"You're not going to cut that timber?" He waved a hand across the channel, where the dusky forest massed behind the red roof of Hawk's Nest.
"Why not?" Rod asked. He wondered if Andy shared a feeling that stirred, he believed, in no breast save his own and Mary's.
"It's a damned shame," Andy muttered.
"No choice."
It was the simple truth. Rod looked across at Valdez often in the next few weeks—perhaps to turn his eyes from the desecration at hand. He did not expect any save himself to feel such a sentiment, to feel a physical shrinking every time a faller lifted his long-drawn cry of "Tim-br-r-r-r," and the sobbing swish of lofty boughs sweeping in a great arc and the crashing thud marked another tree prone. Valdez was a waste. Where living green had clothed the hills there lifted stumps, torn earth, bald rock ledges. Desolation. The Granite Pool lay in its cliffy hollow, bared to the hot eye of the sun. The deer and the birds had withdrawn to the farther woods. Animal life banished, vegetation destroyed. Barren. Bleak. Ugliness spread over square miles. Soon Dent Island would be like that. Hawk's Nest would stand bleak and bare on a stripped promontory. If man were immortal, surely the troubled spirits of his dead kinsmen must hover dumbly about the spot. But they were as powerless as he.
He had walked out to see the first tree thrown down, and he had overheard one faller say to his mate, looking up at the stone house and lifting his face to sniff the sweet smell of lilac blown to him across the lawns by a June breeze:
"By God, it's almost a crime to cut these trees."
But, as he had said to Andy Hall—no choice. Upon that twelve hundred acres the trees stood bough to bough,—clean, straight, tall, enormous of girth and sound to the core. From the level center of the island an easy slope fell away to the water on every side. For a mile back from Hawk's Nest to walk abroad was like walking in the nave of a Gothic cathedral. Perhaps the Goths in their northern fastnesses first saw those pointed arches in the lofty symmetry of fir and pine. For a hundred years the Norquays had warred on the thickets and undergrowth. They had cleared away the dead trunks and the rotten windfalls. The floor of that forest was the floor of a park. Bough to bough the trees stood in endless ranks. Man was a pygmy among them. Dim aisles ran out into shadowy perspective. Only on the southern fringe bordering the house and lawn had the forest been thinned to let in sunshine and become clothed with grass. All the rest was carpeted with moss.
No logging crew on the Pacific Coast ever put their gear into such a logging chance. Twelve hundred acres of fir and cedar, few less than four foot thick at the base, thousands that three men touching fingertips could not span, clean straight trees that lifted a hundred feet without a knot or limb, and another hundred above that bared their heads to the sun. Their feet in perpetual shadow; their heads upholding the sky.
Except on two or three hundred acres of jungle at the northern end there was nothing in all that stretch to hamper a rigging-slinger with his snaky cables. The fallers could lay a tree where they wished. The high-lead gear could snatch the logs out at top speed. Rod could imagine old Jim Handy, the human logging machine, looking with glad eyes on such ground and such timber. Records would be made there. Big days that the loggers would talk about in years to come; days when more timber would go down to float within the boomsticks than ever was moved by a crew of men between sun and sun.