CHAPTER THREE
Flagging’s
The Swede’s plump back and thick winter coat gave Jamie the sensation he was riding on a cloud. His ma had wrapped and packed sandwiches and canned fruit into haversacks which were then tied across the Swede’s back for carrying to the lumberjacks. Also tucked away were tins of tea for brewing hot drinks in the number-two soup cans that each jack carried hooked onto his suspender button. Jamie rode down the pike-way to his first destination. He tried to savor the ride. He loved the gentle, rhythmic swaying of the big horse’s gait. But the fact that Flannigan’s mattress still lay in a heap back on the bunkhouse floor could not be shoved into the back of his mind. In the distance, he heard the sharp crack of a tree yielding to the sawyer’s blade. Timber! reverberated through the forest, followed by more cracking and snapping as a mighty pine plummeted to earth, its branches and massive trunk ripping away that which stood in its path.
Jamie approached the men working at the fallen tree. The great pine lay paralyzed like a wounded dying giant, while the men moved from limb to limb, snicking them off with their crosscut saws and axes. Jamie halted his horse and watched the scene he had witnessed a hundred times before. After the tree was stripped of limbs and branches, it would be cut to sixteen-foot lengths and branded with the Chicago Lumber Company mark.
“Boy’s here with the chuck!” shouted one of the lumberjacks. “Stop your gawking laddie and bring it on.”
Jamie nudged the Swede forward into the camp. He slid off the horse and began untying the haversacks.
“Hand me one of those nose sacks boy and make it quick. We got a lot more timber to cut ‘fore we get a full skid.”
Jamie passed out the food. One of the lumberjacks added wood to a campfire and the men gathered around to eat their lunch.
Jamie had several more stops to make before he would return to camp to resupply. In spite of the many hungry men awaiting their lunch, he hesitated, staring at the landscape. To the north stood the seemingly endless forests of white pine, their majestic boughs reaching for sunlight and enormous trunks standing straight and gallant. Beneath the canopy of these champions, Jamie felt odd stirrings, mystical and heavenly. His pa called it the spirit of the pine. Jamie remembered touching the rough bark of a tree with his pa. “Do you feel its soul?” Pa had asked. Sometimes, if Jamie squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath, he thought he could feel it. Today, the trees seemed to be watching, frozen and quaking, awaiting the rip of the lumberjacks’ saws and blows of their axes. Jamie shook his head to rid the thoughts and turned away.
To the south lay a stumpy, wounded landscape, with only a few puny saplings left standing. It looked vulnerable; a weeping pustule that would surely never heal.
“Better get a goin’ now, boy, or you’ll be havin’ the men come lookin’ for you,” one of the jacks said.
Jamie led the Swede to a stump, sap still oozing. Using the stump as a boost, Jamie mounted. With a cluck and a nudge, they plodded off. It was time to look for Pete Atkins, before the peaches ran out.
He found Pete a mile or so down the pike-way, resting his team. Steam rose through the fibers of the blankets Pete had thrown over the horses.
“You timed it just right,” Pete said as he reached up to scratch the nose of one of the horses. “I see the Swede is serving you well.”
“Yes sir,” Jamie said, dismounting.
Jamie handed him the food. Pete removed a tool from his pocket, a knife of sorts, but with its blades on hinges that folded snugly back into the handle. The knife had more than blades, and Pete extracted a can opener to cut the lid from his peaches. Jamie watched him work the tool and wished he’d had the remarkable invention to work on Flannigan’s mattress.
“Want a mouthful, then Jamie?”
“Oh, no sir.”
“Pete.”
“Pete.”
Pete nodded. He closed the opener, pulled out a slender blade and proceeded to spear peach slices and eat them.
“Got to be careful doin’ this,
