A Michigan Man

A Michigan Man, by Elia W.
Peattie

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Title: A Michigan Man 1891
Author: Elia W. Peattie
Release Date: October 24, 2007 [EBook #23176]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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MICHIGAN MAN ***

Produced by David Widger

A MICHIGAN MAN
By Elia W. Peattie
Copyright, 1891, by J. B. Lippincott & Co

A pine forest is nature's expression of solemnity and solitude. Sunlight,
rivers, cascades, people, music, laughter, or dancing could not make it
gay. With its unceasing reverberations and its eternal shadows, it is as
awful and as holy as a cathedral.
Thirty good fellows working together by day and drinking together by
night can keep up but a moody imitation of jollity. Spend twenty-five
of your forty years, as Luther Dallas did, in this perennial gloom, and
your soul--that which enjoys, aspires, competes--will be drugged as
deep as if you had quaffed the cup of oblivion. Luther Dallas was
counted one of the most experienced axe-men in the northern camps.
He could fell a tree with the swift surety of an executioner, and in
revenge for his many arborai murders the woodland had taken captive
his mind, captured and chained it as Prospero did Ariel. The resounding
footsteps of Progress driven on so mercilessly in this mad age could not
reach his fastness. It did not concern him that men were thinking,
investigating, inventing. His senses responded only to the sonorous
music of the woods; a steadfast wind ringing metallic melody from the
pine-tops contented him as the sound of the sea does the sailor; and
dear as the odors of the ocean to the mariner were the resinous scents of
the forest to him. Like a sailor, too, he had his superstitions. He had a
presentiment that he was to die by one of these trees--that some day, in
chopping, the tree would fall upon and crush him as it did his father the
day they brought him back to the camp on a litter of pine boughs.
One day the gang boss noticed a tree that Dallas had left standing in a
most unwoodman-like manner in the section which was alloted to him.
"What in thunder is that standing there for?" he asked.
Dallas raised his eyes to the pine, towering in stern dignity a hundred
feet above them.
"Well," he said, feebly, "I noticed it, but kind-a left it t' the last."
"Cut it down to-morrow," was the response.
The wind was rising, and the tree muttered savagely. Luther thought it

sounded like a menace, and turned pale. No trouble has yet been found
that will keep a man awake in the keen air of the pineries after he has
been swinging his axe all day, but the sleep of the chopper was so
broken with disturbing dreams that night that the beads gathered on his
brow, and twice he cried aloud. He ate his coarse flap-jacks in the
morning and escaped from the smoky shanty as soon as he could.
"It'll bring bad luck, I'm afraid," he muttered as he went to get his axe
from the rack. He was as fond of his axe as a soldier of his musket, but
to-day he shouldered it with reluctance. He felt like a man with his
destiny before him. The tree stood like a sentinel. He raised his axe,
once, twice, a dozen times, but could not bring himself to make a cut in
the bark. He walked backward a few steps and looked up. The funereal
green seemed to grow darker and darker till it became black. It was the
embodiment of sorrow. Was it not shaking giant arms at him? Did it
not cry out in angry challenge? Luther did not try to laugh at his fears;
he had never seen any humor in life. A gust of wind had someway crept
through the dense barricade of foliage that flanked the clearing, and
struck him with an icy chill. He looked at the sky: the day was
advancing rapidly. He went at his work with an energy as determined
as despair. The axe in his practiced hand made clean straight cuts in the
trunk, now on this side, now on that. His task was not an easy one, but
he finished it with wonderful expedition. After the chopping was
finished, the tree stood firm a moment; then, as the tensely strained
fibres began a weird moaning, he sprang aside,