Washika Read Free Page B

students were once again absorbed by the Cabonga and the logs on and around its shoreline. This was, in fact, their thirty-second day on the sweep.
    That morning no one wanted to work in the water. Everybody was tired of the water and the rotten smell it left on their clothes, and the leeches that swam around them trying to find an opening in their clothes.
    So they worked on shore. There, the logs had settled on the sand and some, in the wet places, were half buried in mud. But mostly, the shore was fine beach sand and, just above where they worked, the sand was transformed to a brown humus covered in grasses and other low foliage and short blueberry plants. Above the shrubs tall white birch stretched outwards towards the water.
    Twenty young men, armed with steel hooks and peaveys, jabbed at the logs and tossed them into the water. That was the job. During the previous log drives there were logs that had managed to escape the confines of the boom timbers. With the opening and closing of the dam at Cabonga, the water level of the lake had changed leaving these logs stranded on the beaches, or in the mud of the low, swampy shores. Now they, the sweep crew, had arrived to clean the shores of these strays so that they could be once again corralled within boom timbers and towed down the lake to Cabonga where, once the dam was open, they could be sent on their way down the mighty Gens-de-Terre River. All along the bay where they had worked that morning a line of logs hugged the shore, floating to and fro with the waves, and held there by a west wind blowing in towards the shore.
    By eleven o’clock sandflies were everywhere. At that time of day they were especially bad on shore. Everyone knew that they were not as bad when you were working in the water but then there were the leeches, those blood-sucking aquatic worms so common to the shallow waters. Ten of the students put on life jackets and boarded the two drive boats snubbed alongside the Madeleine . They untied the boats and poled their way in among the floating logs. Standing in the drive boats they were able to spear the logs with their long pike poles and drag them out away from shore into deeper water and, eventually, past the tugboat. There, at least, they managed to avoid the wrath of the brûlot attack since these little sandflies were more commonly found close to warm beach sand and rarely over water, especially if there was a breeze.
    Alphonse had driven the Madeleine ’s bow up onto shore where the water was deep enough. The old grey tugboat’s engine idled softly there, creating a backwater at her stern. The students pushed the logs into the current of the backwater, sending them even further from shore.
    He stood on deck at the stern and watched how they walked slowly from one log to the next, picking at a log with their hooks until it caught well and then tossing it out on the water. Those with the peaveys worked the larger logs. At opposite ends and on the same side of a very large log, two fellows would jam in the swivel spear-point of their peaveys and, heaving together, roll the log down towards the water. The boys in the drive boats would take over from there, spearing the log with the point of their pike poles and, flexing their arms, guiding it into the backwater current of the Madeleine . Alphonse slid his watch out from the side pocket of his trousers. He looked at it briefly and entered the cabin. Suddenly it was quiet. He had shut down the engine. Sticking his head out through the cabin doorway he hollered, “Lunch!”
    There was no longer the chug-chugging of the Madeleine ’s six cylinders, no banging of pike poles on the drive boat gunwales, no logs splashing water. Now there were only the voices of the students, their lunch pails striking the metal of the Madeleine ’s cabin as they climbed aboard and fought for a good place to lie on deck in the sun.
    The waves ran softly onto the beach; this was almost the only sound