When The Allegash Drive Goes Through

We’re spurred with the spikes in our soles;

There is water a-swash in our boots;

Our hands are hard-calloused by peavies and poles,

And we’re drenched with the spume of the chutes.

We gather our herds at the head

Where the axes have toppled them loose,

And down from the hills where the rivers are fed

We harry the hemlock and spruce.

We hurroop them with the peavies from their sullen beds of snow;

With the pickpole for a goadstick, down the brimming streams we go;

They are hitching, they are halting, and they lurk and hide and dodge,

They sneak for skulking eddies, they bunt the bank and lodge.

And we almost can imagine that they hear the yell of saws

And the grunting of the grinders of the paper- mills because

They loiter in the shallows and they cob-pile at the falls,

And they buck like ugly cattle where the broad deadwater crawls.

But we wallow in and welt ’em with the water to our waist,

For the driving pitch is dropping and the Drouth is gasping “Haste!”

Here a dam and there a jam, that is grabbed by grinning rocks,

Gnawed by the teeth of the ravening ledge that slavers at our flocks;

Twenty a month for daring Death; for fighting from dawn to dark--

Twenty and grub and a place to sleep in God’s great public park;

We roofless go, with the cook’s bateau to fol- low our hungry crew--

A billion of spruce and hell turned loose when the Allegash drive goes through.

My lad with the spurs at his heel Has a cattle-ranch bronco to bust;

A thousand of Texans to wheedle and wheel To market through smother and dust.

But I with the peavy and pole

Am driving the herds of the pine,

Grant to my brother what suits his soul,

But no bellowing brutes in mine.

He would wince to wade and wallow--and I hate a horse or steer!

But we stand the kings of herders--he for There and I for Here.

Though he rides with Death behind him when he rounds the wild stampede,

I will chop the jamming king-log and I’ll match him, deed for deed.

And for me the greenwood savor and the lash across my face

Of the spitting spume that belches from the back-wash of the race;

The glory of the tumult where the tumbling torrent rolls

With a half a hundred drivers riding through with lunging poles.

Here’s huzza for reckless chances! Here’s hurrah for those who ride

Through the jaws of boiling sluices, yeasty white from side to side!

Our brawny fists are calloused and we’re mostly holes and hair,

But if grit were golden bullion we’d have coin to spend, and spare!

Here some rips and there the lips of a whirl- pool’s bellowing mouth,

Death we clinch and Time we fight, for be- hind us gasps the Drouth.

Twenty a month, bateau for a home, and only a peep at town,

For our money is gone in a brace of nights after the drive is down;

But with peavies and poles and care-free souls our ragged and roofless crew

Swarms gayly along with whoop and song when the Allegash drive does through.