The Bavarian Gate By John Dalmas

A moment later a tall, big-shouldered, middle-aged man came through the door. He was bald as an egg, but a thatch of flaxen chest hair bushed from his open collar. “Vhere you been?” he said to Roy. “I ain’t seen you for a year or more.”

“I been to Oklahoma. I’d heard it was real Indian country, and I wanted to see it.”

“Vas it? Indian country?”

“Outside the cities it was. The cities were like Portland, only hotter in summer and colder in winter. I didn’t like it very much.” Axel Severtson, turned to Macurdy. “Vhere you from?”

“Indiana.”

“Indiana.” Severtson frowned. “You know anything about the voods?”

“Yeah. I’ve cut timber off and on all my life.”

The Swede appraised him, checking the heavy shoulders, the large beefy hands. “Come vit’ me,” he said, and beckoning, led the two of them through another door into the shed end of the building. Mostly it was storage. Tools hung on the walls; large, well-greased spools of cable lay on skids; and there were chests presumably holding other equipment. “You a faller?” Axel asked Macurdy.

“When we cut, my uncle and me, we did everything: felled, bucked, and skidded.”

“Vhat did you cut?”

“White oak, more than anything else. Barrel stock.”

The Swede grunted, as if oaks were beneath the attention of real loggers, then took down an axe and tested the blade with a thumb. “C’mon,” he said, and led them out the back of the building. A log perhaps three feet in diameter lay there on skids. Someone had already cut into it with an axe; there was a pair of cuts a few feet apart, one of them ragged and rough. Severtson handed Macurdy the axe.

“Let’s see vhat you can do vit’ it.”

Macurdy hefted it-the handle was longer than he was used to-checked an edge for himself, then stepped onto the log, planted his feet and began, his strokes measured and powerful, precise. Chips as big as books began to fly. Halfway through, the Swede called a halt. “Okay,” he said, “you’ll do. I got some guys didn’t come back from the Memorial Day veekend, and I ain’t vun of those that goes to Portland to bail them out of yail.”

Q Q

Axel sent him back into town to get boots and caulks-said it wasn’t safe working without them-and tin pants and whatever else he needed. After giving him a note saying he was hired, in case he needed credit in the stores. Macurdy invested in a toothbrush, too, but not a razor. Like most Macurdy men, he grew little hair except on his skull-because of his ylvin genes, Varia had told him. He’d never grown more than a faint down on cheeks and jaw.

By noon they were on their way to camp, in a truck hauling rigging gear. They ate a late lunch of sandwiches in the messhall-the crew carried their lunches-then were taken into the woods. Macurdy wondered how it was possible to cut timber on such steep slopes. And the stumps! Most were between fifty and ninety inches across, maybe twenty inches high on the uphill and five feet on the downhill side. On this job, he would learn, most of the trees stood between two hundred and two hundred eighty feet tall. He’d never imagined such forest.

They had to wait a few minutes while the foreman-the youngest Severtson brother, Lars-finished marking out a new cutting strip for a pair of fallers. Then Lars assigned a bucker to fell trees with Roy. Finally M acurdy was given the ex-buckers long one-man saw and steel tape measure, and told what to do. He realized now why buckers worked alone: Most of the prostrate trunks were too large for men to work together on opposite sides.

“You ever do this before?” Lars asked. His accent was slight; he’d come over as a child, and gone to school in Nehtaka.

“Not in trees like these,” Macurdy answered.

“Let’s see how you do.”

The cut had been started, and the saw left in the kerf. Macurdy took hold of the handle, and after a few strokes got the feel of it. “Okay,” Lars said. “Remember, I don’t stand for nobody loafing, even if this is piece work. If you don’t get the wood out, you go down the road.”

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