The prey of the strongest

by Morley Roberts

Now the frost of the lower country, of the lower Fraser, with its intervals of warm Chinook wind and rain, sickened Pete. He put in a lot of time at old Smith's, but by the end of February he was keen on climbing higher. Old Smith got on his nerves, good old soul though he was, and of course Pete couldn't stick to one "jhob." Old Cultus seemed so good a chap, and Pete thought it would be a fine thing to put his legs across a cayuse once more and go a-riding, whooping hell and thunder out of the steers. And he had come nigh to forgetting Jenny. When he thought of her his face looked devilish, but he thought of her seldom.

"She bad klootchman, yah," said Pete. But he couldn't go yet. He waited for the harder frost to go, for the big ice, then two feet thick, to break again in the lower river. Then the Mill would start, and he would hear of the spiked logs.

"That make Quin sick," said Pete. So he hung on and waited, knowing he would hear. It couldn't be long. Men from the City said that things had been tough that winter in Shack-Town. He heard at intervals about this chap or that: about Skookum, good old Skookum, and Chihuahua, who had been jailed for a jag which was of portentous dimensions, leading him to assault a policeman Up Town. The "bulls" yanked Chihuahua in and he got it hot, officially and otherwise, as a man will in the calaboose.

Then the River cracked loudly: the ice roared and broke, and piled itself up in bars and ridges and grumbled and swung and went away with the ebb and up with the flood, roaring all the time.

"Now they start up the Moola queek," said Pete as day by day he saw less ice. The rain poured down and the river was almost in flood already, though the winter held up-country, of course. When the frost broke in the wet Cascades and up in Cariboo, and in the head waters of the forking Thompson, there would be a proper amount of water in the Cañon.

And still he waited.

But in the Mill they started at last, and came nigh to the end of the Mill boom before they could get a steamer to tow them up the new boom. Then they got it, and Pete heard that it was there.

"I make heem sick," said Pete, still waiting. And the spiked logs waited. Their time must come.

It came at last, and of that day men of the Hills still speak.

It was one of Ginger White's devilish days, when he hated himself and his kind and was willing to burst himself if he could make others sigh or groan. He ran the crew of the Mill almost to death, and death came at last as the day died down and found them running the saws screaming in logs still cold within. For the winter left the men soft: they had been half-fed, many of them: they had lived idle lives, and found work hard on their hands, hard on their muscles. But Ginger never failed when the devil was in him. The winter was over: he wanted to work, for he was all behind with money.