Draft horses

Fritz and Dick are the draft horses who help Charlie McDonald and Joe Rantz haul enormous cottonwood logs out of the woods near the Dungeness River. Their work is practical and physically demanding, but their crisp coordination also makes them a memorable instance of the book’s recurring emphasis on what people and animals can accomplish by pulling together.

Work in the Logging Woods

Joe finds part-time work with his older neighbor, Charlie McDonald, whose logging takes them among immense cottonwoods in the gravelly bottomlands along the Dungeness River. After Joe and Charlie fell a tree with an eighty-four-inch two-man saw, they lop off its branches and pry away its bark. Fritz and Dick are then harnessed to the log and drag it out of the woods for shipment to a pulp mill in Port Angeles.

The task gives the horses a specific place in a chain of strenuous labor: the men cut and prepare the timber, and the horses supply the pulling power needed to move it. The logs are so large that felling even one can take an hour or more, while the horses’ hauling turns the fallen trees into loads that can leave the woods.

Signals and Synchronized Effort

McDonald’s vocal cords were almost destroyed when he was gassed in World War I, leaving him able to manage little more than croaks and whispers. Yet he can direct the ponderous horses with a barely audible “gee” or “haw,” and often with only a whistle and a nod. The account stresses the precision of their response rather than the volume of his voice.

At a signal, Fritz and Dick squat on their haunches so McDonald can chain them up; at another, they rise and pull together. Their movements are described as crisply synchronized, as if they were one horse. McDonald tells Joe that when horses pull in this way, they can move far more than twice what each could pull alone. They keep pulling until the log moves, the harness breaks, or their hearts give out.

Narrative Significance

The horses are not simply background to Joe’s employment: their coordinated labor is the defining detail of this episode of his life in Sequim. Their example gives physical form to the difference between two animals exerting themselves separately and two animals working in unison. The comparison resonates with the book’s attention to collective effort, while remaining rooted in the immediate realities of logging: enormous timber, harness, quiet signals, and the strain of getting a log out of the woods.