Comes a Time for Burning Read Online Free PDF Page A

where the trouble starts. That’s what the boys tell me happened here. Sonny goes back up to see what’s wrong. He’s ten feet below the charge when off she goes. And this ain’t his lucky day, see.”
    “I don’t see.”
    “Well, first he got himself a goddamn serious hang-fire, and even then, some of them go off, some don’t.” He reached out and touched Thomas lightly on the shoulder as if the physician wasn’t paying attention. He thumbed the top of his model tree to the side, the wood cracking but still attached. “So we got this. We got this split startin’ to run down the trunk, see. And that’s a lot of weight pitchin’ off to the side. Then the trunk splits, bang.” Bertram yanked at the top, and the split trunk yawned open where he’d started it with his pocketknife. “’Cept for that split, he mighta been okay. But the weight of the top just pried that trunk wide open. They’ll do that sometimes. Now, as that trunk splits—and hell, it can gape a dozen feet before the top tears free and the split slaps shut—well, let me tell you, it don’t take much
gape
before you’re flat run out of safety belt, even if you’re usin’ every inch you got.”
    “And then?”
    “If he don’t cut the safety rope, it’ll cut
him
. Well, it’s going to crush him like a damn banana slug slapped with an axe handle. Saw a climber cut clean in half once up in Vancouver.” He grimaced. “Weren’t all that clean, neither.”
    “The safety rope won’t break first?”
    Bertram shook his head and spat. “Sure as hell better not. They got a steel core, you know. But I tell ya…old Sonny there is damn quick. He saw what was comin’ and had time for one good swing with the axe. Cut the safety rope, then just hugged that tree and prayed, probably. See, it’s small enough around up there that a man can hug it. Well, almost, it is. Trouble is,
when
he hugged it, he got both hands in the split. The crown settled in the neighbor tree, and the split slapped shut. You got about five tons of crown pushin’ it closed now. Like a goddamn big rat trap, is what it is.”
    “My God.”
    “And there’s old Sonny, up to his elbows in a stick of spruce that won’t let him go. They’ve been doin’ some thinkin’, and we’ll see what happens. Lemme see that again.” He held out his hand for the glass. For a long time, Bertram watched the performance overhead. At first, Thomas thought he could hear one of the men calling, but then realized that the high-pitched keening, intermixed with a string of profanity so confused it sounded like jibberish, was uttered by the trapped man himself.
    “What are they going to do?”
    “Don’t know,” Bertram said. “I know what
I’d
do.”
    “I can send something up for the pain. Morphine would do it. Anyone can administer it.”
    “Got to have his wits about him,” Bertram said. “What little wits he’s got left after the dynamite.”
    “Hey!” The single word floated down from above.
    Bertram took a couple of steps closer to the tree, craning upward. “What’d you decide, Art?” Thomas moved up beside the foreman, one arm over his head to shield his eyes. The light caught the individual droplets now, streaming downward like miniature diamonds, just enough air movement to slant them against the dark green of the timber.
    “This crown’s just got to come off.” The man paused before adding, “There just ain’t no other way around it.” He was ten feet above the trapped logger, and with just a small effort could have drawn himself up to sit on the ragged, blasted pinnacle of the spar. “It’s hung up real good in the neighbor.”
    “You’re sure she’s holdin’ hard?”
    “Got a couple limbs right through a crotch. It ain’t goin’ nowhere. Hell, I could walk across it.”
    “What’s Sonny say?”
    It took a while for the logger to ponder that…or perhaps to ask the whimpering Sonny.
    “He ain’t sayin’ much, Paul. I guess he’d sure like to get