Camp Venture: A Story of the Virginia Mountains

by George Cary Eggleston

"Tom Ridsdale you are certainly the healthiest human animal I ever saw or heard of. Why a surgeon in private practice wouldn't make his salt if all his patients recovered after your fashion. You are practically so nearly well that I am going to leave off all your bandages, only holding this newly healed cut together with a strip or two of rubber plaster for extra safety. But I certainly never saw anything like it!"

"Perhaps that's because you never before had a perfectly healthy, out-of-door boy like me as a surgical patient."

"Of course that's it. But now that I've taken off all your bandages and given you leave to eat whatever you want, you must be good enough to obey my orders in other respects. Otherwise, you might spoil this splendid result."

"I will, Doctor. Honestly, I'll do whatever you tell me."

"Well, we're going to begin chopping now, and I peremptorily forbid you to do any work for a day or two—at least, until the healing of those lacerated muscles is complete and their union firm. It would be very easy now to tear the wounds open again, and if you did that they would not heal again in a hurry. So, you must do no chopping, no lifting, no work of any kind for the present. Promise me that and in return I'll faithfully promise to release you from the restraint at the first moment when I think it safe to do so."

"All right, Doctor," answered Tom, "I'll potter about and 'keep camp' till you say I may go to work. And in the meantime I'm going to make some soup out of our scraps and bones. It will warm you fellows up when you come in cold and hungry from your chopping in this excessively cold air."

With that Tom got out their biggest camp kettle, threw all the meat fragments into it, broke up all the bones with a hatchet, and threw them in, and then filling the kettle nearly full of cold water, set it on the fire to boil.

The other boys, after breakfast, had taken their axes and gone out to begin the work of chopping. First of all, they built a fire near the timber they were about to cut, so that benumbed hands and half frozen feet might be warmed as occasion required. They all had good axes, and they all knew how to use them expertly, for these boys had been brought up in a heavily timbered country and had been used all their lives to chopping.

"Now, let's begin right," said Jack Ridsdale, "and then we'll go on right. There are two ways to fell trees in a forest, a right way and a wrong way. The wrong way is to fell them in any way that comes handy, regardless of any incidental damage that may be done as they fall. The right way is so to fell your big tree that in falling it won't smash any of the smaller trees standing around. You see, we aren't going to cut down any tree that isn't big enough to make railroad ties—that is to say any tree that isn't full seven inches in diameter. In doing that, if we take a little care, we can save all the smaller trees, and in the course of a year or two they will grow up, and we fellows can come out here and spend another winter in chopping. It all depends upon the way in which we do our work this time, whether these lands remain a splendid forest or become a desolate waste with all the soil washed off for lack of roots to hold it, and with no hope of anything ever growing upon them again."

Then Jack, who was an expert woodchopper, explained to all the others how to chop down a tree so as to make it fall wherever the chopper wishes it to fall.