Chapter One 

   At fourteen he left Tennessee with plans to never return. Generations past his people had farmed, raised thin and quiet cattle, scratched such a living as they could from scant crops grown in rocky patches of ground. The war had changed it. Killed or burned or starved what livelihood they had, themselves starved of their will. Mother just a child herself when he was born. The end of the war saw her widowed and kinless, stretched by circumstance to an age beyond her nineteen years. For another eight years they lived in a scavenged cabin on squirrel and grouse, berries and wild asparagus, and anything he could pilfer, trips down the mountainside.

   When he left in ’78 he understood that he left her to a fate governed by her own hand, though he never knew what it was. He moved up through Kansas City and Wichita, cadging rides on trains and cargo wagons. He spent six months loading logs in Denver, elsewhere working as a fieldhand, seeing brief seasons through, collecting pay, and moving on. There were days when his youth showed more than his experience and men of depravity and ill-will would take it from him to prove they could. 

In Salt Lake City a knife fight left him with a two-inch graze on his cheek and a man bleeding into the dirt behind him. He’d not started it, but was bound to defend himself, and none who stood and watched blamed him. He left that night in the dark on a cattle train heading north, a rag to his cheek that he discarded in the dust of a cargo car. He jumped in Carson City leaving behind a gaunt grey old man who never spoke and a round-faced preacher who never stopped speaking. 

   In San Francisco he found a place such as he’d never imagined. All manner of exotic women available to him. He stayed a year as a dockhand, nights spent drinking and brawling. At poker he gained a reputation and men in top hats came following his reputation and left with empty billfolds. Then he took up with a prostitute named Rose. Younger than himself but toothless nevertheless. One morning he awoke in their room over a bar to find neither winnings nor woman. He was not quick-tempered and recognized it as an act of survival. He knew he would have misused the money and he did not begrudge it her.

    When he’d culled what wealth he could from San Francisco he moved on as far as he could by train. The track ended in Ukiah, wrong side of the gold rush. He moved inland, following the Sacramento River, saw things he might only have dreamt of in Tennessee, or things that sprang from some nightmare. There were trees of a girth so big it would have taken ten men, arms outstretched to encircle them. He wondered what sort of folk and what sort of beast dwelt among those trees, for he didn’t doubt the queerness of this land.

    He passed burned out and abandoned villages, desecrated and smoking still. He saw traces of the people who had once called the villages home. People long since vanished from his own homeland. Survivors, returned to the broken homes of stick and mud, knowing of nowhere else to go, nor nothing else to do but what they’d done for centuries, millennia. Mostly women and children. Elders. They sat on their haunches, poking at weak fires, vacant eyes that seemed to follow and to not follow him. Children gaunt and naked. In one such village he saw a woman lift her daughter’s ragged garment to reveal skinny brown legs, hairless groin and he turned away in shame, not for seeing but for being shown. 

   He kept to river valleys, stopped at logging camps for day labour, moving on when paid. He met log cutters, or lumberjacks the French Canadians called themselves, coming down off the cheeks of the mountain which they had spent the winter laying naked. Men animal strong, rough-mannered, from Scotland, Ireland, Canada. Amongst themselves they spoke a queer language, a stew of Scots and Irish accents, Gaelic, French and English. These men bore a suppressed aggression upon their faces and in their manner. Something wanting out that was inside them. Skirmishes and conflict in their number.

   When cutting season ended, the structure of the snow and the mountain itself softened and loggers were replaced by others. Buckers and sawyers, men who stripped the felled monsters, cut them to sixteen-foot lengths. And teamsters, quick with a joke and a laugh, but mean and tough just the same, who brought the logs down through the mud to the river’s edge. There were rivermen, lean and small, the men who would drive the logs downriver. 

   He followed the spring north and at one such camp he was hired on to shunt the logs into the river. It was heavy, difficult work and he’d not done it before, but it paid better than day labour for the risk of losing fingers and hands. Here he met a small Swede named Berggren. Berggren worked on the river separating and ordering the logs as they came down the sluice with a long-handled, bladed kind of pick. Berggren danced on the logs, the instrument elegant in his hands, and told him, “You get one, I teach you driving. Where the joke is, ya? Good work. Lots.”

    When he asked the foreman if he could buy one, the man looked him over. “How old are you, son?”

    “Seventeen.”

    He continued looking.

    “Stand on yer right foot.”

    He did.

    “Stand on yer left foot. Switch one fer the other. Not two down at once.”

    He did so.

    “Ye got okay balance,” said the foreman. “Ye drink?”

    “When I can.”

    “Well, ye can’t here. Yer caught drinking, ye leave that moment. Word up and down these camps before next sundown. Ye won’t find work anywhere in these parts. You agree to that?”

    “Yes, sir.”

    “Peavey is one dollar. Caulk boots is two. Gonna need those.”

    The boy handed it over.

    “Foller me,” said the foreman. “What’re ye called?”

    “Samuel. Samuel McGee.”

    He couldn’t have said exactly what it was about log driving that appealed to him. It was graceful, a skill, something learned and earned, and therefore worth doing and having.

 

Chapter Two 

    “When logs are free in water, not jammed. Free. Jump lightly, never stop.” Berggren danced across the timbers, barely causing them to dip. “Never two feet at same time. Unbalances log, you go down. Now you.”

    Under Sam’s foot the log sank. His other foot dangled not knowing where to go. He went down, cold water stealing the air from him. As he went under he heard Berggren laughing. A peavey reached out and he grabbed at it, hands stiff.

    “Always, first time,” Berggren said. “Go to fire. Can easy get hypothermy.”

    Later Berggren told him in hushed and reverent voice, “These not real jams. Real jam is on river. Everything fast, fast. When you break jam, you move fast away. To go down in jam, bad, bad. Logs grind you to flour. Always know where next you step.” He told the boy of how, in Sweden, he’d seen his own father felled by an error of judgement and pulped to mince in a breaking jam. “It can break na seconds. Seconds.” Berggren told of how he himself had once gone down, pulled out by a peavey that nearly took his arm off. He looked off, past the fire as though reliving great things. He told of evil deeds and evil men, made so by the forest and the forest they drove downriver. A man Berggren once knew well who’d killed the camp dog and washed his body in the blood. Bayed naked into the mountains until he was hoarse. Others unable to get past the cutlass in his hand. Of another so driven by the damp and cold to join the logs in the river. 

    “We put in barrels and bury. The dead ones.”

    “You been long at this camp?” the boy asked.

    Berggren blinked, looked unknowing at him, then seemed to wake up. “No.” He laid his knife and fork on the plate crossways, pushed it away. 

   The drive was delayed by a late thaw. Men were jumpy and agitated, quick-tempered. Bored. Men accustomed to constant movement and physical work their bodies missed. Tension grew with the boredom. Idle men, hard men, men not made for waiting, turned irate and fights grew out of the mood. Often it was the Swede who brought them down, speaking softly as if to calm a wild horse

   Sam got to know others. Swedes and Finns, expert river men. A calm and jovial manner to them so unlike the American and Scot and Canadian loggers. Days, the valley warmed and it rained, was snow in the high mountains. They could hear the rumble of avalanches and were keenly aware of the naked slopes directly above them that would not break the force or speed of the snow. Nights, the crisp air working frost on everything.

   By the end of April he’d taken to wrapping a shirt around his face against the black flies and mosquitos. He inhaled them, nose and mouth, and tasted them for days. He’d heard of men choking to death on them, of being driven mad by their constant torment. Mornings, the river bore a mantle of heavy fog that harboured the tiny beasts. 

   In May, the river finally swelled sufficiently to drive the logs two hundred and sixty miles downriver to feed the mill. A man unknown to Sam prowled the camp and spoke to none and seemed not to need human company. His name was Redburn, a red-haired giant, preternatural and dark. Rumours that he was named river boss. No man among them pleased, though none left.

 

    They sat, all of them, at the rough-hewn table, ham and beans and eggs for breakfast. Sam and Berggren opposite a French-Canadian named Etienne, known for his recklessness and his caustic sense of humour. Chewing loudly, Etienne looked dramatically over his shoulders, at each end of the table and beyond. “You know the story of the wolfman? No? I tell you then.” A laugh rumbled deep in his chest.

    “Few years ago, five or six, the thaw was very late. More than now. It snowed in May, you know? Like now men were angry, impatient. Fights at night. Someone brought liquor in. Moonshine. Bad, bad stuff. The smart ones went to bed. I went to bed.” He tapped his chest and then his temple. “Etienne is smart.

    “The others, they sit all night there, drinking, drinking, drinking. They get blind drunk. They get so drunk they forget to feed the fire and then they drink in the dark. They start to hear the howling. Not a wolf, not a coyote. No. It sounds like a man. They are all listening for it. It comes closer and closer. Then,” Etienne cracked his hands together, “it stops.” He paused, looked from one face to another. Some men ignored him, continued eating. Others sat watching, smirking. The younger men listened with gaping mouths, breakfast forgotten.

    “They hear only their own breaths. Puffs of white in the dark. Then, from the river they hear dripping, dripping, dripping, and a heavier breathing than their own. All are silent. They look at each other but no one knows what to do. The heavy breathing turns to a growl. Very low, almost not a growl, but they know it is. They see in the very little moonlight a naked white figure come over the bank. It moves low to the ground, on hands and feet, the four. They smell it, like an animal. They are still, they will not move, provoke it. Whatever it is. Its head moves quickly to the river. It turns and runs on all fours north along the riverbank.”

    Etienne paused again, looked man to man. He whispered, so that all had to lean in closer to hear. “When it runs away, they see in the moonlight it has red hair.” He sat back, satisfied at the effect he has had. Some of the younger men laughed nervously. 

    “Don’t listen,” Berggren told Sam. “Redburn isn’t animal. Maybe missing something. Maybe missing home or booze or woman. He’s not right, maybe crazy, but not animal. He is from Texas but he is driving long, long time. I heard of him in the east. I came to Maine just after he goes. That was long time ago. He knows what he is doing.”

    The boy said nothing. He looked face to face, marking those creased with anxiety, those smooth and untroubled. One of these groups, he thought, will be the better to stick to. He could read people. It was what made him good at poker and it made him good at knowing who to know and who to avoid. In Berggren he saw only good will and an optimism such as he himself had never felt. There was a smile on Berggren’s face, and no deceit. The dying flames of the fire danced orange across it, his blonde moustache glowing. In Etienne he saw no loyalty, but deceit and a vein of darkness.

    “He mayn’t be crazy, but I don’t care for him anyways,” someone said. “No, tisn’t for lack of skill I worry, it’s his lack of morals. Mark it, trouble will happen on this drive, and it’ll be him that causes it.” 

 

    “Hold like this, one hand over, one hand under. If you hold two hands over you can only use peavey one way. This. You see? Must reach all the way around. And easier for balance,”

 Berggren told him.

    He tried it.

    They were at the lake’s edge. Before them, to the horizon, logs like match sticks, tricked the eye, tricked the mind into a lie of scale. 

    He watched Berggren spring across the logs and followed. He felt slow and heavy-footed and Berggren stood watching and said so. “Fast! Must move faster than logs when we are on river.”

    He sped up, challenging his balance until he felt his feet running ahead of him. He was losing control of them. He tried to change his momentum and stepped to his right and felt his balance leave him. A peavey handle appeared in front of him and he grasped it, steadied himself. 

    “I don’t want you to go in. Then we have to go back to camp.”

    Berggren nodded him to continue.

    “Look where your foot will go. Don’t watch your feet.”

    He did so and found this much easier. His confidence grew and he moved faster, running across logs in a circle around Berggren. Smiling, though he didn’t realize it. Berggren smiling, too. “Maybe you are natural.”

    “I must be.”

    Berggren looked around them, checked both shoulders. “When you good you do this.” He sidled to the middle of the log he was on and, leaning his body back slightly, began running backwards on the log. The log rotated away from him. It barely bobbed.

    Sam knew immediately that he wanted to learn this.

    “They don’t like it no more. Not allowed.” Berggren’s feet slowed. The log was now rolling and he jumped, his shoes an inch above the log, and came down, both feet on the log. It stopped and became still and obedient under his feet.

 

Redburn appeared to them at breakfast one day. His animal presence gave them to know he was among them without an uttered word. Men afraid of no beast, uneasy in his presence. They fell silent.

    When he spoke, a voice like rusty barbed wire, “I aim to dock this drive early. End of July. We’ll push hard the first weeks when the river is swollen, get as much distance as we can under the power of the river.”

    He turned his head and brought his finger to his nose, blew a lump of mucous out his nostril. “The drive goes the way I want. I make the rules. You’ll do well to remember that.” He seemed to stare into each one by one and turned on his heel and disappeared as he had come. No conversation resumed. 

    A crudely written notice was nailed to the bunkhouse door later that day. Those who could read did so out loud for those who couldn’t.

 

1.    No horseplay on river or land.

 

2.    No pranks. No music. NO DRINKING. NO FIGHTING.

 

3.    In quarters immediately after last supper.

 

4.    If you work your share you’ll eat your share. Anyone doesn’t put the work in gets PART rations.

 

   In coming days Redburn was nowhere to be seen and they began to doubt him, but for the rumours of the figure of a man seen distantly white in the moonlight, steam rising from him. From their cots they heard wolves howling peak to peak and some swore aloud that it was him. 

   In Redburn, Sam could see nothing at all, not hollow and empty but solid and dense like a tree that wouldn’t split. Trees that destroyed themselves in the splitting like they must be whole or not at all.

​

​