“Bloody-Thundercloud-in-the-Afternoon.”

“No, try again.  Make it something you can draw, so you can make your totem, and make it short.”

“What’s the smartest animal there is?”

“I—­I—­suppose the Wolverine.”

“What!  Smarter’n a Fox?”

“The books say so.”

“Kin he lick a Beaver?”

“Well, I should say so.”

“Well, that’s me.”

“No, you don’t.  I’m not going around with a fellow that licks me.  It don’t fit you as well as ‘Woodpecker,’ anyhow.  I always get you when I want a nice tree spoiled or pecked into holes,” retorted Yan, magnanimously ignoring the personal reason for the name.

“Tain t as bad as beavering,” answered Sam

“Beavering” was a word with a history.  Axes and timber were the biggest things in the lives of the Sangerites.  Skill with the axe was the highest accomplishment.  The old settlers used to make everything in the house out of wood, and with the axe for the only tool.  It was even said that some of them used to “edge her up a bit” and shave with her on Sundays.  When a father was setting his son up in life he gave him simply a good axe.  The axe was the grand essential of life and work, and was supposed to be a whole outfit.  Skill with the axe was general.  Every man and boy was more or less expert, and did not know how expert he was till a real “greeny” came among them.  There is a right way to cut for each kind of grain, and a certain proper way of felling a tree to throw it in any given direction with the minimum of labour.  All these things are second nature to the Sangerite.  A Beaver is credited with a haphazard way of gnawing round and round a tree till somehow it tumbles, and when a chopper deviates in the least from the correct form, the exact right cut in the exact right place, he is said to be “beavering”; therefore, while “working like a Beaver” is high praise, “beavering” a tree is a term of unmeasured reproach, and Sam’s final gibe had point and force that none but a Sangerite could possibly have appreciated.

XI

Yan and the Witch

  The Sanger Witch hated the Shanty-man’s axe
  And wildfire, too, they tell,
  But the hate that she had for the Sporting man
  Was wuss nor her hate of Hell!

  —­Cracked Jimmie’s Ballad of Sanger.

Yan took his earliest opportunity to revisit the Sanger Witch.

“Better leave me out,” advised Sam, when he heard of it.  “She’d never look at you if I went.  You look too blame healthy.”

So Yan went alone, and he was glad of it.  Fond as he was of Sam, his voluble tongue and ready wit left Yan more or less in the shade, made him look sober and dull, and what was worse, continually turned the conversation just as it was approaching some subject that was of deepest interest to him.

As he was leaving, Sam called out, “Say, Yan, if you want to stay there to dinner it’ll be all right—­we’ll know why you hain’t turned up.”  Then he stuck his tongue in his cheek, closed one eye and went to the barn with his usual expression of inscrutable melancholy.