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.
II
Hammond gained much of his information about the limits from his shack-mate, Sandy Macdougal, the cook, who in the evening over a bottle of rye whiskey became quite loquacious. It was through Macdougal he learned of the presence of the girl with the high-arched eyebrows on Amethyst Island, a bit of information that brought about a secret determination to somehow or other come in contact with her, much as the mere idea of again meeting her face to face perturbed him.
Of Acey Smith he saw little, caught only occasional glimpses of him now and then as he went in and out of his office. No one seemed to know where he kept himself a large part of the time. Actual operation of the camps and dealings with the men were carried on almost entirely by the assistant superintendent, a rawboned, hatchet-faced young man named Mooney, who was as uncommunicative as a slab of trap rock.
Ogima Bush, the Indian medicine man, seemed to have the freedom of the camp, to which he paid frequent visits, mixing with the workers of his own race of whom there were several hundred employed in breaking up jams in the river and tending the booms in the bay. They were what was known as the “white water” men because of their hazardous work in the foaming rapids.