ically sensibly to sleep by the creek and now he was awake singing swooshing his whole head into the creek and going Brrrrr and rubbing his hands for a new day—Dave Wain made breakfast with his usual lecture “Now the real way to fry eggs is to put a cover over them so that they can have that neat basted white look on the yellows, soon’s I get this pancake batter ready well start on them”—My list of groceries was so all inclusive in the beginning it was now feeding guerilla troops.
A big axe chopping contest began after breakfast, some of us sitting watching on the porch and the performers down below hacking away at the tree trunk which was over a foot thick—They were chopping off two foot chunks, no easy job—I realized you can always study the character of a man by the way he chops wood—Monsanto an old lumberman up in Maine as I say now showed us how he conducted his whole life in fact by the way he took neat little short handled chops from both left and right angles getting his work done in reasonably short time without too much sweat—But his strokes were rapid—Whereas old Fagan pipe-in-mouth slogged away I guess the way he learned in Oregon and in the Northwest fire schools, also getting his job done, silently, not a word—But Cody’s fantastic fiery character showed in the way he went at the log with horrible force, when he brought down the axe with all his might and holding it far at the end you could hear the whole treetrunk groaning the whole length inside, runk, sometimes you could hear a lengthwise cracking going on, he is really very strong and he brought that axe down so hard his feet left the earth when it hit—He chopped off his log with the fury of a Greek god—Nevertheless it took him longer and much more sweat than Monsanto—“Used to do this in a work-gang in southern Arizony” he said, whopping one down that made the whole treetrunk dance off the ground—But it was like an example of vast but senseless strength, a picture of poor Cody’s life and in a sense my own—I too chopped with all my might and got madder and
