branches away to get at the trunk and then going to work on that. We
took turns using the sonocutter, and the rest of us stamped around to
keep warm. The first trunk must have weighed a ton and a half, even
after the branches were all off; we could barely lift one end of it
with both lifters. The spongy stuff, which changed from bark to wood
as it went in to the middle, was two feet thick. We cut that off in
slabs, to use for building the hut. The hardwood core, once we could
get it lit, would make a fine hot fire. We could cut that into
burnable pieces after we got it to camp. We didn't bother with the
slashings; just threw them out of the way. There was so much big stuff
here that the branches weren't worth taking in.

We had eight trees down and cut into slabs and billets before we
decided to knock off. We didn't realize until then how tired and cold
we were. A couple of us had taken the wood to the waterfall and heaved
it over at the side as fast as the others got the trees down and cut
up. If we only had another cutter and a couple more lifters, I
thought. If we only had an airworthy boat....

When we got back to camp, everybody who wasn't crippled and had enough
clothes to get away from the heater came out and helped. First, we got
a fire started--there was a small arc torch, and we needed that to get
the dense hardwood burning--and then we began building a hut against
the boat. Everybody worked on that but Dominic Silverstein. Even Abe
and Cesario knocked off work on the radio, and Joe Kivelson and the
man with the broken wrist gave us a little one-handed help. By this
time, the wind had fallen and the snow was coming down thicker. We
made snow shovels out of the hard outer bark, although they broke in
use pretty often, and banked snow up against the hut. I lost track of
how long we worked, but finally we had a place we could all get into,
with a fireplace, and it was as warm and comfortable as the inside of
the boat.

We had to keep cutting wood, though. Before long it would be too cold
to work up in the woods, or even go back and forth between the woods
and the camp. The snow finally stopped, and then the sky began to
clear and we could see stars. That didn't make us happy at all. As
long as the sky was clouded and the snow was falling, some of the heat
that had been stored during the long day was being conserved. Now it
was all radiating away into space.

The stream froze completely, even the waterfall. In