Simple Simon
Cattiwow came down the steep lane with his five-horse timber-tug. He stopped by the woodlump at the back gate to take off the brakes. His real name was Brabon, but the first time the children met him, years and years ago, he told them he was ‘carting wood,’ and it sounded so exactly like ‘cattiwow’ that they never called him anything else.
‘Hi!’ Una shouted from the top of the woodlump, where they had been watching the lane. ‘What are you doing? Why weren’t we told?’
‘They’ve just sent for me,’ Cattiwow answered. ‘There’s a middlin’ big log sticked in the dirt at Rabbit Shaw, and’—he flicked his whip back along the line—’so they’ve sent for us all.’
Dan and Una threw themselves off the woodlump almost under black Sailor’s nose. Cattiwow never let them ride the big beam that makes the body of the timber-tug, but they hung on behind while their teeth thuttered.
The wood road beyond the brook climbs at once into the woods, and you see all the horses’ backs rising, one above another, like moving stairs. Cattiwow strode ahead in his sackcloth woodman’s petticoat, belted at the waist with a leather strap; and when he turned and grinned, his red lips showed under his sackcloth-coloured beard. His cap was sackcloth too, with a flap behind, to keep twigs and bark out of his neck. He navigated the tug among pools of heather-water that splashed in their faces, and through clumps of young birches that slashed at their legs, and when they hit an old toadstooled stump, they never knew whether it would give way in showers of rotten wood, or jar them back again.
At the top of Rabbit Shaw half-a-dozen men and a team of horses stood round a forty-foot oak log in a muddy hollow. The ground about was poached and stoached with sliding hoof-marks, and a wave of dirt was driven up in front of the butt.
‘What did you want to bury her for this way?’ said Cattiwow. He took his broad-axe and went up the log tapping it.
‘She’s sticked fast,’ said ‘Bunny’ Lewknor, who managed the other team.