The next morning Ed started with the others of his crew up river to join his brother Rob on the spring drive.
CHAPTER XV
OVER THE RAPIDS
Following the river trail, and being welcomed freely to the temporary camps of the gangs of “brow-breakers,” at a little past noon of the second day, Ed and his companions of the winter’s logging camp came to the head of the drive on North Fork.
The heavy rains had set in, and the river, swollen by the floods of melted snow, was already a torrent of crashing, grinding ice cakes. As the ice went out, the river would be filled with the booming logs, which floated loosely, often banks full for miles, from the disintegrating “brows” along the stream.
Instead of meeting his brother, as he had hoped, Ed was informed that Rob had been sent over to the wangan above Big Bull, where the drive on the main stream was already in motion. The boss, looking over the small stature of Ed, remarked, “They’re wanting polers over there, and we don’t want any more here. As a sacker you wouldn’t be any more account than a muskrat, anyhow.”
Although Ed was stockily built, he was quick with his feet, and practice had gained him confidence upon the floating logs, so poling would be just what he would desire.
Ten miles across the country of forest and swamp, where the land was a “saturated solution” and every little creek aspiring to be a river, was not a pleasing prospect for a boy, but there was no other way open. That journey lived in Ed’s memory for years as a hideous nightmare. Plashing in mud, tearing through thickets of briers and underbrush, wading shallow, icy creeks—and swimming one that was too deep to wade—losing himself in the darkness, stumbling along blindly, by chance—or, we had better say, by the guiding hand of good Providence—Ed finally came to the brink of the river, and knew by the depth of the overflow that he had reached the stream above Big Bull dam.
Again Providence guided his choice, and he turned downstream and soon came in view of the campfires of the drive. Too utterly exhausted to do aught else, Ed stretched himself by a big log fire among the sleeping men, to get what rest he might, in the short space of the night that remained.