How Garnier Broke the Log-Jam

by Algernon Blackwood

“A logjam is a mighty serious thing, an‘ don’t you forgit it,” said Hank Davis, as he carefully selected a burning ember n the camp fire with his naked fingers and held it to the ash of a half-smoked cigar.

We others, sitting cleaning our guns by the fitful light, said nothing, for we knew this was Hank’s preface to a yarn. All day long we had tramped the woods and marshes on the trail of the elusive moose, and after a big supper of venison, trout, and coffee, we were just in the mood for a story. We felt, too, that Hank⁠—this picturesque, dirty, hard-faced son of the woods⁠—was just the fellow to tell it.

There he sat opposite to us, leaning against a fallen tree, his face smeared, his slouch hat over one eye, and his big fingers toying with the gleaming barrel that always carried true when it rested against his shoulder and had his fierce eye looking down it.

“An’ I never hunt through these pairts and see the runnin’ water,” he went on as though to himself, “without calling to mind that thar frog-eatin’ Canuck, Jean Garnier, an’ how ’twas he broke the jam way back in the sixties.”

Behind us the tents shone white and ghostly in the firelight, and the stars peeped down through a tangle of pine-branches that just stirred in the night breeze. On our left the big lake stretched for many miles, and there was not a habitable bit of land in any direction under a two days’ journey.

So we learned (in language that will not bear faithful reproduction) that Jean Garnier hailed originally from a little village near Montreal, named Ste. Rose. He had lived there all his life, more or less, and “a mighty wet life it was too.” For Garnier was very fond of the white whisky of French Canada⁠—that powerful fiery liquid made from corn and found all through Upper Canada⁠—and was more often under its influence than otherwise. But, in spite of his bad habits, he had won the love of a very charming girl in the village, and he loved her too, he told himself, better than anything else in the world.

“With a single exception,” she said to him one day. “That horrid whisky⁠—you love that better than you love me. Otherwise you’d give it up for me.”

“But you wouldn’t cast away a man just because a drop of whisky.”

“Jean, Jean! It’s because I love you so much, that’s why I say I won’t marry you till you give over swallowing that vile white fire.” The girl looked up with a loving appeal in her brown eyes, but she saw the deepening frown on his face, and her heart misgave her.

“Jean, dear, you were a strong-built man a while ago, and I was mighty proud when you came that day and put your arm round my waist and said you loved me⁠—me, a weakly bit of a thing, and you standing up six feet of beautiful strength. The girls were all wild you chose me. Now they laugh instead. And it’s all that dreadful drink⁠—”

The man drew closer, interrupting her with a fierce gesture. “Marry me straight away, Lucie, and I’ll swear never to touch another drop. I’ll give it up altogether.”

He bent his dark head down to the level of her face and stretched out his arms to catch her to his heart. But she slipped past him, white to the lips, and her heart thumping. She knew this was a last struggle, and her mind was made up. Her courage must not fail her now after all those hours of prayer and sleeplessness. He had broken a hundred promises for the drink; but she believed in his love, and was determined not to spare herself if she could only save him.

Jean was dimly conscious of the nobility of her love, and her great force of character worked subtly upon him and overcame him. His arms dropped to his side, and he fell back a pace or two. The longing rose in him eagerly, triumphantly, as it had risen many a time before, to become the true man again, to fight with his whole being and win at last. A stray gleam of sunshine fell from the clouds just then, and threw into vivid contrast the strength of his face and the signs of weakness born of long indulgence. The double revelation smote the girl anew. She drew to his side again.

“Oh, Jean, I cannot argue, but—” her voice broke⁠—“but tell me again that you do love me, more than anything else in the whole world. Give me your promise once again. I’ll believe it⁠—”

There was a deep silence between them. The sun was hidden by a passing cloud. The wind stirred mournfully in the clustering Golden Rod behind them, as if the sighs their hearts would not hold had passed out together and mingled in the air of heaven before them.

The man’s eyes were fixed upon the ground. The moments passed, and he showed no sign that he had even heard her appeal. Then a low sob from the girl broke the silence. Jean suddenly straightened and shook himself. He squared his splendid shoulders, and his great chest heaved with the breathing of strong emotion.

“Lucie, child,” he said simply⁠—but his voice was very low and tense⁠— “I love you better than anything else in heaven or earth, and I cannot lose you. I give you my promise, and this time le lon Dieu will help me to keep it.”

She looked up gratefully, with swimming eyes.

“But first,” he went on, “I shall go away. You will wait for me; it will not be long⁠—a few months at most; but when I come back I shall be your old Jean again⁠—a man⁠—and worthy of your splendid love. And, remember always, I love you.”

It was late autumn when this conversation took place, and a large lumber camp was then in process of formation. Garnier saw the chance to get away from his old companions into a vigorous open-air life that would give his system strength for the great battle. He joined the camp and went away into the far lonely region of forest near the head-waters of the Ottawa River (where we were moose-hunting when Hank told us the story), and for six months the snow and ice cut them off from civilisation as completely as if they had gone to the moon.

The little world of a lumber camp, shut in by the snows and the frozen lakes, surrounded by bleak hills and leagues of pathless forest, has a peculiar interest all its own. A winter that brings a snowfall of ten feet, with thirty-foot drifts and a temperature of forty degrees below zero, is a very serious winter indeed. The life in the camp is almost martial, and necessarily so. In an average sized camp there are some fifty men, rough, vigorous, often desperate fellows, and they are ruled with a rod of iron by the Shanty Boss⁠—i.e. he who rules over the shanty. For there is one huge pine-log shanty in which they eat, and another in which they sleep. The latter has several large stoves burning night and day, and hardly any ventilation. Wooden bunks, three deep, with blankets, and moss or cedar-branches for mattresses, line the walls all the way round. A cook and a “cookee” (assistant cook) rule over the eating shanty, and provide the men with four tremendous meals a day⁠—salt pork, crushed apples, coffee, brown sugar, and a rough kind of bread. The camp rises long before it is light, and at once, after breakfast, the men go out to chop down the trees. At ten o’clock a meal is brought out to them. At two o’clock it is repeated. At six o’clock they come home, dog tired, for the fourth meal, and by eight o’clock they are in bed and asleep. No “shooting-irons” are allowed to be brought into camp, and another rule (which seems to an outsider who has seen the sleepy, tired crew trudge home, almost unnecessary), very strictly enforced, forbids a single spoken word in the sleeping shanty.

The work is extremely hard, and there is little energy left over for fighting or quarrelling, although some Shanty Bosses rule their commandoes with more success than others.

The “axeing” of the big trees is all done while there is snow on the ground, for without its slippery assistance it would be impossible to draw the huge logs to the water’s edge. One set of men make a roadway to the nearest lake or stream, consisting of a main artery with smaller trails running into it and taking in all the big trees on the way. Saplings and undergrowth are cut away from the surface of the snow so that the horses may have a clear skidway along which to draw the great logs. In the summer these skidways are recognisable as faint vistas through the forest, always leading to water.

Once the logs reach the lake or stream they are piled up in stacks twenty feet high along the shore, and, when the ice melts in the spring, are tumbled over into the water and floated in immense “booms” acres in extent, for many weeks, across lakes and down streams till they reach the swift waters of the Ottawa River, and thence are guided to the sawmills many miles farther to the southwards.

In the spring these booms choke up many a good fishing stream. Perhaps some unwieldy log gets caught by a projection in the bank at a sharp corner. Instantly the others, ever crowding on behind, pile up upon its back, and in a short time a towering heap of logs dams the river from bank to bank, forms an ever-changing waterfall, floods the surrounding “bush,” and, in short, forms a log-jam. To start the logs on their journey again is to “break a jam,” and it may easily be imagined that the task of disentangling these massive tree-trunks one from another and setting loose the heap of ill-balanced monsters is one fraught with the greatest personal danger. In fact, to break a jam is to lead a forlorn hope, and the honour is pressed upon no one. The Gangman of the boom asks for volunteers from among the single men; and more than one fine fellow whose sweetheart is waiting in some far village of the St. Lawrence to marry him when the camp breaks up in the early summer has lost her prospective husband in this manner.

Guiding the booms, even in clear water, is a dangerous matter. With spiked boots and a balancing-pole that is also a thrusting-pole, the men run along the logs, jumping from one to the other and keeping their balance with amazing agility. Here and there, however, it may be a man slips in and the logs close over him and make it impossible for him to rise to the surface again.

Hank gave us all this information, much adorned with unnecessary expletives, by way of explaining what happened subsequently to Garnier, for Hank and Garnier were members of the same camp, and when it broke up to follow the logs in the spring, they chanced also to be assigned to the same boom.

The men were halfway down a little rushing stream, called, if I remember rightly, the Sabbatis River, when the jam came upon them.

The water was unusually high, full of melted snow and lumps of ice. The journey across the open lakes had been cold and dangerous, and the moment the boom headed into the narrow stream it started off in a wild rush, with a clumsy galloping motion of its great logs that filled the woods round with deep echoes. This headlong career down stream of an army of tree trunks has something uncanny, even horrible, about it. They seem almost alive, like some antediluvian monsters escaping from the lake in preconcerted onslaught, their ribs black and shining, snorting as they go, irresistible, terrific. As they crash together in the foaming water, leaping away from the impact, half-climbing upon one another’s shoulders, and slipping back with a roar into the waves, to thrust their blunt noses again skywards the next moment, it is difficult to believe that they are merely so much dead wood racing on as fast as ever they can go to the whizzing saws of the mills.

The men knew the dangers that lay ahead, increasing every moment; but none of them flinched. Personal courage in a lumber camp is at a discount, or, as Hank put it more picturesquely, “You kin bet your sweet life there ain’t no white-livered skulkers in a lumber camp outfit.” So that, when the inevitable jam came and the logs began piling up upon each other, with that dreadful thunderous sound which must be heard to be appreciated, it was certainly through no fault of theirs; and, having done all they could to prevent it, they sprang, dived, swam, or wriggled for the shore, each as best he could, and fortunately with no accidents and no lives lost.

There, in midstream, the logs banged and crashed together. The massive wall grew more and more solid. The water hissed through it in places, gurgling up underneath it, and pouring in little torrents over it, wherever it could find a way. A black barrier had suddenly barred the river’s course. Logs stuck out at all possible angles, like huge pencils in a heap of children’s toys. Some stood upright, others lurched sideways, and the whole mass heaved and swayed and groaned as the weight increased and the water pressed up against it.

And, meanwhile, the burden of the water grew steadily behind, and the river began to rise perceptibly.

The time had come to call for volunteers. Someone must break the jam.

Standing behind a clump of hemlock trees, out of sight of the rest of the men, Jean Garnier was wrestling with his thoughts. Here was the chance he had been looking for the chance of proving beyond a doubt to the girl he loved that he was a man once more, that his courage had returned, his nerves grown steady, and that he was master of himself. No man of intemperate habits and shaken nerve could hope to break a log-jam successfully. Everybody knew that. The girls should no longer laugh at her, or the men sneer at him. He could hold up his head again in the village, for she would be proud of him, and he would have proved that he had once for all, and finally, turned over a new leaf. This was only a single act, true, but it was the culmination of many, many weeks of self-restraint, and she would know and realise this, and her respect would come back for him.

He weighed swiftly the awful risk of losing her, and perhaps of breaking her heart, if he failed and was killed. But he cast them aside in the balance. Somehow he felt sure he would get through all right. His old confidence in himself had returned. There were many offers even in the first five minutes, but no one could stand against Jean Garnier. His experience, his strength, his length of limb and arm, and his undoubted skill, all combined to favour him.

He shook hands with a few pals and laughed when the Shanty Boss, a man of proved courage himself, gave him a word of final advice, and added to it⁠—a strange phrase in such company⁠—“may God bring you safe through it.”

Only one man can break a jam. Others can help from the shore, or from whatever vantage-points there may be; but one mind, and above all one man’s weight, must decide the awful course of the loosening mass.

Before starting, he crossed over to speak to his friend Hank Davis. “You know why I’m doing this, Hank,” he said in his Canuck French. “It’s simply to show her that I’ve got back my nerve and courage, and that I’m not the loafer I used to be. If anything happens, give her my wages, and tell her why I did it. See?”

Hank gave him a characteristic blessing, and Garnier looked over his shoulder and laughed as he said, “I’ll get through all right; don’t you worry yourself.”

The next moment he was gone. A crowd of silent men stood in the shadow of the great trees and watched. Garnier carried his pole easily and approached the jam from the rear, springing from log to log where they lay tightly packed and ever rising on the swollen river. A strange silence descended upon the crowd in the wood. The roar of the water became a thing apart. Every eye was fixed on Garnier⁠—a tall, sinewy figure, passing lightly through the spray from log to log; springing with unerring judgment across foaming gaps; leaving one log just before it turned; landing on another, and leaping from it again to a third a second before it was sucked endways, first rising like a pillar, into a vortex of whirling waves.

He soon reached the summit of the barrier and began to use his spiked pole with a will. He thrust here and there; dislodged a log on his left, helped forward one on his right, and toppled over another in front of him. The judgment of the man never failed. It became an awful fight between the river and the logs, seeking to destroy him, and the skilful courageous woodsman a fight in which the slightest miscalculation, or false distribution of a few pounds’ weight, meant a terrible death.

“If anyone can do it, he can,” murmured the boss, cold-blooded, and without excitement, leaning against a tree on the shore and smoking his pipe. It was not the first time he had seen jams broken by a long way.

“Oh, I guess he’ll fix it all right,” said another, a personal pal of Garnier’s, and whose eyes never left the leaping, shifting figure out in midstream.

Just then there rose on the air a terrifying sound. It seemed to come from under the ground, and the very earth shook. The next minute the whole solid barrier of logs melted away like summer mist before the men’s eyes. The jam was broken. It collapsed with an appalling shout of sound. Water spurted up in a hundred fountains to the sky. Whole groups of logs rose on end, wet and shaking, and fell crashing against one another. Then a mighty wave rolled down the river from the wall of water accumulated behind the jam, and the entire mass slid in a broad seething of water past the watching crowd of men and into a bank of enveloping spray beyond.

On the crest of this great wave, erect and calm amid the leaping logs, stood the figure of Garnier. He still held his pole as he swept past them and vanished into the fierce confusion of mist and foam below.

A second later, at the bottom of the fall, the logs could be heard crashing and smashing together with a fiendish uproar in the swirling waters. The men turned to look at one another, and the Shanty Boss looked up the river instead of down. A second later, and the men were flying down the banks to gather the logs into a new boom, and, if possible, to find the body of Jean Garnier. It would, of course, be in pieces, perhaps even unrecognisable; but still they could put him in a decent grave, with a wooden cross and the date, and the Shanty Boss could mumble a prayer over it while they stood round and bared their heads beneath “the murmuring pines and the hemlocks.”

But, as they were searching the shore a quarter of a mile or so lower down, a faint voice was heard calling across the river⁠—

“I’m all right, boys; but get a hustle on and come over to me.”

It seemed incredible, but, following the direction of the sound with their eyes, they saw a man’s figure crouching on the shore just beyond the reach of the still swollen river. It was indeed Garnier. His face was scarcely recognisable as a human countenance, and both his arms turned out to be broken, but apparently he had escaped serious internal injury in the most marvellous manner.

No one ever knew how he escaped, least of all the man himself.

“I saw you all standing under the trees like a streak of black,” he said, “as I was carried past, and the next minute a tree jumped up an’ caught me such a smack in the face that I thought the whole of my skull had gone off with it. That’s all I remember.”

But the chance wave that swept him into safety on the shore had also brought him back a helpless, disfigured man for life. No girl would care to marry him now, and the courage of this rough woodsman was again shown⁠—even if it was mistaken courage-in his decision to live for the rest of his broken life in the woods, and to show himself no more in the village of Ste. Rose, a burden to his parents and a perpetual source of horror and regret to the girl he loved.

“Take her my wages, Hank, old pard, and tell her⁠—tell her I broke the jam. You know⁠—she’ll understand. There’s lots of buried up in these woods,” he added, “fellers that’s broke jams before me.”

“It’ll break her heart as well,” Hank observed. “Lucie’s almighty fond of you.” But Garnier held to his decision, and those among the men who were returning to Ste. Rose agreed to conceal the fact that he was alive.

The arms were set in due course by the camp doctor, the wounds in the face healed gradually; and two months later the man entered into a partnership with a fishing Indian of those parts, and prepared to spend the rest of his life in the woods.

When Hank returned to Ste. Rose he went at once to fulfil the promise he had given to his comrade. It was an odious and difficult task. Moreover, it was not the whole truth. His long face betrayed the nature of his message.

“What is your news of him?” she asked quickly. “Tell me at once. Oh! is it bad? You look so dreadful⁠—?”

“He broke the jam,” Hank said huskily, for he did not understand roundabout methods of breaking bad news. Quickest was best, he thought. “And, there⁠—I never seen any man do a grander thing. He was the bravest chap of the lot, and that cool over it all⁠—”

“Is he—gone then?” she asked in a breathless whisper and with so awful a face that Hank cut short the description he had imagined she would like, and hurried on to his message and the money.

“Here’s his wages I was to give you,” he said, with the feeling that he was doing a most shameful thing, “and I was particular to tell you that he did it so you might know he was a man again, and⁠—” But Hank’s sentence remained unfinished, for the girl had fallen in a faint at his feet. He picked her up and laid her on the sofa and in the time he had to collect himself before she came round again he made up his mind, after his own method, that his promise to Jean was a bad one, and that he was blessed if he’d keep it.

“He ain’t gone at all, only you don’t give a feller time to answer,” he said as soon as she opened her eyes. “He’s only a bit mussed up, that’s all. He’s waiting for you, if you’ll only listen instead of faintin’.”

“But I made him do it,” she murmured despairingly. “I sent him away. He did it for me. Oh! take me to him at once, or bring him to me. I must see him. I can’t live without him.”

Bit by bit the girl learned the exact truth, and the story so set her heart aflame that there was nothing for it but to go after her lover into the woods and seek till she found him. He had originally gone up with the camp in November. He broke the jam in April, and the news was brought to her in the end of July. It was thus nine months since she had seen him, and her heart ached unspeakably.

A week or so after Hank’s revelation he started up into the woods again to search for Garnier and the Indian. Lucie and her brother went with him. But the Indian kept a moving camp, and it was some time before they got upon his tracks.

“It was well on in September,” said Hank, as he finished the story, “when we found the trail of the fishing Indian and put up with his old squaw. Garnier and the Indian were out on a fishing bout, and wouldn’t be back for a week or more. One evening at sunset, as we were sitting on the shore parin’ cedar ribs for the canoes, we heard someone singing far out on the lake, and there, sure’nough, was the big fishing-canoe with Pete, the Indian, in the bows, and Garnier, in the stern seat, steering. His arms were as good as ever, and his voice well it kinder made the tears rise in yer throat somehow to hear it.

“And Lucie, she jumped up and couldn’t settle herself to doin’ anything except runnin’ along the shore and calling to him across the water. I think old Pete had an idea his wigwam was being attacked, because he stopped paddling one time, and made as if he was sheerin’ round to land somewhar else. But at last they come close enough to see who it was, and then-well, I never seen a canoe nearer upsettin’ in the whole of my life. For Garnier, he stood up an’ stared, and then sot down again, and then got up again, just as if he was on shore instead of in a bark canoe loaded with fish.

“Then, when they landed, Lucie’s brother an’ I, we took old Pete, the Indian, aside to show him something in the bush. He wasn’t exactly lookin’ for it, that’s true, but then we wanted him out of the way whar he couldn’t stare in that foolish Indian way. An’ they two⁠—well, Pete’s old squaw followed us out also⁠—and they two had the dirty old wigwam all to themselves to do their fist-shakin’ in.

“Yes, an’ it all happened not over a mile away from this here very spot whar we’re now settin’,” he observed, looking round into the woods where the silence and the shadows were growing every minute deeper, “an’ I do b’lieve the old Indian’s still lamenting his luck at losing such a good, honest fishing partner to this very day.”