Book excerpt:

"Learning the lumber business kept me out of doors exposed to all kinds of weather, freezing in the woods in below-zero cold or broiling in the reverberating heat of the lumber piles in summer, soaked with water and bitten by black-flies and mosquitoes in the spring, soaked with rain and river and muskeg in the autumn. Breakfast came at 5 a.m. in the shanties, and dog-tired bodies were flat in the bunks by eight in the evening. […].

In the winter the walk from the shanty out to the places where the crews were cutting was also a trial. Winds howled in the open places, and we used to swear the temperature went down to 60º below. Under those conditions, it took a half an hour to go a mile. […].

The meals were rather trying to a shanty-dweller who wasn't engaged in heavy manual labour, for they were planned to nourish a hard-working man. They were very high calorie foods, to provide energy that was expended at rapid rates in the Canadian winters, or on the drive and the sweep in the spring and autumn. "Heartburn" was a frequent experience for me. Picture a bowl of white beans floating in lard as breakfast cereal, followed by fried fat salt-pork, with a slice of pie to follow, all washed down with a pannikin of Japanese green tea that had probably boiled for hours, with no milk to cut the acid! […]. Lunch in the woods usually consisted in cold boiled salt-pork, lots of shanty-made bread, and some more of the green tea, boiled over a camp-fire at the lunch-site. Back in camp, evening meal was like the breakfast menu, except that there would be "sea-pie" or baked beans. Desserts included well-stewed prunes, dried apricots or apples, and on occasion raisin pie. […]."