第17章

This is the chief of the many perils of the woods.Like crouching pumas the instruments of a man's destruction poise on the spring, sometimes for days.Then swiftly, silently, the leap is made.It is a danger unavoidable, terrible, ever-present.Thorpe was destined in time to see men crushed and mangled in a hundred ingenious ways by the saw log, knocked into space and a violent death by the butts of trees, ground to powder in the mill of a jam, but never would he be more deeply impressed than by this ruthless silent taking of a life.The forces of nature are so tame, so simple, so obedient;and in the next instant so absolutely beyond human control or direction, so whirlingly contemptuous of puny human effort, that in time the wilderness shrouds itself to our eyes in the same impenetrable mystery as the sea.

That evening the camp was unusually quiet.Tellier let his fiddle hang.After supper Thorpe was approached by Purdy, the reptilian red-head with whom he had had the row some evenings before.

"You in, chummy?" he asked in a quiet voice."It's a five apiece for Hank's woman.""Yes," said Thorpe.

The men were earning from twenty to thirty dollars a month.They had, most of them, never seen Hank Paul before this autumn.He had not, mainly because of his modest disposition, enjoyed any extraordinary degree of popularity.Yet these strangers cheerfully, as a matter of course, gave up the proceeds of a week's hard work, and that without expecting the slightest personal credit.The money was sent "from the boys." Thorpe later read a heart-broken letter of thanks to the unknown benefactors.It touched him deeply, and he suspected the other men of the same emotions, but by that time they had regained the independent, self-contained poise of the frontiersman.They read it with unmoved faces, and tossed it aside with a more than ordinarily rough joke or oath.Thorpe understood their reticence.It was a part of his own nature.He felt more than ever akin to these men.

As swamper he had more or less to do with a cant-hook in helping the teamsters roll the end of the log on the little "dray." He soon caught the knack.Towards Christmas he had become a fairly efficient cant-hook man, and was helping roll the great sticks of timber up the slanting skids.Thus always intelligence counts, especially that rare intelligence which resolves into the analytical and the minutely observing.

On Sundays Thorpe fell into the habit of accompanying old Jackson Hines on his hunting expeditions.The ancient had been raised in the woods.He seemed to know by instinct the haunts and habits of all the wild animals, just as he seemed to know by instinct when one of his horses was likely to be troubled by the colic.His woodcraft was really remarkable.

So the two would stand for hours in the early morning and late evening waiting for deer on the edges of the swamps.They haunted the runways during the middle of the day.On soft moccasined feet they stole about in the evening with a bull's-eye lantern fastened on the head of one of them for a "jack." Several times they surprised the wolves, and shone the animals' eyes like the scattered embers of a camp fire.

Thorpe learned to shoot at a deer's shoulders rather than his heart, how to tell when the animal had sustained a mortal hurt from the way it leaped and the white of its tail.He even made progress in the difficult art of still hunting, where the man matches his senses against those of the creatures of the forest,--and sometimes wins.He soon knew better than to cut the animal's throat, and learned from Hines that a single stab at a certain point of the chest was much better for the purposes of bleeding.And, what is more, he learned not to over-shoot down hill.

Besides these things Jackson taught him many other, minor, details of woodcraft.Soon the young man could interpret the thousands of signs, so insignificant in appearance and so important in reality, which tell the history of the woods.He acquired the knack of winter fishing.

These Sundays were perhaps the most nearly perfect of any of the days of that winter.In them the young man drew more directly face to face with the wilderness.He called a truce with the enemy;and in return that great inscrutable power poured into his heart a portion of her grandeur.His ambition grew; and, as always with him, his determination became the greater and the more secret.In proportion as his ideas increased, he took greater pains to shut them in from expression.For failure in great things would bring keener disappointment than failure in little.

He was getting just the experience and the knowledge he needed; but that was about all.His wages were twenty-five dollars a month, which his van bill would reduce to the double eagle.At the end of the winter he would have but a little over a hundred dollars to show for his season's work, and this could mean at most only fifty dollars for Helen.But the future was his.He saw now more plainly what he had dimly perceived before, that for the man who buys timber, and logs it well, a sure future is waiting.And in this camp he was beginning to learn from failure the conditions of success.

Chapter IX

They finished cutting on section seventeen during Thorpe's second week.It became necessary to begin on section fourteen, which lay two miles to the east.In that direction the character of the country changed somewhat.

The pine there grew thick on isolated "islands" of not more than an acre or so in extent,--little knolls rising from the level of a marsh.In ordinary conditions nothing would have been easier than to have ploughed roads across the frozen surface of this marsh.The peculiar state of the weather interposed tremendous difficulties.