They certainly would want firewood, Uncle John said, and they must always depend on having to make many journeys to the forest to get wood. But the ground must be cleared and kept open round about the village, so that there might be pasture for the cattle and ground for growing corn and other crops.
At last the boys found a very good place. It was high up, beyond a grove of oak trees, and there was a little spring close by: they called the grove of oak trees the forest. They had not very good tools to work with. David had a big clasp-knife with a spring at the back, to prevent it shutting up on his hand, and Joe had a little hatchet that was not very sharp. But Dick wrote to his mother in London, and his father sent him a little axe like an Indian’s tomahawk.
It took them three days to build the hut. Although the trees were Uncle John’s, he could not let them cut down branches. But he let the woodman bring them some cut boughs from the wood-yard.
This was how they built the hut. They chose a young tree with a straight trunk. Around this they fixed the longest and straightest of their boughs upright in the ground. Then they cut smaller pieces of willow and birch and hazel, and laced them in and out of the uprights, until they had got a wattled wall all round, except between two of the uprights, where they left a space for the door-way. The roof they made by tying sticks across from the uprights to the centre tree, and lacing these with twigs and brushwood. Then they plastered the outside with clay and earth. They made a door, with two light poles for the sides and two shorter ones for the ends, tied cross-wise at the corners, and the whole interlaced, like the walls, with hazel shoots and willows.
When the hut was finished, they brought Uncle John to see it. The boys could all get inside quite comfortably by squeezing a little; but there was not room for Uncle John. So, as it was a very hot afternoon, they all sat outside under an oak tree, and read the next chapter from the brown book.
Chapter the Fifth
THE STORY OF TIG: The Food Supplies
