At the back
corner of the cabin there was a gully that went up the hill but it
never had any water in it's six foot deep depression. After we cut the
trees into chunks we would roll them over to the gully and start them
down the hill. They would bound up in the air and sometimes jump out
of the gully where trees would halt their flight. They would go about
40 feet and then we would start them out again. At the bottom they
would be traveling quite fast so we made a barricade of chunks about
the size of a cord of wood, to protect the cabin. It was an easy way
to get the wood down the hill and the chunks ended up right by our
wood pile for splitting. We would cut the basswood chunks about a foot
long as it was a very straight wood, soft and wonderful to split for
kindling. I would sit on one chunk of wood and split another with my
scout hatchet. It would split almost down to the size of a pencil and
I always kept a big pile of it to start fires with. When we were
cutting down trees we would put all the brush into piles so that there
would be places for the rabbits to hide. When we were hunting rabbits,
we could kick the pile with our foot and scare them out. We had a
basswood tree with a nest of honey Bees in a hole about 10 feet up the
trunk. One day when it was about zero degrees out, we cut the tree
down and when it hit the ground the bees flew up in the air about ten
feet before the cold got them and they fell to the ground.
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