Winter Run Read Online Free Page B

but the urge to ride was stronger than his good sense.
    The morning the logging began, Charlie walked over the hill with George, who drove the team in front of him with the two rope lines and his voice. Bill, the second and much smaller and younger horse, was on the right because he still didn’t completely know the commands. With Bill on the right, it was easier for Jim to pull him over when George said, “haw,” the word for left, or push him when George said “gee,” for right.
    Richie Settle, an eighteen-year-old white boy who helped George, drove the truck in front. Richie was what we called slow. But if you spoke quietly and clearly, he could do most anything you wanted, even drive the truck across fields rather than on the public roads. He was very strong. The two-man chain saw was nothing to him. He even understood how to service it and to tighten the chain.
    But Richie couldn’t handle the team. The movements of the huge animals were just too much for him. He looked George in the face when George was giving him instructions, but he never looked carefully at the horses, so he never learned to anticipate what they were going to do. The truck was okay, the living animals were not. So Richie drove the truck and George drove the team, with Charlie walking along beside, pleased as he could be that something brand new was about to happen.
    The process was simple. The owner of a woods to be logged called the extension agent who sent the cruiser to mark the trees to be harvested and fix thevalue. Then the owner contracted with a logger to come in and do the job. Just the largest logs were taken and the branches were pulled into the open and burned. Done right, there was hardly any mess left at all. Within a year the drag tracks of the logs were gone.
    That was George’s arrangement. There was a deadline. The professor had to have the work completed by the middle of August so he could be paid by the pulp-and-paper company by September 1. When the deal was made, the time limit seemed fine to George. But at the end of that first day, when he stopped in at the store, he sounded nervous. He said there were a lot more trees marked than he had expected. Also, some of them were so big he wasn’t sure his team could skid them out. It had been a long time since he had been in those woods—at least a couple of years before the war. They had changed. He should have known.
    Everyone wondered what Professor James’s hurry was.
    But as the team and George and Charlie and Richie had made their way across the broom sage field that first morning, time hadn’t been a factor. It was a pure June morning in Virginia. The humidity had not arrived, all the spring plants and trees were in bloom, and the bobwhite had begun their insistent shout that challenged even the snarl of the chain saw. Or so we thought.
    The first tree was cut. George was on the engine end of the saw, and Richie, who was on the other end,smiled in pleasure when he felt the tree start to go. As the gap opened, the men stepped back from the tree. It scythed through the surrounding branches and hit the ground with a thud that caused the earth to shake under Charlie as he stood on the edge of the woods with the team. The horses were only mildly interested, but Charlie’s eyes were round and startled. He had seen small trees cut for firewood but never anything like this huge oak, which, after it crashed to the ground, looked dead, really dead.
    After the large limbs were cut off with the saw, George and Richie paused to sharpen the axes they would use to strip the rest of the trunk. George sat on the tree with his legs crossed, chewing his tobacco while he moved the file slowly across the blade of the ax. Charlie could hear the file bite into the steel.
    “Want to see something, Charlie?” George called.
    “Sure!” Charlie ran to George’s side after almost tripping over a root that dared interfere with his lunge toward something new.
    “This ax so sharp it’ll