When these preparations have been made, he goes back to his gully in the wilderness, and starts felling in real earnest. The great pines crash before his axe; their heads are lopped of; and they are rolled down the slopes into the tediously-filling dam. For the whole summer this work goes on, till all the trees which can be rolled or dragged there are jostling one another in this artificial lake, and the water of the streamlet no longer collects, but squanders itself over the top of the log sluice-gate. And then comes the moment for the realisation of his labours, and the moment to see whether the engineering of the work has been true. The sluice-gate of logs is knocked away; the water gushes out with a solid flood, carrying with it a prancing, lancing, dancing bristle of trunks, and roaring along with them at galloping speed down the slopes of mountain. It is no little thing which will cause a jam then. Obstructions are sheared away with infinite violence; the ends of the logs splinter themselves into paint-brushes; great trees crack off like reeds; and when the torrent, with its convoy of timber, ends its mad gallop in the river for which it has been aiming, there is a swathe ploughed across the green face of the country unsightly as the new cutting of a railroad.
But if there has been a jam, tedious pains must be expended before the logs can be sent along their journey again; another and a greater artificial freshet has to be created; and it is very often more remunerative to leave one of these knotted tangles of trunks to rot where they have stuck, and to start work again _ab initio_. So that, on the whole, the tapping of one of these mountain dams, and the subsequent half-hour's voyage of the logs, is a matter of pretty vivid excitement to all those concerned.
Again we had to cross the Ounasjoki, this time in a square ferry-boat rowed by a woman and a man, and steered by a solemn, small boy. Our progress was not swift. One of the wheel tyres of the _karre_ was loose, and every few hundred yards some one had to get down to hammer it into place again with a stone. A gray-backed crow showed interest in the proceeding, and followed us for a couple of miles to find out what it was all about. But we came upon a hen capercailzie and her family dusting themselves in the road, and the gray-backed crow forebore to follow us farther. Still I do not think there was much in his line to be got out of them. Eggs of course were his speciality, but the egg season was long past, and the capercailzie chicks were as big as partridges.