United States or Antigua and Barbuda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The day following he culled another of the same sort on still another skidway. He examined it closely, then sought the Rough Red. "It is useless, Jimmy Bourke," said he, "to be hauling of the same poor log from skidway to skidway. You can shift her to every travoy trail in th' Crother tract, but it will do ye little good.
"It hit me and went on into the river," groaned Hippy. "Voice of nature," he added in a mutter, but no one laughed. "Our camp was pitched in the travoy way. The storm loosened the supports of the skidway and let the logs down. Several hundred thousand feet of them rolled over our camp and mashed it flat. A good part of the timber went on into the river.
And Molly started gingerly down the hill. She pulled the timber, heavy as an iron safe, here and there through the brush, missing no steps, making no false moves, backing, and finally getting out of the way of an unexpected roll with the ease and intelligence of Laveque himself. In five minutes the burden lay by the travoy road.
You will observe that they have cut a channel or 'travoy, as it is called, through which the logs will roll after leaving the skidway, and pass on to the stream. This 'travoy' is pretty well grown over with second growth, but the logs will roll the growth down, and when they do you would think that all the tremendous forces of nature had been let loose."
There is nothing more impressive than this rush of a pine top, excepting it be a charge of cavalry or the fall of Niagara. Old woodsmen sometimes shout aloud with the mere excitement into which it lifts them. Then the swampers, who had by now finished the travoy road, trimmed the prostrate trunk clear of all protuberances. It required fairly skillful ax work.
Each pair of men selected a tree, the first they encountered over the blazed line of their "forty." After determining in which direction it was to fall, they set to work to chop a deep gash in that side of the trunk. Tom Broadhead and Henry Paul picked out a tremendous pine which they determined to throw across a little open space in proximity to the travoy road.
When the log had been cat-a-cornered from its bed, the chain was fastened around one end by means of the ever-useful steel swamp-hook, and it was yanked across the dray. Then the travoy took its careful way across the ice to where a dip in the shore gave access to a skidway. Four logs had thus been safely hauled. The fifth was on its journey across the lake.
"Shinny on the corners," "Gents all forw'd," "Sling yer pardner," "Up and down the travoy," "Dozey-dozey," "Smash 'em on the finish," was the way he called off, the latter call bringing the feet of the lumberjacks down in a series of bangs that threatened the collapse of the floor.
From the travoy sledges and the short roads a constant stream of logs emptied itself on the bank. There long parallel skidways had been laid the whole width of the river valley. Each log as it came was dragged across those monster andirons and rolled to the bank of the river.
Only it must be a strong man, with the strength of the wilderness in his eye. The next morning Radway transferred Molly and Jenny, with little Fabian Laveque and two of the younger men, to Pike Lake. There, earlier in the season, a number of pines had been felled out on the ice, cut in logs, and left in expectation of ice thick enough to bear the travoy "dray."
Word Of The Day