I
As the days went by Louis Hammond familiarised himself with the pulp camp and its environs. He had plenty of time on his hands, for, as Acey Smith had predicted, there was little else for him to do except “take in the scenery.”
He gained a liberal education in the garnering of the raw product for the paper-making industry. The Nannabijou Limits, he learned, comprised an enormous block of wilderness territory some ninety square miles in extent, most of which, outside of the great muskegs and mountain lakes, was covered with forests of spruce, balsam and birch, representing billions of money when transformed into the white paper on which many of the great and lesser newspapers and magazines of the United States as well as Canada would be printed.
The limits stretched east down the North Shore from the foot of the Nannabijou range far beyond a point of vision and extended due north inland a good fifty or sixty miles. They were bisected by the mighty Nannabijou River, which emptied into the bay at the western fringe of the camp between deep, precipitous banks. It was this stream that made the Nannabijou Limits so desirable, because it made transportation of the cut poles by water possible from the furthest inland reaches of the territory. Armies of men were engaged in cutting, buck-sawing and decking poles into the river, there being camp after camp, some of them larger than that at the waterfront, for a good twenty miles up the stream. Men and teams were constantly employed hauling supplies back to them. Yet it was said that this season’s cut would scarcely make a scratch on the gigantic Nannabijou forests.
From the mouth of the Nannabijou the cut and barked poles poured into the bay in a wide, glistening white ribbon day and night, continually expanding the tremendous booms, where Hammond was told there was already nearly a million dollars’ worth of pulpwood. Later on, power-driven mechanical loaders on scows would transfer the poles from the booms to the holds of huge pulp-pole carriers, and in these they would be towed by tugs to the mill yards in Kam City.
A large portion of the wood must be delivered that very fall so that the Kam City Pulp and Paper Company could have their mills in operation on contract time in October. Otherwise, the latter company would forfeit their hard-won rights on the limits; and by the terms of the final fiat of the Ontario government the North Star Towing and Contracting Company, at present operating the limits, were bound to deliver the wood in sufficient quantities to keep the Kam City Company’s mills running all winter.
It was a stupendous undertaking—the most colossal in the history of paper-making. And woven into this was the intense rivalry of the two powerful paper companies concerned, a tension of bitter hatred that was the more ominous because surface indications told nothing of what the inevitable climax might be.