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Show 69 caught on to the air holes on top, indicating when to flip them over. Then we made the best sourdough pancakes in all Canada. And every night, like Big Red, I took the starter to bed with me. "Do you know how to build a boat?" Tip shouted, I had just felled a tall spruce tree which barely missed a hillside tent. No, I did not know how to build a boat, but neither did most of the other ten thousand men scattered around this lake. They just chopped down trees and dragged them down the mountains. And cussed. And fought at the sawpits. The sawpits were elevated platforms for sawing the logs into lumber. One man stood up on the platform and held one handle of a six-foot saw, while his partner beneath grasped the lower handle. As they pulled up and down, the man below was showered with sawdust. As a result, many partnerships were broken up, I picked up two oars cheap from two partners who were fighting- without the sawdust. They had carried a prefabricated canoe over Chilkoot Pass, and all they had to do now was nail it together. But in anger, they sawed their canoe in half and divided their ton of supplies. I bought one oar from one partner and one oar from the other. And each one tried to sell me half a canoe. "Do you," Tip called again, "know how to build a boat?" I swung ray ax mightily as I trimmed the fallen spruce tree. |