The Timber Pirate

by Charles Christopher Jenkins

He determined to fly over the Nannabijou Limits as early as possible Monday morning. Monday night the storm came up, one of the worst experienced in Kam City in years, and the shed out on the exhibition grounds in which he had temporarily housed the machine, was unroofed by the gale and minor damages done to the wings of the plane that it took a couple of hours to repair.

The morning, however, broke crisp and clear, an ideal day for flying and making observations. From Kam City to the Nannabijou Limits was a little better than twenty miles, and Hammond figured he could make it in about twenty-five to thirty minutes at the outside.

But again he had trouble in making a start. Three times he went up and had to come down again to make fresh adjustments. It was ten o’clock before he was definitely on his way across the arm of the lake with the craterlike top of Nannabijou Mountain as his objective.

Though the wind had dropped, the lake was still creased with angry waves. He crossed Superior’s upper arm without mishap. As he neared the limits, his first unusual discovery was the immense amount of pulpwood thrown up along the North Shore and on the islands that dotted it as far as the eye could see. There was only one place all those poles could come from, the airman conjectured as his machine roared onward through the bright, sunlit upper air.

His hunch was confirmed when he came opposite the limits and secured a full view of Nannabijou Bay, empty of almost every pulp-pole.

He dropped down for a closer look. The Mounties still patrolled the waterfront, but the camp was a scene of animated chaos. Gangs of men were at work repairing the roadways riven deep by the torrents of the night before while others were engaged in removing the fallen timber that blocked every thoroughfare. He noted that the bridge over the Nannabijou River was gone and the hills were made more desolate by fresh fields of tangled windfalls.

As he swooped, Hammond glimpsed Inspector Little signalling to him to proceed direct to the Cup and return. The young airman picked out a likely looking landing place back of the limits, then shot his machine upward. He followed the course of the Nannabijou to the point where Solomon Creek made its confluence, when he swerved and followed the creek.

Below him now he could discern what had caused the flood that had swept down in the night and carried out the immense field of pulpwood boomed in the bay. The huge beaver-dam on the creek was gone, and where the lake had been, behind the dam, there remained only a slimy area of silt and mud. Thus it was brought home to him at a glance that the war between the rival lumber companies for the operating rights on the limits had been ended by the elements in favour of the North Star. . . The elements alone? He wondered. . . . Likely here was another mystery in the history of the North Star that would remain unsolved. Nobody had seemingly thought of the possibilities in case that lake of water behind the beaver-dam were set free.

Significant as all these things were, Hammond’s main interest was soon centred on the Cup of Nannabijou and its environs. As he glided over the draw in the cliffs along the creek trail to where it seemingly ended in the tunnel opening out over the rapids in the gorge he got a true perspective of the water-gate guarding the only entrance from the land side through the cliffs of the Cup. From his lofty point of observation he could note how the creek in the first place had cut a big oval-shaped “O” in the rock, leaving a high pinnacle in the centre.

But it was the man-made device for diverting the flow of water that most excited his curiosity. At the upper end, where the stream originally forked around the island of rock, was a contrivance like the walking-beam of an old-style steamship. From the ends of this beam, which sat in a steel pillar between the channels, connecting-rods reached down to sliding dams operating in slots cut in the sides of the channels. At the present moment, the dam on the western side was down, and the one on the eastern side up, thus forcing the whole volume of water from the overflow of the lake in the Cup down the latter channel, whose bed, when the dam on that side was closed forcing the water around the other way, formed a dry continuation of the creek trail to an upper tunnel leading through the cliffs and into the Cup of Nannabijou.