I was told that this was the regular meal of the loggers, and I know it was cooked by a chef (there is a French or Belgian or Canadian chef in most logging camps), for I talked with him. To live in a lonely forest, in a shack, and to work tremendously hard, may not be all the life a man wants, but it has compensations.
I understand that just about then the lumbermen were prone to striking. In one place they were demanding sheets, and in another they had refused to work because, having ordered two cases of eggs from a store, the tradesman had only been able to send the one he had in stock.
While we were in this camp we had some experience of the danger of forest fires. We had walked up to the head of the clearing, when one of the men of a group we had left working a short distance behind, came running up to say a fire had started. We went back, and in a place where, ten minutes before, there had been no sign of fire, flames and smoke were rising over an area of about one hundred yards square. Little tongues of flame were racing over the "slashings" (i.e., the débris of bark and splintered limbs that litter an area which has been cut), snakes of flame were writhing up standing trees, sparks blown by the wind were dropping into the dry "slashings" twenty, thirty and fifty yards away and starting fresh fires. We could see with what incredible rapidity these fires travelled, and how dangerous they can be once they are well alight. This fire was surrounded, and got under with water and shovelled earth, but we were shown a big stretch of hillside which another such fire had swept bare in a little under two hours. The summer is the dangerous time, for "slashings" and forests are then dry, and one chance spark from a badly screened donkey-engine chimney will start a blaze. When the fire gets into wet and green wood it soon expires.
These drives, for us, were the major events in an off time, for there was very little happening until the night of the 28th, when we went on board the Princess Alice again, to start on our return journey.
CHAPTER XVIII
APPLE LAND: OKANAGAN AND KOOTENAY LAKES
I
On Monday, September 29th, the Prince of Wales returned to Vancouver and took car to New Westminster, the old capital of British Columbia before picturesque Victoria assumed the reins.
New Westminster was having its own festival that day, so the visit was well timed. The local exhibition was to begin, and the Prince was to perform the opening ceremony. Under many fine arches, one a tall torii, erected by Chinese and Japanese Canadians, the procession of cars passed through the town, on a broad avenue that runs alongside the great Fraser River. Drawn up at the curb were many floats that were to take part in the trades' procession through the town to the exhibition grounds. Most of them were ingenious and attractive. There were telegraph stations on wagons, corn dealers' shops, and the like, while on the bonnet of one car was a doll nurse, busy beside a doll bed. Another automobile had turned itself into an aeroplane, while another had obliterated itself under a giant bully beef can to advertise a special kind of tinned meat.