TRAPPER'S CABIN

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The foundation trunks were laid down—parallel, 15 feet apart, and half buried in the ground—to directly support the side walls and to serve as underpinnings for the whole cabin.

Next we cut two notches, 15 feet apart, into each of the foundation timbers to receive the bottom logs for the front and back walls. Since the trunks tapered, each of the notches had to be individually cut to half the thickness of the end of the log it was to hold.

At that point we had a square on the ground: the two foundation logs, half buried, and the bases of the front and back walls dropped into their notches and resting on the earth. We were ready to lay a support for the floor: This consisted of four logs, parallel to the front of the cabin and set into notches cut into the foundation trunks at three-foot intervals.

Construction of our trapper's cabin from that stage on was based on a crafty use of the tapered tree trunks we had to work with. The idea was to alternate the large and small ends of the logs as we built the building's front and back . . . so that each wall would end up level. In the sides, however, all the timbers were set butt forward to make the front wall higher than the back so the lodge's roof would slant. (You can see what I mean by making two stacks of wooden matches, one lot piled with their heads and ends alternated and the other laid up head on head.)

We started this stacking process by notching the front and back logs to receive the first timbers of the side walls (both set, remember, with their butts faced forward). Once in place, the trunks rested on the foundation timbers . . . which was fine except that we could still see daylight where the layers met. So we closed the gaps by running our chain saw horizontally between the mismatched logs several times to knock off the irregularities until no cracks remained. (After that, we often had to go back and deepen the notches on the same logs since a trunk thus smoothed will wind up sitting lower than it had before.) Then we laid a strip of fiberglass on the foundation timber, dropped the slicked-down side-wall log into its final resting place, and anchored it with four seven-inch spikes countersunk into drilled holes.

Following construction continued in the same way: The two side-wall logs were notched and the second timbers for the front and back of the cabin were dropped into place, flattened with the chain saw, chinked with fiberglass, and fastened down with four spikes. And so forth.

Fourteen logs on a side made the structure as tall as we wanted it. At that point the front wall was about ten--and the back approximately six-feet high, with the sides sloping down—front to back—between the two. We stopped at that point, cut out openings for the windows and door, and framed them (provisionally) with a few pieces of timber.

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