Monday morning a little gray 53 Chevy takes them up into the bush. Two in the front with the driver, and two in the back on some sleeping bags. It's a long drive; they arrive about seven thirty. The logging road is new and rough. After an hour and a half of being thrown around in the cab on that type of road you feel like you've done a day's work already. And you soon lose any feeling of awkwardness with the other workers, when you're tossed together like a garden salad for over an hour.
The air is still chilly up here. It's light, but the sun is behind the peak, and won't reach this area for two hours yet.
Jack learns about no see-ums. They're biting flies, so tiny it's difficult to see just one, hence the name. But they cover your arms in such numbers, all chewing away at you, that you see a sort of very short black fur all over your skin. And they really bite! Some people react strongly to the bites. Jack doesn't, he just smarts and burns. He hates it.
They're in a landing, a cleared area in which the trees are gathered, stripped of any limbs that still remain after skidding, bucked up, and loaded on logging trucks. The loading is done with a cherry picker, which is a power unit mounted on the back of a big old flatbed truck equipped with a couple of jack stands and a long boom, mounted and secured with guy wires in such a way that the boom is free to swing in an arc right over the log pile and the logging truck, and it's tilted just a bit so it returns to rest over the load. At the top of the boom are several pulley blocks and cable mounts, so the power unit can lift the logs by means of a cable running onto a winch drum secured to the truck. Ingenious set up, thinks Jack.
To load the logs, the end of the cable is attached to two shorter lines, each fastened to a thick but sharply pointed hook, a bull hook, to which is tied a thirty foot rope. Jack mans one of these hooks, and his partner the other. Mr Maurence runs the power unit, and from his position he overlooks the logs and the truck, so he can pick the log he wants, to build a nice tight well-balanced load.
