''A Story Of The Big Timber'' Short Story By Irving Bacheller

• Story Name : A Story of the Big Timbe
• Author Name : Irving Bacheller (1859–1950)
• Author Country : United States
• Published Year : 1901
• Story Type : Short Story

The snow on the ground around Lavery's camp was six feet deep. There was a little opening in the evergreen canopy of the forest overhead, and the stars in the cold zenith shivered as one looked at them through the blast of heat and smoke that rose from the chimney. I stood many a night at the door of the big log shanties and saw the sparks shoot up and crackle in the leeward boughs of hemlock. It was forty miles to the clearing on the southern side of the camp, but at every point in the northern semicircle of the compass there was a trackless and unmeasured depth of timber. At a certain opening in the ridge, near Lavery's, one could look ten miles across a rolling sea of green, parted by the frozen waters of the Ottawa that lay like a belt in the valley. The "big skid" flanked the river at the end of the trail, down which "hawbuck" and "teamster" started in sulky silence in the early daylight and up which they came hallooing merrily at suppertime. Then the "hawbucks" stalled their oxen in the big shell, and the teamsters put away the horses that came in hoary with frost. I was the cook's helper at Lavery's and had won fleeting fame in the tossing of flapjacks. My hand had lifted the flapjack to a proud position of indispensability on the upper Ottawa. For the rest, use beans and molasses, salt pork, and potatoes. Bread, butter, and apple sauce were the most popular items in the "filling." The table was spread before the roaring fire of logs every evening, and the men sat down to eat in their shirt sleeves. The keen air went to their blood like wine in the work of the day, and the shanty roared with laughter as they ate. Songs were the solace of the evening hours, while the big lumbermen lay lounging on the bunks or sat in easy attitudes around the fire. The brogue of Scotch and Irish and the quaint dialect of Frenchmen mingled in their talk. There was the brute majesty of the lion in these men as they shook the mighty muscles of their breast and arm in their laughter or when the furrows moved and tightened on their brows in the stern dignity of anger. There were a number of men who could sing doleful ballads, and one who often harangued them with mock oratory that provoked noisy applause. The ancient game of "whack sal," in which two men, blindfolded, struck at each other with straps, was sometimes proposed, but not unless there had been drinking, in which old grudges were apt to be revived.

These northern woodsmen love the smell of powder and the feel of a gun. It is an inborn, overriding passion with most of them. Generally, an idle hand had a gun in it, and the itching palm was one that had long been deprived of its birthright. These godless men of the forest spent their Sundays, in good weather, hunting on snowshoes, and the roar of their guns rushed through the timber and bellowed in the distant waste. It happened sometimes that a luckless hunter ventured too far from camp and never got back for one reason or another. I heard much of one "poor Tom" who had gone away hunting on a Sunday the winter before and met his end somewhere in the great wilderness. Occasionally two or more of the men would wake in the dead of night when the timber wolves were howling and get up and peer out of the window and speak of "poor Tom."

One cold Sunday morning in midwinter, I started clearing snow for Long Pond with a brawny Scotchman known as McVeigh. That was four miles past the Ottawa, and it was difficult walking in the light snow. We wounded a caribou on the farther side of the river and followed its trail of crimson for miles to the top of the great ridge in the north, and then westward through the burnt timber. The sky was clouded over, and the cold was unusually severe. McVeigh seemed to know every tree in the forest, and we were continually coming upon landmarks that reminded him of a story. We had stopped a moment to light our pipes and were striding with long steps through the soft snow. The woods were silent, and I could hear only the creak of our snowshoes and McVeigh puffing at his pie. He halted suddenly and turned his ear to listen. I could then hear a faint but growing sound in the far distance behind us.

"It's wolves," said the old woodsman, "and they're on this line of blood." We'd better leave it and make for the top of the ridge.

We turned to the south at once, intending to cross the ridge and make our way down the valley to camp. It was a stiffer climb than we expected, however, with the snowshoes, and even before we got to the top, that fearful echo was ringing in the nearby woods. Little avalanches of snow fell on our heads as we hurried through the underbrush. We strode through the open timber at the top of our speed, and as I turned to my companion, I noticed a mighty serious look in his face. He stopped suddenly and looked back for a moment.

"They're looking for man-meat today," he said."I'm thinkin' we must've got some of that blood on our shoes."

There was a great slash in the timber right before us. The steep southern side had been stripped quite bare by the lumbermen for a distance above and below the track of our snowshoes. The line of the ridge swerved northward some ten rods at this point and then came back, describing a sort of oxbow, walled with rock, a hundred feet or more in width, and the sides of it fell sharply to the river valley fifty feet below. From Sunday to Sunday, the sky was thick with snow that flew before the dry wind like down.Every flake that fell in the big slash had been driven to this rocky gore by the wind coming up the river out of the east. There was a full fifty feet of snow in the deep pit, which, under a slender crust, lay as light and dry as a heap of feathers. On the far side, the trees stood with their boughs in the drift. The great, gloomy cavern under the canopy of the forest was choked with snow. McVeigh picked up a fallen branch of dead pine as we came to the bend, then cautiously stepped out onto the dome-like top of the great drift. I was a mere boy of eighteen, and but for the coolness of my companion, I should have lost my head and probably my life.

"Hold there!" "Step carefully now," said he, as I came running after him, frightened at the near sound of the wolves.

"You might go to your ears if you broke it here," said McVeigh, and, as he spoke, he thrust the long rod of timber down into the heap of snow.

"See there!" he continued, "the weight of your finger sends it down and out of sight." "We'll stop and rest awhile, and you'll see a bit of fun here."

We crept, with shortened steps, to the white summit of snow near the far side of the pit, and its slender sheathing cracked and crumbled under our shoe frames, though, fortunately, it was strong enough to hold us.

"By the living Lord!" said McVeigh, in a sharp voice, as we turned about; "look there! Stand still now! Don't move!"

There was a fearsome ring and echo in the air as the grey pack wallowed up the top of the ridge in the dead timber. McVeigh claimed there were nearly a score of them—and he always claimed he had counted them—with legs so long that a fair-sized dog could walk under their bellies, and they ran in a close bunch, the snow-spray flying over them. They were the big, grey timber wolves. Now that the danger had come close, I was quite cool, and when they stopped at the brink, I actually began to count them. It seems incredible as I think about it now after all these years.

"The leaders gave a jump, and the whole pack of them stopped when I hollered," said McVeigh in telling the story, when we were safe in camp. "Then they made for us, jumpin' clear with every move of their legs." There was a fall of six feet at the edge of the pit, and they jumped in a bunch. The big heap of snow trembled when they hit it, and they sank as if it had been water. We heard a smothered roar and saw the splinters of crust fly, and the white snow shut over them. Then it stirred like water boiling in a pot, caved, and ran down at the break like sand in a hollow. And then, praise God, it was still. That is the end of the story.

We got to camp as quickly as our legs would take us. and told how we wowed the wolves. The boys listened with much interest, but not a man would believe us! The first big thaw that came, we took them over and showed them what was there in the depths of the pit.