In this he set about building the shanty.  Logs seven or eight feet long must be got to the place—­at least twenty-five or thirty would be needed, and how to cut and handle them with his poor axe was a question.  Somehow, he never looked for a better axe.  The half-formed notion that the Indians had no better was sufficient support, and he struggled away bravely, using whatever ready sized material he could find.  Each piece as he brought it was put into place.  Some boys would have gathered the logs first and built it all at once, but that was not Yan’s way; he was too eager to see the walls rise.  He had painfully and slowly gathered logs enough to raise the walls three rounds, when the question of a door occurred to him.  This, of course, could not be cut through the logs in the ordinary way; that required the best of tools.  So he lifted out all the front logs except the lowest, replacing them at the ends with stones and blocks to sustain the sides.  This gave him the sudden gain of two logs, and helped the rest of the walls that much.  The shanty was now about three feet high, and no two logs in it were alike:  some were much too long, most were crooked and some were half rotten, for the simple reason that these were the only ones he could cut.  He had exhausted the logs in the neighbourhood and was forced to go farther.  Now he remembered seeing one that might do, half a mile away on the home trail (they were always “trails”; he never called them “roads” or “paths").  He went after this, and to his great surprise and delight found that it was one of a dozen old cedar posts that had been cut long before and thrown aside as culls, or worthless.  He could carry only one at a time, so that to bring each one meant a journey of a mile, and the post got woefully heavy each time before that mile was over.  To get those twelve logs he had twelve miles to walk.  It took several Saturdays, but he stuck doggedly to it.  Twelve good logs completed his shanty, making it five feet high and leaving three logs over for rafters.  These he laid flat across, dividing the spaces equally.  Over them he laid plenty of small sticks and branches till it was thickly covered.  Then he went down to a rank, grassy meadow and, with his knife, cut hay for a couple of hours.  This was spread thickly on the roof, to be covered with strips of Elm bark then on top of all he threw the clay dug from the bank, piling it well back, stamping on it, and working it down at the edges.  Finally, he threw rubbish and leaves over it, so that it was confused with the general tangle.

Thus the roof was finished, but the whole of the front was open.  He dreaded the search for more logs, so tried a new plan.  He found, first, some sticks about six feet long and two or three inches through.  Not having an axe to sharpen and drive them, he dug pairs of holes a foot deep, one at each end and another pair near the middle of the front ground log.

Into each of these he put a pair of upright sticks, leading up to the eave log, one inside and one outside of it, then packed the earth around them in the holes.  Next, he went to the brook-side and cut a number of long green willow switches about half an inch thick at the butt.  These switches he twisted around the top of each pair of stakes in a figure 8, placing them to hold the stake tight against the bottom and top logs at the front.