Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons (Complete Series)

Mary’s woodman lifted Titty high in air and set her on the end of the log where it stuck out far beyond the wheels.

“Are you right?” he asked.

“Yes, thank you,” said Titty.

“Hold tight while we get going.”

The other woodman was taking their nosebags off the horses.

“You’ll set her down at Swainson’s,” said the old charcoal-burner. “And tell Mary I’ll have the lad right by morning.”

“Thank you very much indeed,” said Titty.

“Good-night, Billy,” said the two woodmen.

“Good-night, Jack. Good-night, Bob.”

“Coom up, lass!”

For a moment Titty thought that Jack was speaking to her, but the horse between the shafts threw its weight forward with a jerk, and the two leading horses pulled on the traces, and the huge log, with the able-seaman sitting high on the after end of it, as if on the poop of an old galleon, moved out of the wood and off along the road.

Table of Contents

Roger had been very sure that he would like to stop with the old charcoal-burner and spend the night in the wigwam. It was the sort of thing that anybody might plan for himself, like crossing a roaring torrent on a bridge made of a single tree-trunk, meeting a bear half-way and somehow waggling the trunk so that the bear fell in and the hero did not. It was the sort of thing that anybody might safely plan for himself because it was not likely to happen. Never for a minute had he believed that he would be allowed to stay and at the very moment when he was saying hopefully that Susan would not mind, he was expecting that Titty, who, as able-seaman, was in command, would say that he must not. And then what with the woodmen being in a hurry to be off, and Young Billy arranging that they should give Titty a lift down the valley and along the lake road to Swainson’s farm, and Titty, instead of forbidding it, being really glad to have Roger in a safe place, everything had been settled so fast that Young Billy had gone down to the road to see Titty start on her way with the woodmen before Roger realised that he was alone and already in the middle of a new adventure from which he could not possibly draw back.

Lying by the fire he looked out over the green tops of the trees below him to see Kanchenjunga heaving up into the sky on the other side of the valley. Where everything else was strange that, at least, he knew. He had been on the top of it only that morning. He tried to see the little gorge where they had made their half-way camp. It was hidden by a spur of the great hill. It had seemed natural enough to sleep in such a place, in the open air, without even a tent, but with Susan and John and Titty sleeping beside him. It was not at all the same thing as sleeping in a charcoal-burner’s hut, with an old man nearly as old as Kanchenjunga, and a snake hissing in a cigar-box somewhere under the blankets. Roger knew suddenly that it would be only too easy to begin thinking of the old charcoal-burner as of a sort of ogre who might take a fancy for eating ship’s boys. Of course, Young Billy was nothing of the sort. But Roger knew that it would be easy to begin thinking of him in that way. He must not do that. There could be no turning back now. For one thing he could not very well run for his life with his ankle made up into a huge bundle with bracken and a damp red handkerchief that did not belong to him. For another thing, he did not know where to run. And, for a third thing, he knew very well that the Billies were the friendliest of savages.

All the same it would not do to think too much, just in case he began to think of the old man in the wrong way, when it would be difficult to stop. He looked at the hut. It looked newly built, not like the old hut they had seen last year when they had left Swallow and climbed through the woods to see the charcoal-burners and their snake. But he could not be sure. The moss that had been pushed between the logs to keep out the rain was still green, but perhaps it was an old hut with new moss on it. “It’s a very good wigwam, anyway,” said Roger to himself, almost as if it was his own.

The old charcoal-burner came climbing up the wood again.

“The lass’ll be all right,” he said, “and how’s the lad?”

“Very well, thank you,” said Roger.

“Bracken’s rare stuff for taking the hurt out of a sprain.”

“Is this a new wigwam?” asked Roger. “Have you just built it?”

“New what?”

“Wigwam. Log hut. No. It isn’t a log hut, because all the logs stand on end instead of lying sideways. And it’s round instead of square. I don’t see what else you can call it.”

“It’s been called a hut for long enough,” said the old man. “Not but what your word may be right. And this hut’s old and new. They’ve always burned charcoal here when there’s been any burning done in Heald Wood. Happen some of those logs have seen a good few seasons. But huts don’t last so long. They generally fall in a bit between one burning and another. It’ll be a good few years like before we come back to them. And a winter storm’ll easy shift them if they’re not cared for. And then when we come to build them up there’ll be new logs put in with the old and new moss to make all tight, and the time all’s done you’d be hard put to it to say whether hut’s old or new. Fire-spot’s old enough. You can say that without lying.”

Roger began to feel that to the old charcoal-burner it did not seem at all odd to be sleeping in a wigwam in the woods on the side of the fells. For him, in summer that was the natural place to sleep. And why not? Roger stopped worrying about it, and after that everything went easily.

The old man picked up his axe and went on chopping sticks to the right length for the round stack that he was building, putting sticks of the right length in one pile and letting the little odd bits lie to be picked up afterwards and used in his own fire. Roger lay watching him, sniffing the pleasant smell from the embers still smouldering away under the kettle. He felt very sleepy, but he was not going to say anything about that unless the old man said something about it first.

And as the old charcoal-burner chopped away at his sticks, he kept stopping from time to time and talking. He talked of what his old dad might be seeing at Bigland besides the hound trail. There would likely be some wrestling, and when Roger asked what that was, Young Billy said it was high time he was taken to see some. And then he told of how long ago he was taken, when no bigger than Roger, to see his old dad wrestle for a belt with a bit of a silver buckle on it, and then of how the time came when he was wrestling in that place himself. And with that his back straightened and he swung his old arms and rubbed his old hands and clapped them together and rambled away with talk that Roger could not understand at all, about half-Nelsons and cross-buttocks and fair throws and lost handgrips. But Roger did not say that he did not understand. He just listened and the words went over his head like great poetry, only leaving him the feeling that the old man who was talking was very much stirred up by something or other that had happened a very long time ago.

And then, suddenly, the old man stooped again. “Fifty years ago, that was,” he sighed, “but I could show some of them a trick or two yet.”

And now the sun began to go down behind Kanchenjunga, and the old man picked up some of the small bits that had fallen from his chopping and threw them on the fire. And he wiped his axe on the palm of his hand and wiped his hand on the seat of his trousers, and asked Roger what he thought about a duck egg to his supper.