With a little search, whooping
to each other lest they stray away, they found a big dry stub that some
gale had snapped off a few feet above the snow. While Mooka scurried
about, collecting birch bark and armfuls of dry branches, Noel took off
his snow-shoes and began with one of them to shovel away the snow in a
semicircle around the base of the stub. In a short half-hour he had a
deep hole there, with the snow banked up around it to the height of his
head. Next with his knife he cut a lot of light poles and scrub spruces
and, sticking the butts in his snowbank, laid the tops, like the sticks
of a wigwam, firmly against the big stub. A few armfuls of spruce boughs
shingled over this roof, and a few minutes' work shoveling snow thickly
upon them to hold them in place and to make a warm covering; then a
doorway, or rather a narrow tunnel, just beyond the stub on the straight
side of the semicircle, and their _commoosie_ was all ready. Let the
storm roar and the snow sift down! The thicker it fell the warmer would
be their shelter. They laughed and shouted now as they scurried out and
in, bringing boughs for a bed and the fire-wood which Mooka had
gathered.
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