Rain beats on Dave Swagerty’s orange hard-hat, drips down the collar of his rubber rain-suit, and rolls off the backs of his two draft horses. He grins through clinched teeth and fumbles with the choke chain, wrapping it around a log, giving a tug. Then he stands, gripping both muddy leather lines in his gloved hands, and clucks. "Up, now. Let’s go to work." The horses snort, rattle the harness, and begin to pull. The chain clanks as it draws taut. The log slurps from the mud.

Dave hangs onto the lines, running to keep up with the horses. It’s early morning and they’re fresh. As they prance, their big hooves splash. "Easy, easy!" Dave yells, but the wind sucks his voice down the hillside. He scrambles to keep his balance. Suddenly the log bogs in a pool of silt.

Dave crouches, breath steaming, gloved fingers fumbling with the chain. The horses shift their weight. Dave glances up, his face inches from their hocks. They could kick his head in, he knows. So he works quickly, but calmly, and talks low to the horses. "Easy, boys. Easy." He shortens the chains from the doubletree, which will make the tip of the log ride higher out of the muck. Then he bunches the driving lines in his hands. The horses lunge. The log lurches, then jams. The horses strain against the yokes, hooves slipping. They thrust their 3,600 collective pounds into the harness. The leather groans. Then it snaps, recoiling like a busted rubberband. Suddenly free of the log, the two young draft horses spin around, spooked. Dave stands calf-deep in the muck, still holding the lines, shaking his head.

John McCay is coming up the logging road, walking behind his team of draft horses. He reins his team and calls, "What’d you break?"

Dave unhooks the chains and fishes the harness from the mud. Three tugs busted. It’ll cost him $400, the day’s wages. "I think I broke a record," he says, trying to smile. Dave has been learning to log with horses for a year now with McCay as his teacher.

McCay nods slowly, chewing his gum. Beneath the brim of his silverbelly cowboy hat, he squints through his tinted bifocals, then chuckles. "Looks like you broke everything but the contract."

The contract Dave Swagerty has is to clean up a mess he didn’t make. Five years ago, he selectively thinned the timber on this hillside in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. When the woman who lives in the two-story house at the base of the hill wanted Dave to thin more, he refused. It’s already thin enough, he told her. She ignored him and hired another logger, who took most of the rest of the trees. The few left standing, now exposed, snapped in the first strong wind. When the second logger tried to pull the logs down the hillside, his CAT left gashes across the soft slope. The constant Oregon drizzle has sifted through the dead stalks of blackberries and the broken fronds of sword fern, carving channels that weave into other channels and splice into streams.

Now, as it continues to rain, globs of mud cascade down the slope, gaining speed, gushing into each dimple on the hillside, forming puddles, then small lakes, until they spill. The coffee-colored silt fans across the driveway, around the tires of the property owner’s new station wagon. The felled logs are marooned on the hillside. To prevent any further damage, the Oregon State Board of Forestry issued a permit to remove the timber with horses -- meeting a contemporary problem with an age-old solution. These days, with a growing public concern for wildlife and watershed quality, more timber owners are seeking an alternative to heavy-equipment harvesting. The future of sustainable logging may lie in its past.

Accepting this challenge, horse loggers have returned to the woods, from the pine forests of Georgia to the redwoods of the Pacific, trading the growl of diesel engines for the clip-clop of hooves. Dave, one of the 100 or so horse loggers in Oregon, has returned to finish the job.

He’s annoyed. Not so much at the sight of the hillside scraped bare, but what it represents: a job poorly done. How a job is done, for Dave, matters just as much as why it was done. He can operate any machine in the woods, but instead, he’s opted to work with his young team. Logging with horses is not an assembly-line task that can be mastered in a few days. It’s a journeyman’s trade, like stone masonry or black-smithing, and requires at least a year’s apprenticeship.