LUMBERERS.
Scene, early morning; the sun pouring clear light over the snowy world,
and upon Captain Argent in front of the hut, just emerged from his
blankets and rugs.
'Why, Arthur, here's an elk walking up to the very hall door!'
Almost at the same minute Ina appeared among the distant trees, and
fired. He had gone off on snow-shoes long before daybreak, to run down
the moose he knew to be in the neighbourhood, had wounded a fine bull,
and driven him towards his camp.
'Why didn't you finish him off on the spot,' asked Arthur, 'instead of
taking all that trouble?'
'No cart to send for the flesh,' replied Ina significantly.
There might be a thousand pounds of that, covered with long coarse hair,
and crested with the ponderous antlers. A hunch on the shoulders seemed
arranged as a cushion support to these last; and in the living specimens
seen afterwards by Arthur, they carried the huge horns laid back
horizontally, as they marched at a long trot, nose in the air, and
large sharp eyes looking out on all sides.
'It was a sharp idea to make the elk his own butcher's boy,' quoth
Argent.
The massive thick lips formed the 'mouffle,' prized in the wilderness as
a dainty: Arthur would have been ashamed to state his preference for a
civilised mutton chop. Other elks shared the fate of this first; though
it seemed a wanton waste of nature's bounties to slay the noble animals
merely for their skins, noses, and tongues. Ina was callous, for he knew
that thus perished multitudes every year in Canada West, and thousands
of buffaloes in the Hudson's Bay territory. Arthur could not help
recalling little Jay; and many a time her lesson kept his rifle silent,
and spared a wound or a life.
One day, while stalking wild turkeys, creeping cautiously from tree to
tree, an unwonted sound dissipated their calculations. Coming out on a
ridge whence the wood swept down to one of the endless ponds, they heard
distant noises as of men and horses drawing a heavy load.
'Lumberers,' explained Ina, pricking his ears. He would have immediately
turned in a contrary direction; but the prospect of seeing a new phase
of life was a strong temptation to Captain Argent, so they went forward
towards a smoke that curled above a knot of pines.
It proceeded from the lumber shanty; a long, windowless log-hut with a
door at one end, a perpetual fire in the centre, on a large open hearth
of stones; the chimney, a hole in the roof. Along both sides and the
farther end was a sort of dais, or low platform of unhewn trees laid
close together, and supporting the 'bunks,' or general bed, of spruce
boughs and blankets. Pots slung in the smoke and blaze were bubbling
merrily, under presidence of a red night-capped French Canadian, who
acted as cook, and was as civil, after the manner of his race, as if
the new arrivals were expected guests.
'Ah, bon-jour, Messieurs; vous etes les bienvenus. Oui, monsieur--sans
doute ce sont des gens de chantier. Dey vork in forest,' he added, with
a wave of his hand--plunging into English. 'Nous sommes tous les gens de
chantier--vat you call hommes de lumbare: mais pour moi, je suis chef
de cuisine pour le present:' and a conversation ensued with Argent,
in which Arthur made out little more than an occasional word of the
Canadian's--with ease when it was so Anglican as 'le foreman.'
'What a good-looking, merry-faced chap he is!' observed Arthur, when the
red nightcap had been pulled off in an obeisance of adieu, as they went
to seek for the others, and witness their disforesting operations.
'French Canadians are generally the personifications of good humour and
liveliness,' returned Argent; 'the pleasantest possible servants and the
best voyagers. Listen to him now, carolling a "chanson" as he manages
his smutty cookery. That's the way they sing at everything.'
'So the lumberers have a foreman?'
'Curious how the French can't invent words expressive of such things,
but must adopt ours. He tells me "le foreman's" duty is to distribute
the work properly, allotting to each gang its portion; and also to make
a report of conduct to the overseer at the end of the season, for which
purpose he keeps a journal of events. I had no idea there was so much
organization among them; and it seems the gangs have regular duties--one
to fell, one to hew, one to draw to the water's edge with oxen; and each
gang has a headman directing its labours.'
Nearing the sound of the axes, they came to where a group of lumber-men
were cutting down some tall spruce-firs, having first laid across over
the snow a series of logs, called 'bedding timbers,' in the line that
each tree would fall. One giant pine slowly swayed downwards, and
finally crashed its full length on the prepared sleepers, just as the
strangers approached. Immediately on its fall, the 'liner' commenced to
chop away the bark for a few inches wide all along the trunk, before
marking with charcoal where the axes were to hew, in squaring the
timber; meantime another man was lopping the top off the tree, and
a third cutting a sort of rough mortise-hole at the base, which he
afterwards repeated at the upper end.
So busy were the whole party, that the hewer, a genuine Paddy, who stood
leaning on his broad axe until the timber was ready for him, was the
first to raise his eyes and notice the new-comers. Arthur asked him what
the holes were for.
'Why, then, to raft the trees together when we get 'em into the water,'
was his reply; and in the same breath he jumped on to the trunk, and
commenced to notch with his axe as fast as possible along the sides,
about two feet apart. Another of his gang followed, splitting off the
blocks between the deep notches into the line mark. And this operation,
repeated for the four sides, squared the pine into such a beam as we
see piled in our English timber yards.
What was Arthur's surprise to recognise, in the mass of lumberers
gathered round a huge mast, the Milesian countenance of Murty Keefe, a
discontented emigrant with whom he had picked up a casual acquaintance
on the steamboat which took him to Montreal. He was dressing away the
knots near the top with his axe, as though he had been used to the
implement all his life. When, after infinite trouble and shouting in all
tongues, the half-dozen span of strong patient oxen were set in motion,
dragging the seventy-feet length of timber along the snow towards the
lake, Arthur contrived to get near enough to his countryman for audible
speech. Murty's exaggerated expectations had suffered a grievous eclipse;
still, if he became an expert hewer, he might look forward to earning
more than a curate's salary by his axe. And they were well fed: he had
more meat in a week now than in a twelvemonth in Ireland. He was one of
half-a-dozen Irishmen in this lumberers' party of French Canadians,
headed by a Scotch foreman; for through Canada, where address and
administrative ability are required, it is found that Scotchmen work
themselves into the highest posts.
During the rude but abundant dinner which followed, this head of the
gang gave Argent some further bits of information about the lumber
trade.
'We don't go about at random, and fell trees where we like,' said he.
'We've got a double tax to pay: first, ground rent per acre per annum
for a licence, and then a duty of a cent for every cubic foot of timber
we bring to market. Then, lest we should take land and not work it, we
are compelled to produce a certain quantity of wood from every acre of
forest we rent, under pain of forfeiting our licence.'
'And will you not have it all cut down some day? Then what is the
country to do for fuel and the world for ships?'
The foreman rubbed his rusty beard with a laugh.
'There's hundreds of years of lumbering in the Bytown district alone,'
said he; 'why, sir, it alone comprehends sixty thousand square miles of
forest.'