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DICK AND HIS FRIENDS: The Hut that the Boys built

AS soon as Uncle John had finished reading, he asked the boys if any of them could guess why Tig’s father’s winter hut was partly dug out of the ground.

Dick thought because of wild beasts; and Joe said: “Because it would be warmer underground.”

Uncle John said that those were very good reasons, but he thought the chief reason was that in those early times people could not build walls. They had no tools such as masons and carpenters have nowadays. They had no iron to make pickaxes and saws and planes with; they had only stone axes that were not much use for splitting or shaping beams. And so they had to live in houses not much better than foxes’ dens or rabbit-burrows.

They went to the heath next day, and looked at the pits again. Dick and Joe were talking about the pit-dwellings. Dick said they must have been very damp places to live in; but Joe said no—rabbits and foxes and badgers live in burrows underground, and their fur is always dry. They asked Uncle John’s opinion. He said that he thought in very wet weather the huts would be damp, because the rain would soak in through the roof. But as the village was on the top of the hill, no water would lie about the ground; and, anyway, the men probably dug trenches to carry off the water down the hill.

David said he thought the huts must have been very small; he wondered how the people managed to live in them.

“Yes,” said Uncle John, “they must have been small. But you see, the people who lived in them had no furniture, and they did not mind crowding. It is very likely, too, that they did not lie down full-length when they went to sleep. There was no room for that in the winter huts. They slept sitting, with their hands clasped over their feet and their chins on their knees. We should not find this a comfortable position to sleep in; but it was the way they were used to. And besides, if a man had tried lying at full length in one of these huts, he would soon have found his toes in the fire.

“Before the people learned how to build huts they lived in caves. Why was it better to live in huts than in caves?”

None of the boys could think of the answer, so Uncle John said:—“If a man could find a cave that was roomy and dry, it would be a pleasanter place to live in than a dug-out hut with a leaky roof. But if he wanted to live in a cave, he would have to go where the cave was; though if he could build a hut, he might live wherever he pleased. In the whole of a countryside there might not be more than two or three caves fit to live in, so that relations and friends could not live near to each other. But once men had learned to build huts, whole families could live together, and, what is more, they could build a wall or a stockade round the huts, as we have read. There is safety in numbers too, and in many ways it was much more comfortable for them than living scattered over the country in caves.”

The boys wished very much to build a hut. But as it was summer-time, they thought they had better try to build a summer hut. Besides, it would have been too big a piece of work to dig down four or five feet into the ground. They were a long time before they could find a place for their hut, because, as they said, they must pretend that it was not one hut that they were going to build, but a whole village of huts. They talked over with Uncle John the things that the people had in mind when choosing a site for a village. They decided that, no doubt, it must be on high ground, with a clear view of the country round about on every side, so that the dwellers in the village could see if their enemies were coming to attack them. Then they would be better able to defend themselves if they stood above their enemies, than if their enemies stood above them.

There was another reason for having the village up on the hill rather than down in the valley, and it was this. The valleys were thick with forests, in which were bears and wolves, so they were dangerous for men and cattle. But on the open hill-sides the cattle could be driven out to feed every day in safety; and if wolves came out of the forest, the men could see them in the open and keep them in check.

Joe said they must have water for the village, so they must be sure of being close to a stream or a spring.

Uncle John said that water was very necessary, of course; but that if you went to live on the top of a hill for safety you could not expect to have water in abundance, for there are no streams about the tops of hills, and not often springs. However, he said, the people managed to overcome this difficulty, as the book would tell.

David wanted to know about firewood; wouldn’t they need to be near the forest for that?

They certainly would want firewood, Uncle John said, and they must always depend on having to make many journeys to the forest to get wood. But the ground must be cleared and kept open round about the village, so that there might be pasture for the cattle and ground for growing corn and other crops.

At last the boys found a very good place. It was high up, beyond a grove of oak trees, and there was a little spring close by: they called the grove of oak trees the forest. They had not very good tools to work with. David had a big clasp-knife with a spring at the back, to prevent it shutting up on his hand, and Joe had a little hatchet that was not very sharp. But Dick wrote to his mother in London, and his father sent him a little axe like an Indian’s tomahawk.

It took them three days to build the hut. Although the trees were Uncle John’s, he could not let them cut down branches. But he let the woodman bring them some cut boughs from the wood-yard.

This was how they built the hut. They chose a young tree with a straight trunk. Around this they fixed the longest and straightest of their boughs upright in the ground. Then they cut smaller pieces of willow and birch and hazel, and laced them in and out of the uprights, until they had got a wattled wall all round, except between two of the uprights, where they left a space for the door-way. The roof they made by tying sticks across from the uprights to the centre tree, and lacing these with twigs and brushwood. Then they plastered the outside with clay and earth. They made a door, with two light poles for the sides and two shorter ones for the ends, tied cross-wise at the corners, and the whole interlaced, like the walls, with hazel shoots and willows.

When the hut was finished, they brought Uncle John to see it. The boys could all get inside quite comfortably by squeezing a little; but there was not room for Uncle John. So, as it was a very hot afternoon, they all sat outside under an oak tree, and read the next chapter from the brown book.