton briefly.
"Thought we'd have some logs on hand when it came time to start up."
"Wait a minute," requested Bob. He sprang lightly from the vehicle, and
scrambled over to stand alongside the nearest of the fallen monsters. He
could just see over it comfortably. "My good heavens!" said he soberly,
resuming his seat. "How in blazes do you handle them?"
Welton drove on a few paces, then pointed with his whip. A narrow trough
made of small peeled logs laid parallel and pegged and mortised together
at the ends, ran straight over the next hill.
"That's a chute," he explained briefly. "We hitch a wire cable to the
log and just naturally yank it over to the chute."
"How yank it?" demanded Bob.
"By a good, husky donkey engine. Then the chute poles are slushed, we
hitch cables on four or five logs, and just tow them over the hill to
the mill."
Bob's enthusiasm, as always, was growing with the presentation of this
new and mighty problem of engineering so succinctly presented. It
sounded simple; but from his two years' experience he knew better. He
was becoming accustomed to filling in the outlines of pure theory. At a
glance he realized the importance of such things as adequate anchors for
the donkey engines; of figuring on straight pulls, horse power and the
breaking strain of steel cables; of arranging curves in such manner as
to obviate ditching the logs, of selecting grades and routes in such
wise as to avoid the lift of the stretched cable; and more dimly he
guessed at other accidents, problems and necessities which only the
emergency could fully disclose. All he said was:
"So that's why you bark them all--so they'll slide. I wondered."
But now the ponies, who had often made this same trip, pricked up their
ears and accelerated their pace. In a moment they had rounded a hill and
brought their masters into full view of the mill itself.
The site was in a wide, natural clearing occupied originally by a green
meadow perhaps a dozen acres in extent. From the borders of this park
the forest had drawn back to a dark fringe. Now among the trees at the
upper end gleamed the yellow of new, unpainted shanties. Square against
the prospect was the mill, a huge structure, built of axe-hewn timbers,
rough boards, and the hand-rived shingles known as shakes. Piece by
piece the machinery had been hauled up the mountain road until enough
had been assembled on the space provided for it by the axe men to begin
sawing. Then, like some strange monster, it had eaten out for itself at
once a space in the forest and the materials for its shell and for the
construction of its lesser dependents, the shanties, the cook-houses,
the offices and the shops. Welton pointed out with pride the various
arrangements; here the flats and the trestles for the yards where the
new-sawn lumber was to be stacked; there the dump for the sawdust and
slabs; yonder the banking ground constructed of great logs laid close
together, wherein the timber-logs would be deposited to await the saw.
From the lower end of the yard a trestle supporting a V-shaped trough
disappeared over the edge of a hill. Near its head a clear stream
cascaded down the slope.
"That's the flume," explained the lumberman. "Brought the stream around
from the head of the meadow in a ditch. We'll flume the sawn lumber down
the mountain. For the present we'll have to team it out to the railroad.
Your friend Baker's figuring on an electric road to meet us, though, and
I guess we'll fix it up with him inside a few years, anyway."
"Where's Stone Creek from here?" asked Bob.
"Over the farther ridge. The mountain drops off again there to Stone
Creek three or four thousand feet."
"We ought to hear from the fire, soon."
"If we don't, we'll ride over that way and take a look down," replied
Welton.
They drove down the empty yards to a stable where already was
established their old barn-boss of the Michigan woods. Four or five big
freight wagons stood outside, and a score of powerful mules rolled and
sunned themselves in the largest corral. Welton nodded toward several
horses in another enclosure.
"Pick your saddle horse, Bob," said he. "Straw boss has to ride in this
country."
"Make it the oldest, then," said Bob.
At the cookhouse they were just in time for the noon meal. The long,
narrow room, fresh with new wood, new tables and new benches in
preparation for the crew to come, looked bare and empty with its handful
of guests huddled at one end. These were the teamsters, the stablemen,
the caretakers and a few early arrivals. The remainder of the crew was
expected two days later.
After lunch Bob wandered out into the dazzling sunlight. The sky was
wonderfully blue, the trees softly green, the new boards and the tiny
pile of sawdust vividly yellow. These primary colours made all the
world. The air breathed crisp and bracing, with just a dash of cold in
the nostrils that contrasted paradoxically with the warm balminess of
the sunlight. It was as though these two opposed qualities, warmth and
cold, were here held suspended in the same medium and at the same time.
Birds flashed like spangles against the blue. Others sang and darted and
scratched and chirped everywhere. Tiny chipmunks no bigger than
half-grown rats scampered fearlessly about. What Bob took for larger
chipmunks--the Douglas Squirrels--perched on the new fence posts. The
world seemed alive--alive through its creatures, through the solemn,
uplifting vitality of its forests, through the sprouting, budding spring
growths just bursting into green, through the wine-draught of its very
air, through the hurrying, busy preoccupied murmur of its streams. Bob
breathed his lungs full again and again, and tingled from head to foot.
"How high are we here?" he called to Welton.
"About six thousand. Why? Getting short-winded?"
"I could run ten miles," replied Bob. "Come on. I'm going to look at the
stream."
"Not at a run," protested Welton. "No, sir! At a nice, middle-aged,
dignified, fat _walk_!"
They sauntered down the length of the trestle, with its miniature steel
tracks, to where the flume began. It proved to be a very solidly built
V-trough, alongside which ran a footboard. Welton pointed to the
telephone wire that paralleled it.
"When we get going," said he, "we just turn the stream in here, clamp
our sawn lumber into bundles of the right size, and 'let her went!'
There'll be three stations along the line, connected by 'phone, to see
that things go all right. That flume's six mile long."
Bob strode to the gate, and after some heaving and hauling succeeded in
throwing water into the flume.
"I wanted to see her go," he explained.
"Now if you want some real fun," said Welton, gazing after the foaming
advance wave as it ripped its way down the chute. "You make you a sort
of three-cornered boat just to fit the angle of the flume; and then you
lie down in it and go to Sycamore Flats, in about six minutes more or
less."
"You mean to say that's done?" cried Bob.
"Often. It only means knocking together a plank or so."
"Doesn't the lumber ever jump the flume?"
"Once in a great while."
"Suppose the boat should do it?"
"Then," said Welton drily, "it's probable you'd have to begin learning
to tune a harp."
"Not for mine," said Bob with fervour. "Any time I yearn for Sycamore
Flats real hard, I'll go by hand."
He shut off the water, and the two walked a little farther to a bold
point that pressed itself beyond the trees.
Below them the cliff dropped away so steeply that they looked out above
the treetops as from the summit of a true precipice. Almost directly
below them lay the wooded valley of Sycamore Flats, maplike, tiny. It
was just possible to make out the roofs of houses, like gray dots. Roads
showed as white filaments threading the irregular patches of green and
brown. From beneath flowed the wide oak and brush-clad foothills, rising
always with the apparent cup of the earth until almost at the height of
the eye the shimmering, dim plains substituted their brown for the dark
green of the hills. The country that yesterday had seemed mountainous,
full of cañons, ridges and ranges, now showed gently undulating,
flattened, like a carpet spread before the feet of the Sierras. To the
north were tumbled, blue, pine-clad mountains as far as the eye could
see, receding into the dimness of great distance. At one point, but so
far away as to be distinguishable only by a slight effort of the
imagination, hovered like soap-bubbles against an ethereal sky the forms
of snow mountains. Welton pointed out the approximate position of
Yosemite.
They returned to camp where Welton showed the clean and painted little
house built for Bob and himself. It was quite simply a row of rooms with
a verandah in front of them all. But the interiors were furnished with
matting for the floors, curtains to the windows, white iron bedsteads,
running water and open fireplaces.
"I'm sick of camping," said Welton. "This is our summer quarters for
some time. I'm going to be comfortable."
Bob sighed.
"This is the bulliest place I ever saw!" he cried boyishly.
"Well, you're going to have time enough to get used to it," said Welton
drily.