Spring was at hand almost before he realized that the vernal equinox had come and gone. But winter had to precede spring. In October the fall rains broke in bitter earnest. The sodden drip of eaves lulled him to sleep at night and greeted him on awakening. He went to work in the morning with his fellows and trudged back at night soaked through heavy clothing. The bunk house reeked with steam from sodden garments festooned above a red-hot stove. Day and night, for weeks on end, gray clouds and drifting mist hovered above the trees. Every gully discharged a stream seaward. To step through a clump of brush meant a shower bath. Everything a man touched, tools, gear, timber, was damp and clammy cold. The thin soil squashed into mud under their boots. The moss was saturated. The great firs dripped like weeping giants. Even the old hands on the coast began to remark profanely that there had never been such rains. Yet the logs came down. The falling gangs went grumbling into the wet thickets about the base of the trees they must fell. The rigging-slingers and hook tenders cursed as they fumbled the slippery cables. Donkey engineers scowled from beneath the tin shelter over each machine. And Jim Handy prowled in oilskins from gang to gang, silent, eagle-eyed, on the job. Rain or shine the timber came log by log to the booming ground, the boom men with their pikes arranged it in sections, and when the sections grew to a thirty-swifter raft, a tug hauled in, hooked on her towline and the cedar and fir of Valdez began its journey to the mills. During those sodden weeks Rod Norquay put by all that he had ever been. His work, that opus which had led him to forswear, however briefly, the ease and comfort of Hawk's Nest, was laid away. Not forgotten. He sat sometimes in the evening, dreaming. He had wanted to see what made the wheels go round, to know how and why men labored and endured privation, to see what life was like in the raw. And he was getting insight with a vengeance. He saw men throw down their tools in a passion and quit at a word. He saw new men reel drunkenly down a steamer's gangplank and go to work next morning with aching heads and bloodshot eyes. He saw a snap phrase bring a blow, a fight to a finish. The whole panorama of the timber, trees, men, machinery, shifted before his eyes that winter, gave him food for thought as well as sometimes a flash of something that stirred his pulse. For there were heroic moments, risks, long chances taken and skilfully avoided. A flying limb, a snapped cable, a rolling log. A man had to be alert. It was no place for a dullard. The logger had his pride of calling. It was borne in upon Rod that only tried men followed the woods. It was something of a satisfaction that he qualified as one of them on the job.