d
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.

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 on