![]() ![]() They saw Sailor feel for it, and recover. One of the men whipped off his sack apron and spread it down. Sailor’s left hind hoof had slipped on a heather-tuft. ‘Hing on! Hing on, lads, or she’ll master ye! Ah!’ ‘You’re getting her!’ Simon Cheyneys slapped his knee. The log shifted a nail’s breadth in the clinging dirt, with the noise of a giant’s kiss. The horses took the strain, beginning with Sailor next the log, like a tug-of-war team, and dropped almost to their knees. ‘Oh, look! Look ye! That’s a knowing one,’ said the man.Ĭattiwow had fastened his team to the thin end of the log, and was moving them about with his whip till they stood at right angles to it, heading downhill. ‘Shipbuilder of Rye Port burgess of the said town, and the only-’ ‘This is Simon Cheyneys,’ Puck began, and cleared his throat. ‘Me and Mus’ Robin are pretty middlin’ well acquainted,’ the man answered with a smile that made them forget all about walruses. “What Cattiwow can’t get out of the woods must have roots growing to her.”’ Dan had heard old Hobden say this a few days before.Īt that minute Puck pranced up, picking his way through the pools of black water in the ling. ‘Don’t he justabout know?’ he said shyly, and shifted from one foot to the other. ![]() ![]() In his size and oily hairiness he might have been Bunny Lewknor’s brother, except that his brown eyes were as soft as a spaniel’s, and his rounded black beard, beginning close up under them, reminded Una of the walrus in ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’ He was dressed in flour sacks like the others, and he leaned on his broad-axe, but the children, who knew all the wood-gangs, knew he was a stranger. ‘I believe Sailor knows,’ Dan whispered to Una. They cocked their ears forward, looked, and shook themselves. ‘She’s sticked fast,’ said ‘Bunny’ Lewknor, who managed the other team.Ĭattiwow unfastened the five wise horses from the tug. He took his broad-axe and went up the log tapping it. ‘What did you want to bury her for this way?’ said Cattiwow. The ground about was poached and stoached with sliding hoofmarks, and a wave of dirt was driven up in front of the butt. He navigated the tug among pools of heather-water that splashed in their faces, and through clumps of young birches that slashed at their legs, and when they hit an old toadstooled stump, they never knew whether it would give way in showers of rotten wood, or jar them back again.Īt the top of Rabbit Shaw half-a-dozen men and a team of horses stood round a forty-foot oak log in a muddy hollow. His cap was sackcloth too, with a flap behind, to keep twigs and bark out of his neck. Cattiwow strode ahead in his sackcloth woodman’s petticoat, belted at the waist with a leather strap and when he turned and grinned, his red lips showed under his sackcloth-coloured beard. The Wood road beyond the brook climbs at once into the woods, and you see all the horses’ backs rising, one above another, like moving stairs. Cattiwow never let them ride the big beam that makes the body of the timber-tug, but they hung on behind while their teeth thuttered. ‘There’s a middlin’ big log stacked in the dirt at Rabbit Shaw, and’-he flicked his whip back along the line-‘so they’ve sent for us all.’ĭan and Una threw themselves off the wood-lump almost under black Sailor’s nose. ‘They’ve just sent for me,’ Cattiwow answered. ![]() ‘What are you doing? Why weren’t we told?’ ‘ Hi!’ Una shouted from the top of the wood-lump, where they had been watching the lane. His real name was Brabon, but the first time the children met him, years and years ago, he told them he was ‘carting wood,’ and it sounded so exactly like ‘cattiwow’ that they never called him anything else. He stopped by the wood-lump at the back gate to take off the brakes. CATTIWOW came down the steep lane with his five-horse timber-tug. ![]()
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