Girl in a Buckskin

without building a cabin, with the frost only three moons away. A cabin will come last of all.”
    Staring at the hollow Becky bit her lips. He meant a smoaky home, a house with three earthen walls and a chimney of green wood or stones. Very well, she thought, she would not show her disappointment; it was enough for now that they were here. Putting down the copper pot she knelt to the ground and began digging. “This fire I will build,” she said, “and it had better be built quickly else we’ll have no hotchpot for dinner this night. Would there be any roots about, Eseck, to throw in the kettle?”
    “Aye, there’ll be roots,” Eseck said, and this time he left the musket with her, taking only the tomahawk.
     
    For three nights they slept on pine boughs under the stars while they combed the forest for little treasures of wood: indeed, the woods proved not unlike a storehouse of wealth so full of variety was it. They found hemlock for Eseck’s bows and arrows, poplar wood for trenchers and noggins and birch bark for platters, and one splendid pine tree which Eseck’s eye admired and which he said would make a marvelous dugout until such time as he might fashion a birch-bark canoe for them. These treasures they brought home, along with the first of the wild blackberries, and sitting on the beach beside the fire they went to work with knife and stone. The bow that Eseck made was like nothing Becky had ever seen before: it was a double bow, like those of the Wabenakis he had lived with, and far stronger than a single bow, he said. Becky would see this when she herself learned to shoot with it.
    With a sharpening stone Becky was learning to shape and cut arrow points from the deer’s antlers. Sitting on the shore with the strong south wind in her face, she thought how different life looked to be here from life at the Leggett house down country: there were no spinning wheels here, no wool to be carded or thread to be spun, no pewter to clean with rushes until it shown like silver. She watched with a proud eye the growing store of arrows near the fire, seeing a deer for each point she had made. When the big double bow at last stood propped against a tree Eseck cut string from the rawhide he had stretched on a drying frame and from birch bark made a quiver for the arrows which he tied across his shoulder.
    And now for Becky he hollowed out the slabs of poplar wood and made two shining white trenchers so they need no longer eat from the kettle but could pour their stews into vessels like proper people. Later he promised to carve a bottle for her of wood, but in the meantime he set a slab of wood over the fire to hollow it out for a carrying pail.
    With these finished they began digging into the hill to make the cave. With hands and hatchets they dug deep into the bank of the hill, almost as deep as Eseck was tall, and high enough for both to stand in. Then they fetched hunks of earth and saplings and built out the walls in front of the cave, so that only half of the house would be inside of the hill. When the sod walls were high enough to stand beside they roofed them over with layers of tree branches and rough shingles of birch bark and green rushes, leaving room for a chimney which they made of smooth round stones found along the beach and mortared with wet clay. When they were through they had a snug house, half inside the hill and half outside.
    And now it did not matter to Becky that their home was not of cut logs. On the day she moved her huckaback sack into it she found it exceedingly snug. There was a log stump for sitting on and two mounds of hemlock boughs for beds. When the earthen floor was thoroughly tamped down and dry Becky would gather fallen pine needles and scatter the floor with their fragrance. In the little fireplace she placed the copper kettle on its tripod of sticks and on the log table in front of the fire she arranged the trenchers, the leather noggin for drinking and their three spoons. The water pail she would leave by the door.
    With these things done Becky lit a fire under the pot and watched the cave slowly fill up with a warm flickering light that scurried over the earthen ceiling and back to the small tunnel Eseck had dug in the rear for their stores. But there was one thing Becky had almost forgotten. When Eseck had gone to test his bow in the woods she chose a flat piece of birch bark from their pile and with Eseck’s jackknife marked off the days they had been in the woods.