CHAPTER SIX

A Futile Search

Immediately after breakfast, they set out north from the ranger station.

“We’ll be back in three days,” Russ Steele told Dick Fellows. “Using your station as a base, we’re going to cover all the territory between the Black River and the Rapid River, from Red Lake to the Canadian border.”

“Good luck,” the ranger said. “I hope I can be of some help to you.”

Russ shook the young man’s hand. “You have already, Dick.”

As they started through the woods, with Prince crashing through the underbrush ahead of them, Sandy was pessimistic. “How much ground do we have to cover, Uncle Russ?”

“One hundred and twenty square miles or thereabouts. I’m not sure exactly.”

“It seems so hopeless,” Sandy said. “I read in the paper about an airplane that crashed in the north woods with three men aboard and they didn’t find it for four months. A bomb—even an A-bomb—must be considerably smaller than a two-engine plane.”

Russ nodded grimly. “It’s a big order, all right. But don’t forget, there are, or soon will be, hundreds of teams like ours, each covering an assigned sector. If we’re all thorough and painstaking, we’ll find the bomb sooner or later.”

“What about air patrols, General Steele?” Quiz asked. “Why can’t the Air Force retrace the route of the B-52 with another plane? Maybe they could spot the bomb.”

Russ Steele jerked his thumb up at the sky as a wedge of pursuit ships droned overhead. “They’ve been doing that for two days, but it’s a long shot. First of all, no one knows precisely what route that big bomber was flying after the radio conked out. Secondly, it’s pretty difficult to spot objects from the air, especially in heavily forested country like this. An object can drop through this thick canopy of foliage and leave no more trace than if it had fallen into the ocean. No, I’m afraid this is a job for the foot soldiers.”

“FOR-ward MARCH!” Jerry bellowed in a good imitation of a drill sergeant. “Hut-two-three-four....”

Russ laughed. “I’m afraid this operation calls for a loose formation, Jerry. Suppose we maintain an interval of about fifteen hundred feet between each two men. That will keep us within easy hailing distance of each other. I’ll be on the right flank with one of the Geiger counters. You boys can draw lots to see who takes the left flank with the other counter.” He grinned. “That poor guy will have to walk a little more than a mile before we even get started.”

“I’ll be the fall guy,” Sandy volunteered. “I’m in better shape than Jerry or Quiz.”

Jerry sniffed. “Show-off! But I’m not proud,” he added hastily. “Go ahead.”

“That’s settled, then,” Russ said. “Our direction will be due north. You all have compasses; check them regularly. All right, we may as well get started.” He unstrapped the walk-o-meter from his leg and handed it to Sandy. “You better take this to pace off the intervals. Quiz, Jerry and I will wait until you’ve reached your position. Then you sing out and the boys will pass the word down the line. If any of you see anything unusual, sound off and sit tight until I get there.” He pointed to the black box Sandy had slung over one shoulder. “And if that Geiger counter begins to chatter, backtrack fast until it stops.”

Time passed quickly for Sandy. He was a little lonely at first, but it didn’t last long. There were so many fascinating things to be seen in the forest when you were alert, he realized. Chipmunks and squirrels spied on him from tree hollows. He passed within two feet of a rabbit burrowed into a pile of leaves. A lizard that blended so perfectly into the bark of a tree that it was invisible from more than twelve inches away didn’t loose its rigidity, even when he touched its tail. After the first hour, Prince came bounding through the brush to keep him company. An hour later, the dog went off to join somebody else. At regular intervals, the boys would call out to each other, though an attempt by Sandy and Jerry to keep up a running conversation soon left both of them hoarse. They had no chance to get bored. The enormity and excitement of the mission they were performing saw to that.

At noon, Russ Steele called a halt for lunch. “Stay where you are,” he called to Quiz. “Break out a K-ration. Pass the word on to Jerry and Sandy.”

Five hours later, they rendezvoused on the banks of a small river. “We’ll camp here for tonight,” Russ said. “We should make the Canadian border sometime tomorrow afternoon. There’s a logging camp up there, Quiz, so you’ll get a chance to see lumberjacks at work.”

“If I’m still alive,” Quiz said wearily. “I feel as if I’d walked a hundred miles today.”

Russ grinned. “Not quite. Maybe twenty.”

Jerry looked up from a heaping mess kit of beef stew. “Twenty miles! Say, that’s pretty good. Bet you never figured you’d ever be walking that far, eh, Sandy?”

“I’ll say.” Sandy, who had removed his shoes and socks, lifted one bare foot and blew on it. “The soles of my feet feel all puffed up.”

“Before you go to bed soak them in the river,” his uncle told him. “Matter of fact, we can all use a good bath.”

After they had finished eating, the boys teamed up to wash the mess kits and pans. Then they stripped off their clothes on the river bank.

“Last one in gets KP tomorrow night,” Russ said. He dove off a small bluff, cleaving the water in a perfect racing dive. Prince was right at his heels, yelping excitedly.

“Boy, that dog sure loves to swim,” Jerry said.

Russ surfaced and flicked water at the Doberman with the back of his hand. “He’s a regular porpoise. Come on in, boys; it’s great.”

Sandy walked gingerly down the steep bank and stepped into knee-deep water. “Wow, is it cold!”

“Sissy,” Jerry laughed and went splashing past him. “Yipes! It’s ice!”

“Well, don’t kick it all over me!” Sandy roared.

Quiz gritted his chattering teeth. “The only way to get into ice water is _fast_.” He belly-whopped between Jerry and Sandy, spraying them from head to foot.

“You sneak,” Jerry gasped.

“C’mon,” Sandy laughed. “Let’s duck him.” He dove in after Quiz.

After a few minutes they began to enjoy their bath thoroughly. “It’s not so cold,” Sandy said.

Jerry flopped on his back and blew a stream of water into the air like a whale. “We’re just too numb to feel it. Look, I’m turning blue.”

“I don’t care. It feels like heaven after hiking twenty miles through the woods with the temperature at an even hundred.”

Russ swam over to them. “How do you know it was a hundred?”

“I’ve got a thermometer,” Quiz told him. “In the little glade where I ate lunch, it was one hundred degrees Fahrenheit at a quarter past twelve.”

Russ gazed somberly toward the forest. “If it doesn’t rain soon—well—I don’t know.”

A purple twilight was settling rapidly over the river as they toweled their bodies briskly and dressed. By the time they finished putting up the pup tents, it was dark. But even darkness brought little relief from the heat that night. And the air was alive with mosquitoes, a few of which managed to penetrate the netting.

“How are we going to get any rest?” Jerry groaned. “It’s too hot to climb into our sleeping bags and if we lie on top of ’em we’ll be eaten alive.”

Quiz sat up and searched through his pack. “I considered this eventuality.” He held up a small aerosol bomb. “DDT. Shut your eyes and hold your breath for a minute, Jerry.” He pointed it up in the air and pressed down the button until the little enclosure was thick with white mist.

“I always knew you were a genius, Quiz,” Sandy yelled over from the other tent. “How about lending it to us?”

“Help yourself.” Quiz reached under the netting and rolled it over to his friend.

Jerry sighed blissfully as Quiz lay back. “That did the trick, Quiz, old boy. You sure saved the day—the night, I mean.”

Quiz grumbled as he rolled over on his side. “If I had _really_ been smart, I would have brought along an inflatable mattress.” But two minutes later he was asleep.

The new day dawned as bright and hot as the previous one. They broke camp shortly after 8:00 A.M. and resumed their trek north at the same 500-yard intervals. The morning passed uneventfully.

At noon, Sandy relayed a question down the line to his uncle: “When do we eat?”

Russ Steele asked the boys whether they could hold out for another hour. “I think we can make the logging camp,” he explained. A chorus of “ayes” answered him.

Shortly after one o’clock, Sandy heard a loud crash in the distance. Right after that Russ Steele rallied the boys around him.

“We’re approaching the logging camp,” he told them. “That noise you just heard was a tree being felled. Sandy, we’d better get these Geiger counters out of sight. No use inviting a lot of questions that we can’t answer. We’ll wrap them up in our shelter halves.”

When that had been taken care of, Russ led the way forward. Gradually the trees began to thin out and diminish in size.

“This is a new stand,” Russ explained. “Nowadays, logging companies do as much replanting as they do cutting. With proper methods of conservation, they hope to undo some of the mistakes of their predecessors.”

A quarter of a mile farther on, they emerged into a large clearing in which a half dozen low, sprawling buildings were situated. There was a great deal of activity in the camp. Across the clearing, a convoy of trucks jammed with lumberjacks pulled out of a dirt road and drew up in front of one building where a long line was forming. Whooping and laughing, the lumberjacks vaulted the tail gates of the trucks and piled over the side-boards.

Russ Steele smiled. “Chow time. That’s the mess hall.”

“What’s their hurry?” Quiz asked.

“I guess you get mighty hungry swinging an ax,” Sandy said. “I read once that a logger eats about five thousand calories a day to keep him going, as compared with the three thousand that the average man needs.”

Jerry grunted. “My old man says I must eat close to ten thousand a day, every time he has to pay the grocery bill.”

“Ten thousand dollars’ worth a day?” Sandy said with a straight face. “That sounds about right for you, chow hound.”

Jerry clipped the tall, slender boy on the arm with his knuckles. “Calories, you dope! Don’t get smart.”

“I’ll bet neither one of you knows what a calorie is?” Quiz said dryly.

Sandy’s forehead puckered up thoughtfully. “I think I do. It’s a unit of energy, isn’t it?”

“That’s close,” Quiz admitted. “It’s the amount of heat—heat is energy—required to raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree Centigrade.”

Jerry nudged Russ Steele. “Bet you didn’t know that, General Steele?”

Russ smiled good-naturedly. “I had a vague idea it was something like that. Let’s find the office. I used to know the foreman of this camp.”

The boys eyed the lumberjacks admiringly as they walked by the mess hall. Most of them were stripped to the waist, their muscles bunching and rippling in their sun-bronzed arms and torsos as they moved about. The cuffs of their sweat-blackened levis were tucked into the tops of hobnailed boots.

“Let’s recruit a couple of these bruisers for the Valley View football team. Our line would be a stone wall for sure,” Jerry whispered to Sandy.

Russ took them around the end of the mess hall to a small frame shack in the middle of the camp. A big collie was sitting in the open doorway. Instinctively, Sandy reached down and got a hold on Prince’s collar.

“They won’t fight,” Russ told him. “They’re old friends.”

The collie, recognizing Russ, came bounding out of the shack and leaped up on his chest, trying to lick his face. Russ pummeled him in the ribs playfully. “Bruce, old feller, how are you?” He looked up as a short, squat, bald-headed lumberjack appeared in the doorway. “Well, Jonas! I figured they would have retired you by this time.”

The man’s broad face lit up. “Russ Steele! You old dogface! What are you doing here this time of year?”

“Brought my nephew and a couple of his buddies up on a camping trip. Boys, I’d like you to meet Jonas Driscoll, the toughest bull-of-the-woods who ever swung an ax.”

After the introductions, Jonas took them through the back door of the mess hall while the two dogs chased each other around the compound. “I’ll have Cookie fix them up a grand feed from the left-overs,” he said.

Sandy felt self-conscious as Jonas cut in at the head of the line and picked up metal compartment trays and silverware for each of them. “Won’t those other guys get sore?” he asked, as they walked away from the serving table.

Jonas laughed. “Naw, you’re company. Anyway, they’d be scared I’d flatten ’em if they kicked.”

There were about twenty wooden tables with benches running down each side of the mess hall. Jonas led them to a table at the rear that was almost empty. Salt- and pepper-shakers and clean cups were stacked in the middle of each table. As they sat down, Jonas motioned to one of the mess boys, a gangly youth about sixteen. “Let’s have a couple of pitchers of iced tea here, son.”

Jerry gazed bug-eyed at the five pork chops and the mounds of mashed potatoes, vegetables and apple sauce heaped up on his tray. “This is lunch?”

Jonas Driscoll’s blue eyes twinkled. “Just a light snack, son. Wait till you eat supper.”

“Oh boy!” Jerry breathed rapturously.

“You ought to sign him on one of your crews, Jonas,” Russ suggested.

“He’s light on muscle—except between the ears,” Sandy said, “but he’s got the appetite for it.”

“I can’t get sore with all this lovely food in front of me,” Jerry said, as he went to work with knife and fork.

“You been a lumberjack long, Mr. Driscoll?” Sandy inquired.

“Fifty years last May. Started in as a cook’s helper when I was thirteen. And I expect to be at it another forty.”

Russ looked across at his old friend fondly. “Logging is still a rugged business, but nothing like it used to be in Jonas’ prime.”

“I’ll tell the world,” the foreman agreed. “Electricity and the gasoline engine have taken all the work out of it.”

A kibitzing lumberjack at the end of the table held up his hands, thick with calluses. “Is that _so_! Well, suppose you tell ’em where I got _these_!”

Jonas laughed good-naturedly. “You’re right, French. Them bulldozers and power saws don’t help you sawyers much—not in this camp anyway.” He turned to the boys. “They’re the boys who swing the axes and pull the big cross-cut saws.”

“Don’t all lumberjacks cut down trees?” Quiz wanted to know.

“Not exactly. There’s a lot of different jobs in logging just like in any other business. There’s sawyers, high riggers, yarders and river hogs. After lunch, I’ll take you out to the stand we’re cutting now and show you around.”