pleasant smell. Radiating like the spokes of a wheel from the head of
the chute ran deep, raw gashes in the earth, where the donkey had hauled
up the Brobdingnagian logs on the end of an inch cable.

"This is no small boy's play, is it, Stell?" Charlie said to her once in
passing.

And she agreed that it was not. Agreed more emphatically and with
half-awed wonder when she saw the donkey puff and quiver on its anchor
cable, as the hauling line spooled up on the drum. On the outer end of
that line snaked a sixty-foot stick, five feet across the butt, but it
came down to the chute head, brushing earth and brush and small trees
aside as if they were naught. Once the big log caromed against a stump.
The rearward end flipped ten feet in the air and thirty feet sidewise.
But it came clear and slid with incredible swiftness to the head of the
chute, flinging aside showers of dirt and small stones, and leaving one
more deep furrow in the forest floor. Benton trotted behind it. Once it
came to rest well in the chute, he unhooked the line, freed the choker
(the short noosed loop of cable that slips over the log's end), and the
haul-back cable hurried the main line back to another log. Benton
followed, and again the donkey shuddered on its foundation skids till
another log laid in the chute, with its end butted against that which
lay before. One log after another was hauled down till half a dozen
rested there, elongated peas in a wooden pod.

Then a last big stick came with a rush, bunted these others powerfully
so that they began to slide with the momentum thus imparted, slowly at
first then, gathering way and speed, they shot down to the lake and
plunged to the water over the ten-foot jump-off like a school of
breaching whales.