30 In Great Waters

Cassiar. My first stop was at Rock Bay, where a
new manager for the company’s hotel was expected.
On landing I found that I was suspected of being
that high dignitary. It was a cruel blow to the
group of loggers at the beach when I divulged the
startling and disappointing information that I was
only a preacher. They treated me very decently,
however. I put up at the hotel, and next morning
set out on my tramp of eight miles up the skid-road
to the camp in the woods on the lake shore, where the
trees were being felled, limbed, and bucked, ready to
be hauled down the skid-road by oxen and horses to
the ocean, there to be tied into booms for towing
to the sawmill in town.

On account of a strong wind, making it too
dangerous to work, the eighty men in camp were idle.
These were the days before prohibition or govern-
ment control, and, to say the least, ‘‘booze’”’ was
often very much in evidence in the camps. This
day several sacks of bottles of the “‘oil of joy” had
been sent up from the hotel to help the men to while
away their idle hours. This all helped, you can well
imagine, to make the situation more difficult for me.
But yet through it all, in that camp and wherever
I went afterwards, the loggers always treated me
with abundant kindness. If you could only realize
the remoteness and deadly monotony of these log-
ging camps in those long-ago days, you could appre-
ciate the almost irresistible longing of the logger to
escape from its dreariness into the happy, although
temporary, exhilaration of a good spree. Well, I