In the spring, I returned to logging and spent some time rigging back spars on grapple yarders up in Knight’s Inlet for the German. It was tough work, but I liked it. By the time I was 21, I was working on Haida Gwaii in a place called Juskatla. I was throwing tongs on a chunk truck.
The first day I arrived at camp, I was standing in the door of my room in the bunkhouse as the crews came home, looking to see who I knew. One would always find others whom you have logged with in other camps. Across the hall from me was a giant of a fella, a Haida man. He was about 6 ft 4 and as wide as a house at the shoulders. As he ducked to enter his room, he asked me my name, and after I told him I was Bud Logan, he said, “Any relation to Howard?”, and I said ya, he’s my brother. Now it turns out my brother had been working here just a few months before I arrived, he had got into an altercation with this Haida man, and my brother had to use a 2×4 on him, beat him pretty bad was the word in camp. Thankfully, the man did not decide to take it out on me, and we became friends. His name was Tiny.
Juskatla was a big camp, more like a small town, with large married sections with houses and bunkhouses for those who were single. Huge cookhouse, and we ate like kings.
The scenery here was fantastic, the deer were so plentiful that there was no limit to hunting them when I arrived on the islands, but shortly afterwards, they put a limit of one deer a day. These were Sitka deer and were about as big as a mid-sized dog. But there was another animal that was hunted here, one you could only get 1 tag a year for, one that could fill your freezer. These were Scottish long-haired cattle, or as I liked to call them, hippy cows. It seems that at the turn of the century, a man attempted to start a cattle ranch on Haida Gwaii to raise beef for the sailing ships that stopped here. It was a complete failure and was soon abandoned; however, the cattle were left to fend for themselves and, over several generations, had become wild. Now they could be hunted as food, could you imagine, a whole beef once a year? The people ate well. Not sure of the status of these cows now.
When my 2 sons became men, they were both compass men on timber cruising contracts. They worked up on Haida Gwaii, and I got to see the islands again through the photos they sent home. I enjoyed this. They said nobody knew much of anything about these cows. Although in 2021, a car was totalled after hitting a wild cow.