Ghost Hawk by Susan Cooper

Author:Susan Cooper
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Published: 2013-08-27T07:00:00+00:00

FIVE

Master Medlycott’s workshop was a noisy, bustling place, and he employed three general workmen as well as Ezra, Thomas, and John. On John’s first morning, two of the workmen had unloaded the enormous tree-trunk logs from Goodman Bates’s cart and rolled them to the yard behind the workshop. Other logs from local trees lay here too, waiting to be sawed into chunks and then split lengthwise with axes, first into quarters and then eighths, then thinner still. Lengths of wood like this sat weathering in the yard in tall neat stacks—chestnut, red oak, and pine. They would sit there for months or years, until Master Medlycott felt they were ready to become the staves out of which all barrels were made.

I watched all this with fascination. In the life I had lived, our pots and containers were made from bark and skins and clay; we wove baskets from reeds and wood, but we had no need for these massive containers, nor for the great wheels of the carts that had to carry them, nor the great beasts that pulled the carts. The skills of the cooper belonged to a different life, in which the bark of a tree was often thrown away, and all its wood chopped into these prized flat pieces called staves.

John would learn someday to make staves, but he had a long way to go. It took him weeks even to learn the names of Master Medlycott’s tools, all of which had come over with him from England. To begin, John was put at the grinding wheel, to learn how to sharpen the blades of planes and spokeshaves and axes. There he sat, in a little cloud of sparks, while he watched the others making casks: bending staves into shape while heating them over a small fire, damping them with water, and whacking iron hoops down over them to hold them together.

They were always busy; there was a great demand for barrels and casks, to carry almost everything the people ate or drank. Many more English families were coming in ships, spreading through this open forest land where my people had hunted and grown crops for so long. Instead of hunting and trapping, they raised animals that ate up everything green, and they were cutting down all the trees. Their buildings were made with deep stone-lined cellars and thick sturdy walls, and once a settlement was built, it did not move. It just grew bigger.

Because of his staves, Master Medlycott had respect for the trees. He would gaze up in admiration at a tall straight white oak and feel that the casks he made from its wood should be worthy of the splendid tree. But even he treated the tree not as a living creature but as a thing. This was how they thought of our mother the earth, these white men: as a place full of things, put here by their God for them to use.

“Is it not wonderful,” Master Medlycott said at dinner one summer

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.