“All right,” said he.  “Just so you don’t get in the way of a falling tree.”

A narrow fringe of brush and scrubby timber separated the camp from the actual work.  From the water’s edge to the donkey engine was barely four hundred yards.  From donkey to a ten-foot jump-off on the lake shore in a straight line on a five per cent. gradient ran a curious roadway, made by placing two logs in the hollow scooped by tearing great timbers over the soft earth, and a bigger log on each side.  Butt to butt and side to side, the outer sticks half their thickness above the inner, they formed a continuous trough the bottom and sides worn smooth with friction of sliding timbers.  Stella had crossed it the previous evening and wondered what it was.  Now, watching them at work, she saw.  Also she saw why the great stumps that rose in every clearing in this land of massive trees were sawed six and eight feet above the ground.  Always at the base the firs swelled sharply.  Wherefore the falling gangs lifted themselves above the enlargement to make their cut.

Two sawyers attacked a tree.  First, with their double-bitted axes, each drove a deep notch into the sapwood just wide enough to take the end of a two-by-six plank four or five feet long with a single grab-nail in the end,—­the springboard of the Pacific coast logger, whose daily business lies among the biggest timber on God’s footstool.  Each then clambered up on his precarious perch, took hold of his end of the long, limber saw, and cut in to a depth of a foot or more, according to the size of the tree.  Then jointly they chopped down to this sawed line, and there was the undercut complete, a deep notch on the side to which the tree would fall.  That done, they swung the ends of their springboards, or if it were a thick trunk, made new holding notches on the other side, and the long saw would eat steadily through the heart of the tree toward that yellow, gashed undercut, stroke upon stroke, ringing with a thin, metallic twang.  Presently there would arise an ominous cracking.  High in the air the tall crest would dip slowly, as if it bowed with manifest reluctance to the inevitable.  The sawyers would drop lightly from their springboards, crying: 

“Tim-ber-r-r-r!”

The earthward swoop of the upper boughs would hasten till the air was full of a whistling, whishing sound.  Then came the rending crash as the great tree smashed prone, crushing what small timber stood in its path, followed by the earth-quivering shock of its impact with the soil.  The tree once down, the fallers went on to another.  Immediately the swampers fell upon the prone trunk with axes, denuding it of limbs; the buckers followed them to saw it into lengths decreed by the boss logger.  When the job was done, the brown fir was no longer a stately tree but saw-logs, each with the square butt that lay donkeyward, trimmed a trifle rounding with the axe.