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This is a story about a day in the life of a couple of loggers. Not a typical day, mind you, because if every day in the woods was like this, no one in their right mind would ever wander into the woods, let alone live in them.
As with all in this series, any similarity to persons, places or events, either real or fictitious, is most likely a coincidence. As any small town local knows, everything that could ever happen has already happened to someone, somewhere, at least once. Usually, it's happened to an acquaintance of a distant cousin, whom no one has ever met. Of course the names have been changed to ensure the characters' lack of similarity to any other characters, either real or fictitious, so it doesn't matter anyway.
A friend of a cousin's uncle is a logger; the type of specialist who improves the health of a forest by carefully thinning trees, among other things. Everyone calls him Pokey because he's normally so calm and imperturbable.
The owner of the sawmill mill liked Pokey's work. He had bought a huge chunk of property for a song, because it used to be an oilfield. He wanted Pokey to thin it out and clean up the brush for him. They had their work cut out for them - no pun intended. The work was hard. Rusty bits of pipe, oil rig, even train tracks hidden in the thick, deep brush waited to take out an expensive tire or deliver a nasty cut to the areas of their bodies not armored in Kevlar. Most of the trees marked for thinning would make good timber however, and the deal the mill owner had offered was very good, so they pushed on.
There was a nice oak marked for cutting next to an old, hollow soft maple, about 60 feet tall. Both trees were right next to the logging road. The oak came first, the maple they planned to take down next. The cutter felled the oak. The tree fell nicely, but rolled into the trunk of the soft maple with a thump, startling the huge nest of honeybees that neither man had noticed earlier.
Like deer caught in the glare of headlights, the two men stood, watching in frozen horror, while halfway up the old maple, the biggest, maddest swarm of honeybees either one had ever saw massed for an attack. The cutter unfroze first. He dropped his saw, which was still running, and ran for his life. Pokey decided to break in the other direction toward the idling skidder, in the hopes they could keep working elsewhere until the bees calmed down.
The bees, attracted by the rumble of the skidder or by Pokey pelting down the road - or both - decided he was their target. Some of the bees broke off from the main group to attack the idling chainsaw, covering it so thickly it looked like a squirming mound of insects. The bulk of the army continued after Pokey, or the skidder, or both. At first, Pokey figured his Kevlar-lined logging pants would protect him from stings. He slid to a stop at the skidder....unfortunately, right onto a nest of ground hornets buried by the dozer a few days earlier. They'd just finished digging themselves out.
The combination of noises from the angry army of honeybees, the rumbling skidder, and their hole being stopped up again was more than the hornets could take. Not that hornets need a reason to attack. The hornets joined in the attack. Pokey's Kevlar pants and boots were no longer any protection, because the hornets crawled up the legs and down the back, stinging tender areas that rarely see the light of day, let alone a swarm of stinging insects.
Pokey lost it completely. Needless to say, he forgot about the skidder. His only idea was to run as fast as he could away from both bees and hornets, hoping that they would tire of attacking him and turn on each other. Running uphill, Pokey tried to strip off his logging pants and jeans and get the hornets OFF his nether regions. Unfortunately, his feet had been sweating in the rubber logging boots. The boots stuck to his damp socks, just enough to prevent a desperate logger from kicking them off. Naturally, the logging pants and jeans became tangled on his boot tops just below knee height....
And there was poor Pokey, a tall, rangy man, stumbling for his life as fast as he could, uphill, with logging pants, jeans, undershorts and boots tangled around his calves, while honeybees and hornets practically plastered his posterior with welts.
While it'd be more dramatic if Pokey had gotten to the fishponds on the neighboring property, or threw himself downhill to roll out range of the angry swarms, the truth is that the attack ended as abruptly as it began. The bees and hornets finally lost interest, and Pokey eventually succeeded in peeling off logging pants, jeans, shorts, socks and boots.
Both the skidder and saw were literally covered with honeybees from the massive nest, idling away precious fuel while both men watched, unable to do a thing about it but wait. Pokey used the time to good advantage, picking stubborn leftover hornets out of his clothes. The bees solved their problem for them, clogging the filters in the skidder and saw so they both stalled. Both men left in disgust, knowing they'd have to spend most of the next morning changing bee-clogged oil and filters.
Pokey did get his revenge on the hornets before dawn the following morning: he rigged up a small, homemade fuel-air bomb and literally blew the offending nest away. Revenge against the honeybees came later, but the honey and beeswax was almost compensation enough for the indignities he suffered that day and the two nights spent sleeping on his stomach with an ice pack on his bum.
Just another day in the life of a guy who spends his life in the woods...but fortunately, not a typical day.
© 2002, Michelle Houghtaling