Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

The visitors take their own food, and use these articles. The Chinese cook at the house near by provides boiling water, and all the owner asks is that those who use his crockery shall wash it up at the sink provided, and with the dish-cloths provided, and leave it in readiness for the next comer.

That generosity is the final and completing touch to the charm of that exquisite place, which is a veritable "Garden of Allah" amid the beauties of Canadian scenery.

Another drive was over the Malahat Pass, through superb country, to a big lumber camp on Shawnigan Lake. Here we saw the whole of the operations of lumbering from the point where a logger notches a likely tree for cutting to the final moment when Chinese workmen feed the great trunks to the steam saw that hews them into beams and planks.

Having selected a tree, the first logger cuts into it a deep wedge which is to give it direction in its fall. These men show an almost uncanny skill. They get the line of a great tree with the handle of their axes, as an artist uses a pencil, and they can cut their notches so accurately that they can "fall" a tree on a pocket-handkerchief.

Two men follow this expert. They cut smaller notches in the tree, and insert their "boards" into it. These "boards" have a steel claw which bites into the tree when the men stand on the board, the idea being both to raise the cutters above the sprawling roots, and to give their swing on the saw an elasticity. It is because they cut so high that Canada is covered with tall stumps that make clearing a problem. The stumps are generally dynamited, or torn up by the roots by cables that pass through a block on the top of a tree to the winding-drum of a donkey-engine.

When the men at the saw have cut nearly through the tree, they sing out a drawling, musical "Stand aw-ay," gauging the moment with the skill of woodsmen, for there is no sign to the lay eye. In a few moments the giant tree begins to fall stiffly. It moves slowly, and then with its curious rigidity tears swiftly through the branches of neighbouring trees, coming to the ground with a thump very much like the sound of an H.E. shell, and throwing up a red cloud of torn bark. The sight of a tree falling is a moving thing; it seems almost cruel to bring it down.

A donkey-engine mounted on big logs, that has pulled itself into place by the simple method of anchoring its steel rope to a distant tree—and pulling, jerks the great trunks out of the heart of the forest. A block and tackle are hitched to the top of a tall tree that has been left standing in a clearing, and the steel ropes are placed round the fallen trunks. As this lifting line pulls them from their resting-place, they come leaping and jerking forward, charging down bushes, rising over stumps, dropping and hurdling over mounds until it seems that they are actually living things struggling to escape. The ubiquitous donkey-engine loads the great logs on trucks, and an engine, not very much bigger than a donkey-engine, tows the long cars of timber down over a sketchy track to the waterside.

Here the loads are tipped with enormous splashes into the water to wait in the "booms" until they are wanted at the mill. Then they are towed across, sure-footed men jump on to them and steer them to the big chute, where grappling teeth catch them and pull them up until they reach the sawing platform. They are jerked on to a movable truck, that grips them, and turns them about with mechanical arms into the required position for cutting, and then log and truck are driven at the saw blade, which slices beams or planks out of the primitive trunk with an almost sinister ease.

Uncanny machines are everywhere in this mill. Machines carve shingles and battens or billets with an almost human accuracy. A conveyor removes all sawdust from the danger of lights with mechanical intelligence. Another carries off all the scrapwood and takes it away to a safe place in the mill yard where a big, wire-hooded furnace, something like a straight hop oast-house, burns every scrap of it.

The life in the lumber camp is a hard life, but it is well paid, it is independent, and the food is a revelation. The loggers' lunch we were given was a meal fit for gourmets. It was in a rough pitch-pine hut at rough tables. Clam-soup was served to us in cylindrical preserved meat cans on which the maker's labels still clung—but it lost none of its delightful flavour for that. Beef was served cut in strips in a great bowl, and we all reached out for the vegetables. There were mammothine bowls of mixed salad possessing an astonishing (to British eyes) lavishness of hard-boiled egg, lemon pie (lemon curd pie) with a whipped-egg crown, deep apple pie (the logger eats pie—which many people will know better as "tart"—three times a day), a marvellous fruit salad in jelly, and the finest selection of plums, peaches, apples, and oranges I had seen for a long day.