Encouraged by this find, we immediately turned our attention to some fine timber standing close to the bank near by, and began hand-logging to supplement what we had already secured afloat. This work soon gave us ample means to buy our winter supplies, even though flour was fifty dollars a barrel. And yet, because of that same hand-logging work, my wife came very near becoming a widow one morning before breakfast; but she did not know of it until long afterwards.
It occurred in this way. We did not then know how to scaffold up above the tough, swelled bases of the large trees, and this made it very difficult to chop them down. So we burned through them. We bored two holes at an angle to meet inside the inner bark, and when we got a fire started there the heart of the tree would burn through, leaving an outer shell of bark.
One morning, as usual, I was up early. After lighting the fire in the stove and putting on the kettle, I hastened to the burning timber to start the logging fires afresh. As I neared a clump of three giants, two hundred and fifty feet tall, one began toppling over toward me. In my confusion I ran across the path where it fell. This tree had scarcely reached the ground when a second started to fall almost parallel to it, the two tops barely thirty feet apart and the limbs flying in several directions. I was between the two trees. If I had not become entangled in some brush, I should have been crushed by the second falling tree. It was an escape so marvelous as almost to lead one to think that there is such a thing as a charmed life.
In rafting our precious accumulations of timber down the Columbia River to Oak Point, we were carried by the current past the place where we had expected to sell our logs at six dollars a thousand feet. Following the raft to the larger waters, we finally reached Astoria, where we sold the logs for eight dollars a thousand instead of six, thus profiting by our misfortunes.
But this final success had meant an involuntary plunge off the raft into the river with my boots on, for me, and three days and nights of ceaseless toil and watching for all of us. We voted unanimously that we would have no more such work.
The flour sack was nearly empty when I left home. We were expecting to be absent but one night, and we had been gone a week. There were no neighbors nearer our cabin than four miles, and no roads--scarcely a trail. The only communication was by the river. What about the wife and baby alone in the cabin, with the deep timber at the rear and a heavy jungle of brush in front? Happily we found them all right upon our return.