George went to work in a logging camp on the Adams River outside Vancouver, where he soon found himself scrambling madly up and down a mountain, trying to satisfy a steam donkey’s mechanically relentless appetite for firewood and water. After a month of frantically sawing wood and lugging tin pails of water up from the river two at a time, he quit and returned to Vancouver, where he got a relatively cushy job working in the shipyards—one in which he did not have to work quite at the pace of a steam engine. But it was grim, dangerous work that soon cost him two of his fingers.
