Chapter 8

I got the message. Now we were making good progress, having got all the logs onto our platform. Mataoka had helped dig away the soil where the bottom log would lie. The soil was poor and thin and the bedrock shallow under the platform, so we didn’t have to dig down deep to reach it. We filled the shallow footings with the small broken stones that littered the hill behind it. These I tamped down with a stump from one of the logs. Then we laid our foundation course of log, going right around, including across where the door would be. The house was to be two logs long by one wide, but I had left some logs at full length to make the bottom row whole.

Mataoka looked at the second row as I started to lever the first log up onto it. “Aren’t you going to split them?” she asked. She had a point. I stared at the rectangular frame by my feet. I stared at the big pile of logs we had manhandled here. If I split them, I had much more wood. How could I split them?

Mataoka left me to think about it. I went and got a stake I had sharpened to make a fence post of, and tried to jam it in the end of the nearest log, where there already was the start of a natural split. It stuck, so I grabbed a short tree fork I had shaped as a mallet and hit the end of the stake. There was a twang and I realized my stake was too long. As the stake was now wedged in and not easy to move, I grabbed my ax instead and quickly cut the stake down. Now, when I hit the end, the log creaked instead of the stake twanging. I hit a few more times, and quickly there was a loud splitting sound and the whole log fell into two halves! Energized, I set about splitting more logs. Soon I had a handy pile of quarters. I found it was no problem to pick where the split would be, using the ax to make a slot to start wedging the wood apart with stakes and the mallet. Only a couple of logs wouldn’t split, and only a few split untidily. I began to wish I’d thought to split them earlier, before we had struggled to get them all up to the platform.

Now that I had planks instead of round logs, I had to rethink how I would build the house. I didn’t have nails, but I had borrowed the auger from the farm so I could make holes. I could use short stakes to join the rows together. Would I make the walls from solid timber, perhaps four inches thick, or would I now build a timber frame with wattle and daub between?

We didn’t have cows nor horses to get dung for the daub, but we had plenty of deer and elk scat we could collect. That might work. Would that be faster? Would it be warmer?

In the end, I elected to build the walls from the big, thick timber planks I was splitting. The walls would be at least a palm thick, so there was plenty of width for the auger to drill for pins to join them together. We stuffed between the planks with thick wads of moss.

At one end, I built a fireplace and chimney from stones and clay. The rock around us wasn’t very strong, and could be hit to square off and make bricks to work from. It seemed to work well.

Mataoka went foraging during the day sometimes, coming back from the lake down below with fresh fish each time. She hid a net down there so she didn’t have to carry it back each time. Fish were plentiful and the lake was large, so fish largely replaced venison in our diet as the wild animals in our upper valley learned to be wary.

As the weather changed and became colder and the rain came more often and the leaves started to fall, I had got our house up to about head height and I decided to start on a roof rather than go higher. Mataoka wasn’t as tall as I and building the house higher would take longer than I liked. Mataoka had already cut a lot of stalks to use as thatch and, as we were so practiced making wigwams, we soon had a roof on. I had to make it quite pitched because of how we were thatching it, so the low eaves didn’t stop you standing up straight inside.

It all went quickly – suddenly – and the house was transformed from an open-top box exposed to the elements into something that really felt like a house. Like home. Mataoka quickly rigged up a cot like the Indians had in the wigwams and we moved in for our first night in our new home.

Now we had two wigwams for storage and the house to live in. Mataoka was insistent that I also build the outhouse from the planks I was splitting, the outhouse being the defining symbol of English living. She jokingly tried to get me to call her Martha again, but I couldn’t keep it up.

The heat from our warm spring was being lost to the chilling fall wind too quickly and the pool wasn’t as warm as it had been, although a light mist rose from it when it began to snow. Mataoka and I built another quick wigwam over it, and that warmed it up nicely. Now, when we bathed daily, cold drips of melt would hit our necks sometimes and make us jump, as the snow on the roof seeped through. Clearly we hadn’t thatched this as well as the others.

We also built a wigwam over the pile of logs I hadn’t used, thinking this would keep them better until spring when I could start on better outbuildings, and it would give me a place to work even in the winter. We also piled up all the wood chips I had made around the house platform, to keep them dry under shelter so we could burn them right through the winter. And we gathered plenty of other dry firewood, too.