"It's real graft, this is. I got the easy end
of it, and mine's no snap. I miss a signal, big stick butts against
something solid; biff! goes the line and maybe cuts a man plumb in two.
You got to be wide awake when you run a loggin' donkey. These woods is
no place for a man, anyway, if he ain't spry both in his head and feet."
"Do many men get hurt logging?" Stella asked. "It looks awfully
dangerous, with these big trees falling and smashing everything. Look at
that. Goodness!"
From the donkey they could see a shower of ragged splinters and broken
limbs fly when a two-hundred-foot fir smashed a dead cedar that stood in
the way of its downward swoop. They could hear the pieces strike against
brush and trees like the patter of shot on a tin wall.
The donkey engineer gazed calmly enough.
"Them flyin' chunks raise the dickens sometimes," he observed. "Oh, yes,
now an' then a man gets laid out. There's some things you got to take a
chance on. Maybe you get cut with an axe, or a limb drops on you, or you
get in the way of a breakin' line,--though a man ain't got any business
in the bight of a line. A man don't stand much show when the end of a
inch 'n' a quarter cable snaps at him like a whiplash. I seen a feller
on Howe Sound cut square in two with a cable-end once. A broken block's
the worst, though. That generally gets the riggin' slinger, but a piece
of it's liable to hit anybody. You see them big iron pulley blocks the
haul-back cable works in? Well, sometimes they have to anchor a snatch
block to a stump an' run the main line through it at an angle to get a
log out the way you want.
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