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 Macurdy 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."
He left then. As Macurdy drew and pushed the long saw, he decided he was going to like this job.
In Severtson's camp, buckers slept in their own shack, and fallers in another. The choker setters and whistle punks shared still another, as did the cooks, the riggers and skinners and donkey engineers, the cookees and swampers and stable boys and bullcook, the filers and blacksmiths. They ate together though, at long tables bent beneath food, served by the several cookees-mostly boys, but with an old timer whose back couldn't stand the heavier work any longer, and a Finn with a stumpy foot, earned in the always dangerous woods.
For two weeks Macurdy bucked fir-two weeks in which he also learned to file a saw like a pro. The camp had filers, but the general attitude was that any real honest-to-god sawyer filed his own. Macurdy's dad had taught him as a boy, but he'd never been more than adequate before. Now he learned the fine points of swaging, and how to get the set so even, the cut surface was as smooth as if planed.
Then Roy's felling partner was afflicted with terminal thirst, and left for Portland to drink up his money. Roy suggested Macurdy for a replacement, and Lars agreed to give him a trial. Skill with the axe was the most demanding part of the faller's job, and axemanship Macurdy's best woods skill; they became not only a successful team, but by Macurdy's second week felling with Roy, they were in contention for the highest producing team, and the big monthly prize of twenty dollars each.
The previously dominant team included a man everyone stayed clear of, so far as possible. Even his partner was wary of him. Like Macurdy, Patsy Hannigan was new in the area, but already had a reputation as both a logger and a troublemaker. His aura reminded Macurdy of the late Lord Quaie's, in Yuulith, with cruelty smoldering at the surface, poorly concealed.
Hannigan was not a particularly large man-six-foot one and one hundred seventy pounds-but sinewy, and tough as a bullwhip. He'd gone to Nehtaka for Memorial Day, and fought twice; both his opponents were hospitalized. He fought dirty-not the usual thing among loggers. The only men in camp who didn't seem leery of him were Lars and Macurdy-and possibly Klaplanahoo; it was hard to be sure about the Indian. Lars's reputation as a fighter was well established; his older brother had made him woods boss at age eighteen, and several brawlers of reputation had quickly tested him. He'd never been whipped, and since then had seldom needed to fight.
Surprisingly, Hannigan had shown no inclination to call the foreman out, but the general belief in camp was that when the Irishman decided to hit the road, he'd try taking the boss before he left. Or possibly Macurdy, whom most felt could take him, though they'd never seen Macurdy fight.
It never happened. Hannigan discovered Hansi Sweiger instead. Hansi, seventeen years old, had come with his family from Germany at age eight, and in school had lost his accent entirely, though his family still spoke German at home. When he'd graduated from high school that spring, he'd come to work as a whistle punk. Now, belatedly, Hannigan had discovered the kid was German. It was the excuse he needed to abuse him verbally, as if Hand had been personally responsible both for the World War and Germany's defeat in it. Macurdy had expected Lars to call Hannigan on it, but he never did. Roy said it wasn't done that way; in the camps, a man stood up for himself, though in Hansi's case, no one doubted that if he ever stood up to Hannigan, he'd be beaten half to death.
That never happened either. Because one morning the sheriff and a deputy came to camp, Axel with them, bearing a warrant from Coos County for Hannigan's arrest on charges of rape and murder. They came into the messhall to serve it.
The crew had finished breakfast, and the men were gathered at the lunch tables, packing their lunches. As soon as the sheriff identified his purpose, Hannigan's hand went inside his shirt and emerged with a flat.38 caliber pistol, firing even as he drew. The first shot tore through the sheriff's right bicep, spinning him around; the second hit the deputy in the middle of the forehead; the third struck Axel high in the chest. Then, for a reason that would never be known, Hannigan turned his pistol toward Hansi Sweiger, who stood big-eyed by the coffee tank, thermos in hand.
His fourth shot hit no one, however, because Macurdy threw his heavy sheath knife, taking Hannigan between the fourth and fifth ribs on the left, barely missing the breastbone and plunging into the heart. Hannigan shot into the floor as he fell.
Macurdy used an Ozian shaman's version of first aid to hen p Axel and the sheriff. The deputy and Hannigan were beyond help, though Macurdy wouldn't have helped Hannigan anyway.
He had no idea what Hannigan had done for him, nor had Hannigan.
5
Mary Preuss
Lars sent the crew to the woods anyway. Axel wasn't dead, he said, Hannigan was, and dead or alive, the sonofabitch wasn't going to shut down Severtson's camp.
Production wasn't up to standard that day, of course, except by Klaplanahoo and Macurdy. There was a lot of talking, much of it about Macurdy: how quickly he'd moved, how accurately and powerfully he'd thrown.
Two days later a deputy arrived with a court order: Macurdy was to come in for a hearing. Lars demanded to know why. Because, the deputy told him, anyone who willfully killed someone, even with good cause, had to have a court hearing, to establish in law that the act had been necessary. That way, he explained, no one could ever claim he'd done wrong by it.
Lars explained back that that was a lot of bullshit-at no one could ever say there was anything wrong with what Macurdy had done. But he took the deputy out to Roy's and Macurdy's cutting strip, and Macurdy left for town in the sheriff department's new 1933 Ford V-8, with a radio like the police car in Miles City. Macurdy wasn't worried; the deputy's aura reflected friendly admiration.
In town, the sheriff, Fritzi Preuss, sat behind his desk with his right arm and shoulder in a cast. His face was drawn, his aura marked by trauma and the strong analgesic he'd been given for pain. Hannigan's bullet had smashed through his humerus, an injury much more traumatic than a flesh wound or ordinary fracture. Nonetheless he got to his feet, shook left hands with Macurdy, and with a mild German accent, asked some routine questions. One was where he'd come from-county, state, and home address-Fritzi writing the answers slowly in careful, left-handed block letters.