“It sort of gives you a lump in your throat,” Quiz said, his voice touched with reverence. “That tree was probably hundreds of years old. Now it’s gone.”
Jonas dropped one hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Not really. That old tree will help build a lot of fine houses and furnish ’em too. Studding, shingles, chairs, tables, cabinets, the works.”
Immediately, another crew with light power saws began cleaning the limbs off the trunk.
“Soon as she’s limbed,” Jonas explained, “they’ll cut up the trunk into manageable lengths and the dozers and cranes will stack ’em in cold decks.” He indicated a neat pile of logs at one side of the road. “In the old days we had to let them sit here until winter when the roads were iced over, so they’d slide easy behind the horses. Today, we use trailer trucks.”
“Makes it a lot easier on everybody, doesn’t it, Jonas,” Russ Steele said. “Now, tell the truth, the ‘good old days’ weren’t really so good, were they?”
The old man grinned sheepishly. “Well—we got the job done just the same,” he said lamely.
Tractors, with thresher-like attachments, moved back and forth along the length of the felled tree, gathering up the lopped-off branches and chewing them up into smaller pieces. These scraps were later heaped up into mounds.
“Come winter, we’ll burn a lot of that slash and spread the ashes around for fertilizer,” Jonas explained.
“Must be quite a fire hazard in this weather,” Russ Steele said.
The foreman’s mouth tightened. “This heat spell has everybody on edge. It’s getting so I wake up every half hour at night, thinking I smell smoke. We been posting fire watches out here on our own. Them poor rangers got their hands full as it is. You really picked a bad time to go camping, Russ. You going back to Red Lake from here?”