Inside the skidder cab, Gideon kept a laminated maintenance schedule based on Ansel’s system and the Deere service manual.
Every fifty operating hours:
Hydraulic fluid.
Engine oil.
Grease all articulation and grapple points.
Tires.
Pins.
Hoses.
Every two hundred fifty:
Engine oil and filter.
Hydraulic filter.
Fuel filter inspection.
Every five hundred:
Pump clearance.
Cylinder seals.
Articulation joint.
Detailed wear inspection.
Every service got a date.
Hour-meter reading.
Condition note.
By the end of 1995, the log covered forty-three pages.
The Deere had run roughly 820 hours since the rebuild.
No major unscheduled failure.
Lambert Ingersoll saw it when Gideon came in for filters.
Then again when he came for a grease fitting.
Lambert did not announce that he had changed his opinion.
Men like Lambert rarely did.
They simply stopped making the old joke.
Through 1995 and into 1996, the referrals continued.
Everett Radke.
Another landowner.
Then a timber buyer named Nolan Kessler out of Hayward.
Nolan had been hearing Gideon’s name from enough people that eventually he called him.
Forty acres near Ojibwa.
Fifteen dollars a ton.
Gideon yarded roughly 380 tons over five weeks.
Gross:
$5,700 before fuel.
He was twenty-three.
The original Deere had more than a thousand hours on the rebuild.
Still running.
From October 1993 through the spring of 1996, Gideon’s notebooks showed roughly $22,980 in gross yarding income.
Against that were the original acquisition and rebuild, scheduled maintenance, fuel, and the $65 monthly bay rent.
His net position had improved by more than sixteen thousand dollars.
More important, the machine was paid for many times over.
No finance payment.
No bank lien.
No equipment note coming due every month whether timber moved or not.
That spring, the newspaper finally printed the story Gideon had been waiting for.
The Park Falls mill was reopening.
Late summer restart.
New timber contracts.
Rhinelander ownership.
Nolan Kessler called the same week.
“Rates are gonna move,” he said.
“I figured.”
“You got capacity?”
“One machine and me.”
“Need more.”
“I know.”
Nolan laughed.
“Everybody’s gonna need more.”
Gideon hung up.
Then he went to the café on Main Street, ordered coffee, opened his notebook, and started calculating.
Again, he told nobody what he thought was coming.
He did not need to.
He had spent two and a half years preparing for a moment he could not schedule.
That was the important part.
Preparation had to come first.
Otherwise opportunity was just news.
His second operator arrived in June.
Tobin Amundson.
Nineteen years old.
Dairy-farm kid from near Winter.
Two summers of skidder experience with a crew that had since folded.
Tobin came into Gideon’s bay on a Tuesday evening and stared at the John Deere for a long time.
“That the Pelletier machine?”
“Yeah.”
“I heard about it.”
“Most people did.”
Tobin walked around it.
Checked the new hydraulic hoses.
Looked at the grapple.
Studied the tires.
“Doesn’t look like the same machine.”
“Mostly isn’t.”
“What’s on the rebuild?”
“Thousand sixty-two hours.”
“How’d the pump look at five hundred?”
Gideon looked at him.
That was a better question than most men twice Tobin’s age asked.
He opened the notebook.
“Gear-face clearance within tolerance. No scoring. Fluid clean.”
Tobin nodded.
“I’m interested.”
Gideon hired him for twelve dollars an hour.
Then spent three days teaching him the machine.
Not just controls.
Sounds.
Temperatures.
What the pump should sound like on a cold morning.
What it should never sound like warm.
What a grapple pin felt like before visible play developed.
How to record something unusual even when you did not yet know whether it mattered.
On the second day, Tobin pulled a small notebook from his coat and wrote something down.
Gideon noticed.
He said nothing.
He remembered being sixteen.
The Park Falls mill restarted in September 1996.
Three weeks behind schedule.
Within thirty days, the market changed.
Nolan Kessler’s yarding rate moved from fifteen dollars a ton to seventeen-fifty.
Then eighteen.
The dormant crews began scrambling.
Some had sold equipment.
Some had machines that had sat for nearly three years and would not stay running.
Others were waiting on financing.
Gideon had already moved.
In August, he bought a 1981 Clark Ranger skidder at a farm sale near Fifield.
Purchase price:
$850.
Six weeks of rebuilding.
Parts:
About $1,140.
When Nolan called in October and said he needed three parcels yarded simultaneously before freeze-up, Gideon answered without hesitation.
“I can do it.”
He ran the Deere himself on the largest parcel near Meteor.
Tobin ran the Clark on the second.
Gideon subcontracted the third to a one-man outfit he trusted from his falling-crew days.
Between mid-October and early December, the three jobs produced roughly 1,940 tons.
At eighteen dollars a ton:
$34,920 gross.
After Tobin’s wages, subcontractor payments, fuel, and operating costs, Gideon’s notebook showed approximately $14,310 net.
Eight weeks.
Twenty-three years old.
Two working machines.
One employee.
A timber buyer who called him before anyone else.
The story around Sawyer County changed that winter.
In 1993, the story had been:
The Voss kid bought the Pelletier wreck.
Good luck.
In 1996, the story included tonnage.
Rates.
Production.
Rebuild cost.
The men who heard it at the co-op or café did the arithmetic themselves.
Nobody came right out and said:
We missed something.
Instead they said:
“Kid’s doing all right.”
Or:
“Ansel Voss was always one hell of a mechanic.”
Or:
“That Park Falls reopening sure changed things.”
That was how a county changed its mind without admitting it had changed.
Lambert Ingersoll heard the numbers while standing at the co-op counter.
He remembered watching the Deere pass his store nearly three years earlier.
He remembered telling someone he would believe it when he saw it work.
He did the arithmetic quietly.
Then returned to his job.
Gideon spent the winter of 1996–97 doing what had become normal.
Buying things other people did not want.
A 1979 Timberjack 225 came up at a farm sale near Glidden.
Broken front axle.
Seized hydraulic motor.
Purchase:
$420.
Transport:
$90.
Machined replacement shaft:
$195.
Hydraulic motor rebuild:
$260.
Seals, filters, hoses, fluid, welding supplies:
About $330.
Total:
$1,295.
Spring arrived.
The Timberjack ran.
Now Gideon had three machines.
By the end of 1997, Gideon Voss Logging had two full-time operators, a part-time bookkeeper named Maren Amundson—Tobin’s older sister—and annual gross revenue of about $71,420.
Net after wages, fuel, maintenance, rent, insurance, and registration:
$26,850.