Dave’s grandpa and uncle were loggers, and since he was a kid, that’s all Dave ever wanted to be. He grew up with John McCay’s sons, listening to the stories their father told about his father using horses to log the woods during the war when gas was rationed. The horse loggers would drive their teams down the streets of Eugene in the spring. Right down the street! Walking behind a team, harnesses polished, they went house to house, offering to plow gardens—back when everyone had big backyard gardens. And if two drivers came to an intersection at the same time, they’d see whose team could out-step the other—like kids revving their cars at red lights. But unlike hotrods, horses were not simply a status symbol, but a man’s livelihood. Those were the days, Dave thought when he heard the stories, when work defined a man.

A year ago, Dave had the chance to help another horse logger for a few days, and everything clicked. He liked horses; he liked the work. He said: "Boy, this is it."

Last December, Dave purchased a team of Clydesdale/Shire horses. And wouldn’t you know, they were directly descended from McCay’s dad’s team -- those very same horses from the photos turning sepia with age, like the one that shows ten-year-old John McCay seated on the buckboard of a wagon beside his dad. McCay had retired from logging, but couldn’t pass up the chance to own the great-great-grandsons of his father’s team, and so, following Dave’s lead, he bought himself a team. Only a few weeks later his dad, the teller of all the horse logging tales, passed away, and John McCay’s task became clear: take the unbroken horses that had never been worked before, never been shod, never looked through a collar, or even into the woods and show him how to work a team the same way his dad had showed him.

Dave lets McCay take over, see if he can salvage the situation. The older man skids the next log and scans the ground. The tips of stumps jut from the mud. They’re like icebergs with submerged trunks big around as a man can reach. Any inexperienced horse logger could have snagged and busted the harness as Dave did. It’s not just a matter of paying attention—it’s knowing what to look for. In fact, if McCay hadn’t been around to help hitch the horses for the first time, Dave would have gotten himself killed. When Dave remembers, he tries to joke: "Them horses made me their wind chime."

He trots behind McCay, carrying the choke chain. He helps when he can, or stands and watches, grinning, and nodding. "Oh yeah," he says a lot. And: "Boy, that sure worked, what you showed me."

He learns the tricks of moving logs with horses. Unlike machines, horses have limited power. Worked too hard, they’ll get sore and bruised. A machine takes as long to fix as ordering a spare part; a horse can take months to heal. So McCay works the horses slow and easy, showing Dave how to "cheat a log." He turns the horses left, then right. The log pivots like the needle of a compass trying to settle on north. Maybe it takes more time, but if he gets the log moving—if only a few paces to the side—then the horses will think they can haul it. If they jerk and the log doesn’t budge, they get discouraged. McCay explains to Dave: "With a machine, just squeeze the throttle—it’ll either work or break. It don’t know the difference."

Dave grins. Without his team to drive, he tries to stay busy by trimming the limbs with a chainsaw so the logs will slide easier. He hates to be left without work. Fact is, when he first started helping McCay, he’d work harder than anyone on the crew, so hard he’d make himself sick. But McCay respected the effort.