Free The Friends of Meager Fortune by David Adams Richards Page A

have,” Mary said.
    Now Owen coming home was a great blessing. Buckler grabbed his hand and shook it, tears in his eyes. And it was on the tip of his tongue to call Owen, Will—but he stopped himself before that.

TWELVE
    The woods are much changed, and how a good man lived then would try the best men now.
    The next day Owen went out on the Tote Road with a team, packing in canned peaches and flour, pork and beef, and a barrel of doughnuts, to the camp far up on Good Friday Mountain. It took hours to get there, and so he slept the first night under the moon. By the time he reached higher ground, snow had fallen.
    The next morning, in the crisp snow-filled air, he saw Good Friday Mount, and knew the teamsters would be hard pressed to get down a load. And on every foot up that mountain, he saw in his mind’s eye the horses stumble, and the loads come down upon their backs.
    “Poor fuckin’ horses,” he thought, for unlike Will he had always thought a little more of horses than men—which even he considered a weakness. And Will would consider unforgivable.
    Any qualms or weakness here would soon be known by men who cherished strength.
    He reviewed his site—knew which teams of horses would come in, the men, the cutting they had done at the top of thehill where they would start in a week or so to haul it by horse to the riverbank, to block and chain it up until the spring drive. He needed dams built so the runoff would be great enough to carry the timber, and that very morning he ordered his men down to do it. He also ordered a road straight down over an embankment—the only place on the face of the mountain where one could possibly do it—and to have a bridge constructed at the bottom. They did what he said.
    Still, even the loyal ones knew it was a harsh place.
    “I know it is a harsh place,” Jameson said, “so go now if you need to.”
    None did.
    It was widely thought in the last week or two that Jameson would give over their holdings and sell out to Estabrook. And that Owen had come home as a war hero to get the best price.
    Owen made it clear that this was not the case.
    They would continue to cut upon Good Friday, and they would bring the wood to the mill in the spring.
    Later that day he walked down into the shine and told the fellers that he knew it was a hard place—but they had been in hard spots before, hadn’t they. The way they would fashion the run down to Arron Brook would be the most dangerous run in the province. He told them this point blank.
    One of the teamsters who had come in early, Gravellier, said there might be another way around. He asked Owen if he knew that.
    “Yes I do,” Owen, who had looked at a map of the area, said, “but there is no time to trim another road so far away.”
    They asked Owen if he had run out a team.
    “Yes I have,” he said, “once or twice. I won’t lie, I am not a great teamster—but I will rely upon great teamsters here!”
    They stood about him in the year’s first snow, with axes, draft horses, and chains, the “shine” they had cut lookinglike a tunnel into the future, bright with the bark-scalped trees and dark with the shadow of trees ready to be felled, some of the men like ghosts scattered here and there, wearing thick woolen shirts, Humphrey pants, and old coats, their beards scrapped with tree chips, ice, and snot, they breathed in the dense wood, the only world they knew—while the world at that moment in Toronto, New York, or London knew nothing or cared little for the millions of board feet these men had cut, skewered out of the earth for the benefit of those cities and city dwellers, who would think of them, if at all, as savages.
    Owen sat that night in the smoky camp—where things were not much different than what he had seen as a boy. He saw the socks and woolen underwear sacked up to dry on poles above the stove, the arms and muscled backs of men making ready for the night in the sweet acrid smell of burning wood. He understood it