Once in the coastal forests there was a crew of loggers who worked long and hard in mud and rain and cold on the sides of steep mountains. They'd stop for lunch before noon and the racket of the donkey engine was mercifully quiet for a while. They all had tin lunch buckets with rings of metal cable through the handles. Lunch was four or five thick hunks of bread, a piece of cheese or meat the size of a baby's head, a couple of lumps of cake or pie and may be some apples. They ate ferociously fast - even Betty. Wally and Betty were fallers. Some said they were married. Betty was six foot tall and more than two hundred pounds. She and Wally could take down a tree within inches of where they wanted it. No one messed with Betty - within her hearing, anyway.
All that spring the lunch time treat was the magnificent bull elk who came to oversee them as they ate. He stood on a knoll a careful distance away and he watched them with much curiosity until the donkey started up again. He was the finest elk any of them had seen. Curley brought his Brownie camera and got a couple of pictures. They didn't come out very well. The elk's rack just looked like branches.
One day the elk didn't show up. Suspicion around the crew was mutual. There wasn't a one of them hadn't shot an elk out of season. Half of them ate elk meat year round. So who'd done it? Who shot the elk?
Most thought it was Curley. He had the family to support. He had the wife that wasted money on useless things. Curley felt the silence around him.
``Look you sons of bitches! I never shot the elk. Ask my old lady!'' They laughed and kidded him. Curley thought it was Tom shot the elk and it made him mad that he didn't speak up.
One afternoon going home in the crummy Curley said as much. Tom hauled off and clobbered him. They stopped the crummy and Tom and Curley rolled out fighting like bears. Hot and tired and dirty and angry and hungry.
A couple of days later they found the elk dead and tangled in a hank of wire left by a crew stringing line to the ranger station.
``If we'd just looked we might have saved him,'' said Betty.