The Making of a Cedar Dugout Canoe

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FINAL SHAPING

You don't want to fill the depth guides just yet, however, because you'll need them to help you gauge your final finishing work. Using the D-adz and curved knife-and proceeding very carefully, never taking a substantial amount of wood from any one spot at a time-shave and shape the hull to a thickness of about 1-1/2 inches on the bottom, 1 inch at the bilge, and 3/4 inch along the sides. This process requires hours of delicate carving, on both the interior and exterior, and demands a high degree of patient artistry: If you work too quickly, you'll remove more wood than you want from a given area and lose the contours and/or thickness for which you're striving.

Once you've achieved the desired shape and thickness (congratulations . . . you're nearly done!), you can proceed to fill the depth-guide holes, one at a time. First, stuff a bundle of tender spruce buds into an opening, and then drive a short, sharpened 1/4"-diameter cedar peg into one side of the cavity, and then another peg into the opposite side, so that the two whittled tips intermesh tightly. The wooden pins crush the spruce needles . . . which in turn release a sticky resin that glues the wedges together to form a permanent, watertight plug. Now, go ahead and trim off all of the wood that protrudes from the opening, so that the filled area is flush with the hull . . . and go on to stop up the remaining cavities in the same manner.

There . . . you're finished! Stand back and admire your work (and try to resist the temptation to chip off "just a little more" here and there). The adz blades produce an attractive feathered pattern that's usually left intact, at least on the inside. Possible alternatives include sanding the wood smooth and carving decorations into the cedar. Both operations, though, require a thicker-and thus heavier-hull. Norman and Earl chose to adorn their sculpture only with a narrow trim line carved just below the sheer . . . and I think you'll agree, from looking at the photos of the end product,that any further embellishment was truly unnecessary!

A VALUABLE LEARNING EXPERIENCE

Obviously, carving a traditional Indian dugout canoe from a massive chunk of unyielding wood is no small job: It requires time, patience, persistence, strength, and skill. But as in so many other seemingly formidable tasks, the key to success is more in the doing than in knowing how. You learn as you go.

And remember that everybody-even an expert woodcrafter like Tait or Carter-is likely to make mistakes and encounter unforeseen problems. The stem ends on Norman's and Earl's canoe, for example, developed serious checks . . . cracks that had to be pegged together in an effort (time will tell how successful) to keep the extensions from breaking off completely. But even if the worst should happen, Tait will probably just resculpt what remains of the bow and stern, or perhaps carve and attach new stem ends. "Don't be afraid to make mistakes," says Norman. "Most of them can be corrected . . . and all of them will teach you something."

Perhaps a story will best illustrate this point. Charles Jones, a Nootka chief who was an expert canoe-maker (and who claimed that you had to have worked on at least three canoes to master the art), liked to tell about how he learned to create dugouts. One day when Charles was nine years old, his father took him into the woods, bucked a cedar log, and told the boy to try to carve a canoe the way he had seen his elders do it. The old man then sat down to watch, saying, "The uglier it is, the better for you."

Charles's dad knew that the youngster would learn best by making his own mistakes. Come to think of it, that's a good lesson to remember when you're about to tackle any challenge!

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