ook tender, rigging slinger, and donkey, which last trio moved the logs
from woods to water, once they were down and trimmed. Terrible,
devastating forces of destruction they seemed to Stella Benton, wholly
unused as she was to any woodland save the well-kept parks and little
areas of groomed forest in her native State. All about in the ravaged
woods lay the big logs, scores of them. They had only begun to pull with
the donkey a week earlier, Benton explained to her. With his size gang
he could not keep a donkey engine working steadily. So they had felled
and trimmed to a good start, and now the falling crew and the swampers
and buckers were in a dingdong contest to see how long they could keep
ahead of the puffing Seattle yarder.

Stella sat on a stump, watching. Over an area of many acres the ground
was a litter of broken limbs, ragged tops, crushed and bent and broken
younger growth, twisted awry by the big trees in their fall. Huge stumps
upthrust like beacons in a ruffled harbor, grim, massive butts. From all
the ravaged wood rose a pungent smell of pitch and sap, a resinous,
pleasant smell. Radiating like the spokes of a wheel from the head of
the chute ran deep, raw gashes in the earth, where the donkey had hauled
up the Brobdingnagian logs on the end of an inch cable.

"This is no small boy's play, is it, Stell?" Charlie said to her once in
passing.

And she agreed that it was not. Agreed more emphatically and with
half-awed wonder when she saw the donkey puff and quiver on its anchor
cable, as the hauling line spooled up on the drum. On the outer end of
that line snaked a sixty-foot stick, five feet across the butt, but it
came down to the chute head, brushing earth and brush and small trees
aside as if they were naught. Once the big log caromed against a stump.
The rearward end flipped ten feet in the air and thirty feet sidewise.
But it came clear and slid with incredible swiftness to the head of the
chute, flinging aside showers of dirt and small stones, and leaving one
more deep furrow in the forest floor. Benton trotted behind it. Once it
came to rest well in the chute, he unhooked the line, freed the choker
(the short noosed loop of cable that slips over the log's end), and the
haul-back cable hurried the main line back to another log. Benton
followed, and again the donkey shuddered on its foundation skids till
another log laid in the chute, with its end butted against that which
lay before. One log aft