Cheating the Hog: A Sawmill. A Tragedy. A Few Gutsy Women - Paperback

by Rae Ellen Lee (Author)

Echo needs a miracle. She's turning fifty, living with her gun-toting mom, and her lover's been killed in a logging truck accident. She made front-page news as a Salvation Army bell ringer, but that job ended and she's digging for change to pay off a gambling debt. Then she hits pay dirt. The local sawmill hires her to do cleanup and odd jobs, like cheating the hog. And now, with high pay and benefits in sight, Echo expects to be farting in silk. But on the first day at the mill, she realizes this job could kill her. Can she survive hanging from a narrow ramp twenty feet in the air while untangling cedar bark? Will a forklift driver named Bullfrog run her down before she gets her first paycheck? When tragedy does strikes, she leads the other women mill workers to fight back with a few leveraged threats and wit as sharp as band saw teeth-earning her respect on the job and the attention of a strong-hearted man.

Author Biography

Rae Ellen Lee grew up on a stump ranch in northern Idaho, and later served in the Foreign Service in Washington, D.C., Switzerland and (then) Yugoslavia. After earning a degree in landscape architecture from the University of Idaho, she worked with the U.S. Forest Service in Idaho and Montana. She is the author of two linked memoirs, some readers call humorous neurotica. The first memoir features life on a sailboat, and the second one is set on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Her two novels are also set in unusual locales: the first in a turn-of-the-century mining camp brothel she lived in and renovated, and the second one in a sawmill. An amateur naturalist and geezer enthusiast, she is wrapping up a research project she began twenty-five years ago and will publish the results, A Field Guide to Geezers, in the spring of 2013. She now writes, hikes and sketches around the Western U.S.