Immediately after fitting out Jim Halliday with his water wheel we set to work on our log cabin. As a model we had a photograph of a log hut which Uncle Ed had sent us. As the cabin was designed particularly for use in winter time, we decided that it should be located where it would be sheltered from the northern winds and would be exposed to the sun. The ideal spot seemed to be on the southern shore of Kite Island, which was backed by a thick grove of trees but gave an unobstructed view in front for a distance of about four miles down-stream.
First we staked out the plan of the house. It was to be 12 feet long by 10 feet wide, so we leveled off a space of this area, and at the corners, where the greatest weight of the building would come, large rocks were embedded in the ground.
The logs for the house were cut from a tract of wooded land about five miles up the river, belonging to Mr. Schreiner. To be sure we could have cut the timber from our own island, but when Reddy had said something to his father about our building a log cabin, Mr. Schreiner had warned us not to cut down any of the trees without the owner's permission. All we could learn about the owner was that his name was Smith, and that he lived somewhere in New York city. It seemed unlikely that he would ever have anything to say about our cutting down a few trees, but rather than run any risk Mr. Schreiner advised us to make use of his woods for any timber we might need. Accordingly we started out early one morning on a logging expedition. We had no apparatus for handling any logs more than 6 or 8 inches in diameter, and Bill reckoned it out that we would have to have about fifty logs of this size for the sides of the building alone. This did not mean that fifty trees had to be chopped down, because we could usually cut two logs from a single tree. As the logs would have to overlap about a foot at each corner, we had to cut the longer ones to a length of 14 feet and the others to a length of 12 feet. Aside from these we had to have several 16-foot logs for the roof. Only the straightest logs were chosen, and while Bill and Reddy wielded the axes the rest of us hacked off the small branches with hatchets and hauled the sticks down the river. Here we tied them together to make a raft.