Aksel and the Bachelor Boys came to the funeral. As was the custom, coffee, cake, and biscuitti were served at Ilmahenki. There, the women of the family talked about children, people at the funeral they hadn’t seen for a while, who was seeing whom and where it might lead, and a kitchen in Astoria that ran completely on electricity, including the stove. The men talked logging and lumber. Matti had an idea of how to power different, more efficient yarders with diesel engines, which had been perfected during the war. He’d already converted two steam donkeys from wood to oil by mounting big oil tanks on the back of the skids and eliminated two men, no longer needing anyone to cut and split wood.
Matti had put most of his and Kyllikki’s savings into the stock market and the market had gone up. He figured he could sell some of his stock at a good profit and use that money to buy the new diesel and necessary components for the new yarder and still leave him with more money in the stock market than he’d originally invested. If it all went as planned, it would be like getting a new, more efficient yarder for free. What a country this was.
Matti made up his mind to put money behind his ideas when Jens Lerback answered his question, “What are you up to these days?” by saying, “Not much, looking for a new line of work.” Jens already had a reputation for gasoline engines. It wouldn’t take him long to get up to speed on diesels. He’d had some sort of accident and walked with a decided limp. One arm wouldn’t rise above the level of his shoulder, but Matti had no doubts he could run a yarder. Heppu Reinikka and Yrjö Rautio were known to be good loggers. Matti knew that Aksel was the finest high rigger on the long-log side of the mountains, even with a shoulder wound. As for Kullervo, he was a hard worker and the experience of the others could mitigate his hearing problem. Anyway, it clearly was a package deal.
He offered the Bachelor Boys fifty cents an hour for an eight-hour day. They would need to move to the Oregon side of the river, because of Matti’s deal with Reder.
They went outside to talk it over. No one talked. Aksel and Jens lit two cigarettes, took deep drags, and passed them on in different directions. Heppu took a deep drag on one and blew the smoke upward, looking at the clouds. “It’s fair wages,” he said. Looking at the burning end of his own cigarette, Yrjö said, “I swore I’d never again be a wage slave,” and he passed it to Kullervo.
They all kicked at the ground, passing the cigarettes along, squinting in the smoke.
Finally, Aksel said, “If you work for Matti Koski you aren’t a wage slave; you’re a logger.”
They all took that in, passing the cigarettes along until they’d smoked them to the point of burning their fingers. Jens flipped a smoking butt away, shaking his fingers where it had burned him. “I’m in if you’re in,” he said to all of them.
Everyone looked at Aksel. He nodded his head and they went back inside.
It didn’t take Jens long to figure out how to hook up a diesel to power the big cable drums of the old steam donkey. He removed the boiler and the steam pistons and bolted down the diesel in the boiler’s place. Then he linked the drive shaft of the old cylinders to the diesel’s power takeoff. Everything else remained the same, except the throttle.
The Bachelor Boys moved to Svensen, Oregon, a settlement close to Matti’s new show. They and the new diesel yarder were in operation three weeks after Mielikki’s funeral.
There was only one thing wrong with the new workforce: they were out of shape. No one had given it a thought, especially the Bachelor Boys. By midmorning on their first day, everyone was thinking about it. Hands had grown soft along with muscles. Reflexes were still fast, but not lightning fast—and in the woods lightning fast saved your life.
At first Matti worried a bit; then it got downright funny. They all had the brains of loggers, but the bodies of shoe clerks. He watched Yrjö and Heppu wolf down a large lunch and then walk somewhat stiffly back to the show. A huge log temporarily hung up, then jerked over the obstacle and came hurtling right at them. They both sprinted for a shallow dip in the ground and threw themselves into it as the log careened over their heads and up the hill to the landing. The sprint had been too much for them. They both poked their heads up from the indent with vomit on their chins and shirts. Matti laughed out loud, drawing a middle finger from Heppu.
A lot had changed in the high-rigging game since Aksel had last done it. Now, high climbers had spurs, much like those worn by electric linemen, only with way longer spikes. The extra length was needed to penetrate the thick unstable bark to reach solid wood. The flip line was a rope with a steel core, a safety measure against a badly aimed ax stroke that had been learned the hard way. Harness and saddle combinations of varying designs had also been invented.
He flipped the line, it caught, and he dug in his spikes. At the first limb, his hands were shaking from the exertion and beginning to blister. He was breathing heavily. He steeled himself for the job ahead and took a moment to regain some strength by holding closer to the trunk.
From far below he heard Matti holler, “Rig it, Aksel. Don’t make love to it.”
He moved.
When the tree narrowed to about three feet, he began sawing. Sweat stung his eyes. He was gasping. His shoulder ached from the wound he never talked about.
There was a light cracking sound. The top of the tree began to move. Aksel dropped down quickly, jamming his spikes into the trunk. In a slow majestic fall, the top swept past him, falling away, growing smaller and smaller. The delimbed spar suddenly lurched to the side, then came whipping back, its speed vastly accelerated with the tension of the entire trunk, moving nearly twenty feet before whipping back in the other direction. It was like being on a mainmast in the highest wind imaginable, only three times higher up.
He slowly made his way to the ground, then staggered off to get the small 50-pound block they would use to haul up the massive 350-pound bull block that would do the real work.
When he finished the day, his hands bleeding, his feet aching, he was totally spent. He hadn’t felt like this since his first day at Reder Logging. He would have preferred to be back in combat.
Aksel and the other Bachelor Boys piled into the Oldsmobile. They all lit cigarettes. They carefully drove the Oldsmobile over ruts and potholes and through the mud to their boardinghouse in Svensen, where they collapsed in their cots without taking off their clothes. It was a stiff and sober crew that arrived the next morning.
In three months, as Matti had expected, they were all fully productive—and each about fifteen pounds lighter.