For the first week, armed with razor-sharp axes that were kept that way by frequent honing, the three of them attacked the grove of yellow birch. Then, while Ira and Andy set up the gasoline-powered buzz saw, Ira used his own horses to drag the wood in to them. When they had enough to keep them busy for a while, he felled and trimmed more trees alone. Except for Sundays, which the Casmans always observed, even though they did not do it in church, the trio worked hard every day from dawn to dusk. As a result, wood piled up fast.
One afternoon, Andy glanced at the sun, calculated that they could work at least one more hour and picked up one end of a birch pole, while Ira took the other. Co-ordinating their actions perfectly, for they had been working together a long while, they swung it into the cradle. Ira had taken the saw end, and Andy was just as happy. The whirling saw, kept as sharp as the axes, could scream its way through a twelve-inch tree in a couple of clock ticks—and through a man's hand in considerably less time! But Ira, who had been handling the business end of a buzz saw ever since he'd been old enough to work, had yet to receive his first nick.
The pair finished the log, took another, and at exactly the right time Jud came in from the wood lot. The three of them worked to arrange the tumbled pile of wood in neat cords, eight feet long by four feet high, and so well did they know what they were doing that, by the time they were finished, it lacked only a few minutes of being too dark to work any more.
Ira solemnly regarded the results of their day's labor. "Twenty mo' cords to go," he announced. "We finish early nex' week."
"Jest in time," Jud said. "Breakup's comin', an' them town folk won't want wood then."
"How do you know the breakup's coming?" Andy challenged him.
"My rheumatiz changed."
"Twon't be much of a breakup," Ira murmured. "Ain't enough snow fo' that. I mistrust 'twill be a puny season' fo' crops, less'n we get a heap o' spring rains."
"There'll be water in the swamp," Andy said.
"Allus some theah," Ira conceded. "How's yo' mushrats doin', Andy?"