TALL TIMBER

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22393, 14 April 1936, Page 5

TALL TIMBER

BRITISH COLUMBIA WOODS SEASON'S ACTIVITY BEGINS [from our own correspondent] VANCOUVER. March 25 Up and down the coast of British Columbia the lumberjacks are swarming into the woods, 10,000 of them—as a greater demand from the United Kingdom and the British Empire presages a record output—fallers, buckers, chokers, hooktenders, donkeymen, whistle punks and the high-riggers, those tall, loose-limbed, nonchalent aris- , tocrats of the forest. Hard, wiry, lean fellows in high boots and mackinaws, agile as cats, incredibly skilful, at home only within the sound of falling timber, and the pungent aroma of cedar, fir and hemlock, they are back in larger numbers than since 1929, the year of boom and burst. The world is calling for lumber, and more lumber. Before the season •is out, the industry will have earned £15,000,000. Great Britain. Australia, South Africa, the United State* and Japan are chief consumers of a pn>Juct that is the most reliable barometer of economio conditions west of th& Rockies. Where the old-time lumberjack used to " blue " his cheque in oceans of strong drink, and veritably tear up the sidewalks of ths cities, the modern logger has settled down, bought himself a house, a car and a radio.lnto such things this year's wages, sharply increased, will go. The men are in the woods earlier this year, before the spring is under way. Leading them are the fallers and buckers, advance guard of the logging army—squat fellows, their shoulders broadened and their arms lengthened from years spent over the saw—cutting down "the big trees, sawing them intc logs. Farther back, beside the spai trees and the sky lines, the hooktendei and his chokermen are binding the logs with steel lines, signalling the donkeyman to " give them the highball." The logs stir, come to life, leap in the air, lurch along the sky line to the flat cars. Log trains of 60 and 70 flat cars, . half a mile from " loci " to caboose, . wind, snake-like, through the forest, to the " saltchuck," where they are bound into booms, to be hauled by panting, - husky tugs to the mill on the way to the markets of the^world. M „ 4