The old hunter then gathered an armful of small limbs, and laid them on the ground in a circle like the spokes of a wheel, the butts over-lapping at the center where the hub of the wheel would be. With a few small twigs he lighted a fire where the butts joined, the flames catching quickly and burning in a fierce vertical flame.
“This fire will make the most heat for the least amount of wood and throw the heat in all directions,” Martin explained. “And that is why it is the best kind of a fire for heating a round tent, such as an Indian tepee.”
“But why did the Indian have to care about the amount of wood he burned?” Larry asked. “He had all the wood he wanted, just for the chopping of it, didn’t he?”
The old man smiled indulgently. “Yes, he surely had all the wood he wanted just for the chopping—millions of cords of it. But how was he going to chop it without anything to chop it with, do you think? You forget that the old Indians didn’t have so much as a knife, let alone an axe. And that explains the whole thing: that’s why the Indian made small fires and built skin tepees instead of log houses.
“If you left your axe and your knife here at the tent and went into the woods to gather wood, Larry, how long do you suppose it would take you to collect a day’s supply for our big fire? You wouldn’t have much trouble in getting a few armfuls of fallen and broken branches but very soon you’d find the supply running short. The logs would be too large to handle, and most of the limbs too big to break. And so you would soon be cold and hungry, with a month’s supply of dry timber right at your front dooryard.
“But it’s all so different when you can give a tap here and there with your axe, or a few strokes with your hunting knife. And this was just what the poor Indian couldn’t do; for he had no cutting tool of any kind worth the name until the white man came. So he learned to use little sticks for his fire, and built his house of skins stretched over small poles.
“It is hard for us to realize that cutting down a tree was about the hardest task an Indian could ever attempt. Why the strongest Indian in the tribe, working as hard as he could with the best tool he could find, couldn’t cut down a tree as quickly as you could with your hunting knife. He could break rocks to pieces by striking them with other rocks, and he could dig caves in the earth; but when it came to cutting down a tree he was stumped. The big trees simply stood up and laughed at him. No wonder he worshipped the forests and the tree gods!
“Of course when the white man came and supplied axes, hatchets, and knives, he solved the problem of fire-wood for the Indian. But he never changed the Indian’s idea about small fires. Too many thousand generations of Indian ancestors had been making that kind of a fire all their lives; and the Indian is a great fellow to stick to fixed habits. He adopted the steel hatchet and the knife, but he stuck to his round fire and his round tepee.
“And yet, although he had never seen a steel hatchet until the white man gave him one, he improved the design of the white man’s axe right away. The white man’s hatchet was a broad-bladed, clumsy thing, heavy to carry and hard to handle. The Indian designed a thin, narrow-bladed, light hatchet—the tomahawk—that would bite deeper into the wood and so cut faster than the white man’s thick hatchet. And every woodsman now knows that for fast chopping, with little work, a hatchet made on the lines of the tomahawk beats out the other kind.”
The old man took his own hunting axe from the sheath at his belt and held it up for inspection.