First person narrative about a teenage boy in Ontario Canada who leaves home to go work for a lumber company; fulfilling his dream of following in his recently deceased father's footsteps as a "shantyman" (logger). The narrator tells of how he spent his first season of employment in the timber trade as a chore-boy and the daily grind of life in a lumber camp. The author gives a wonderful account of some of the personalities of the men who hacked their living out of the frontier wilderness of Southeast Canada.