me one did not keep an eye out. Or they would climb up the leg of the
table and peek over the edge with their beady eyes, wondering how far
they dared approach without danger to their agile persons. But the
funniest thing was when two chipmunks would quarrel,--as generally
happened when one unearthed a nut that another had buried. Nickering in
the angriest way imaginable, the two tiny things would come at each other
with ears laid back, in what appeared for all the world like a
head-butting contest. Around and around they would whirl in a spiral
nebula, till one got a head start on a race for home and mother.

Each morning they awoke to the hack-hack-hack of the sawyers and the
steady grating of the log saw, the twitter of the donkey engine and the
volcanic remarks with which the bull-puncher was urging his team forward.
The yellow sunshine sifted aslant through the giant trees, birds sang,
and chipmunks chattered. A water-packer passed them one day with his mule
plodding along under 40 gallons disposed in canvas bags on a wooden
frame, and beyond, across the singing creek, they could see the swampers
burning the brush they had cut from the pathway of the tree next to fall.

Breakfast dispatched, the boys hurried over to watch the two-bitted axe
biting its huge kerf in the side of a ten-foot trunk. When it had eaten a
third of the way through the giant trunk, the sawyers began on the
opposite side, nearly as high as the top of the kerf, resting the long
instrument on pegs driven into two holes that had been bored for the
purpose. Iron wedges were driven after the saw. The instant the tree
began to lean, the head chopper had driven a stake about 150 feet from
the base on the side of the kerf, declaring that the falling tree would
drive that stake into the ground, so accurately could they gauge the
direction of its fall. The swampers had cleared the way between. Then
came the cracking of neighboring branches, as the mammoth trunk swayed
and toppled to the forest floor. There was a crash that shook the ground,
which rebounded with a shower of chips and bark dust, and the stump gaped
raw and red where for perhaps 2,000 years it had upborne the plumed
Sequoia Gigantea.

The boys, far above whose heads the fallen trunk towered, scrambled up
the rough bark and raced each other up and down the novel roadway that it
made. Then, the excitement over, they suddenly realized that they were
hungry and ran another race back to camp.