I looked down at it with a great deal of satisfaction. Then I got to my feet, dusted off the seat of my pants, picked up my axe and started back to where the cabin was going up. I wavedat Jimmy as I passed.

Of the fifteen of us, seven were girls. Five had cut down their trees in the morning, the only ones who hadn’t being me and Sonja. So I found her making a door for the cabin with Riggy. The saw pit was now turning out slabs from medium-sized logs — the slabs being really half-logs, flat on one side, round on the other. The slabs were to be used for shutters, doors, roof and cabin floor. In the case of the door, the poles cut in the morning were being nailed to the flat sides of slabs about six feet long. I gave Sonja my axe and sent her along to find Mr. Pizarro, looked at the saw pit in operation for a minute, and then turned to my afternoon job. In the pit, one person gets down in it, one person stands on the ground above, and the log is sawed between them. The only disadvantage is that the person on the bottom gets sawdust in his hair, but if you switch off this evens out.

My afternoon job was taking the mud and moss brought by the mud-and-moss detail (Juanita) and chnking the cracks between the logs. By the time I got back, the two boys on the walls were working on their third tier of logs. They had skids in place and were now looping ropes around the logs and pulling them up the skids and into place. I happily went along, pushin my mud and moss in place, thinking of ethics, and whi ing the afternoon away as the walls rose.

After Riggy finished the door and shutters, Mr. Pizarro showed up and they stopped putting up walls for awhile. By that time the walls were high enough that I felt surrounded, tall enough that I had to stand on a cut block to do my chinking. Where I had yet to chink the light slanted through to cut across the shadowed floor.

Mr. Pizarro climbed over the logs then, needing a little boost, and borrowed my block to stand on. Then he and Riggy cut through the solid logs to make the windows. They made two cuts for each window and removed the sections of log. It was then easier to get in and out, which was good because the logs were becoming harder to raise into place. Riggy came inside, and instead of two boys raising logs, there were now three boys and Mr. Pizarro, plus me when Juanita didn’t have enough mud and moss for me and they needed a hand.

When there were two more rows of logs in place, they cut the door in the same way as the window and suddenly the cabin wasn’t a tight littlз box anymore. Everybody was coming in from the woods then, and I went out of the cabin through the hole that was a doorway. Juanita and I made one last trip for mud together while they were raising the last log into place over the door. When we came back with the mud, everybody pitched in and we finished the outside chinking. It was great fun and at the end we just took mud and threw it at each other. I caught Jimmy a great gob across the back and he returned the favor. All fifteen of us were running around throwing mud while Mr. Pizarro stayed out of range and watched us.

When we were all out of mud, he said, “What are you going to do? You only have one spare change of clothes.”

Jimmy looked at the river, gave an onward ho point of the finger, and said, “There we are.”

He sat down, pulled off his shoes, and then made a dash, fully-clothed, for the river, plopped through the shallows and made a plunge into the water. I had my shoes kicked off in an instant, and my notebook out of my shirt, and followed right after. The water was clear and cold, not too swift, and just fine for swimming. It was much better than my one previous planetary swimming experience. We all splashed and made grampus noises in the late afternoon sun, flipped water at each other, and had a real old-fashioned time. Very quickly we were joined by Mr. Marechal’s group, who were not mud-covered but most of whom had gotten reasonably dirty or sawdust covered in the course of the day and knew a good thing when they saw it. We stayed in until we were called out, and then we came out soggy.

Our leaders were willing to make one concession to the good usages of civilization, and we took our clothes to the scoutship to be quickly dried. The rest of our weekend — sleeping arrangements, hand-done work, handprepared food — was simple enough to please Thoreau, who I am convinced was a nice fellow who confused rustic vacations with life. We did get this one concession, though.

After dinner, freshly dressed, full of food and a warm glow, and thoroughly tired, I wandered over to look at the other cabin along with Jimmy. It was about as far toward completion as ours — that is, the walls were in place and chinked, and the door and window holes were cut — but it looked odd. One of the long walls was higher than the other, and higher than any of our walls. It gave the cabin an odd unfinished look, a hunchbacked look.

We had been issued bubble tents, which can be folded to pocket size and are proof against almost anything, but we had been told not to bring them. Instead we unrolled our beds near the fire and took our chances in the open. I was one of those who drew guard duty, but I was lucky enough to get second hour. I stayed awake, relieved Stu Herskovitz, who hadn’t seen anything, and walked for an hour around the camp. I didn’t see anything except people ready to go to sleep. I yawned my way through the hour, then got Vishwa Mathur up and went to sleep myself.

There were clouds over the sky in the morning and it was gray through breakfast and cold, but then the clouds began to break into white pieces and move apart and then the sky was clear again and it was bright.

We raised the gable ends of the roof into place and fit the doors and shutters. Then all of us working, we raised the three roof logs into place, the ridgepole on top, the other two below on either side, forming a slope. As we were finishing, somebody looked over at the Marechal cabin and saw what they were doing. They were slanting a roof from the tall wall across the short one. “That’s not fair,” I yelled. “You’re building a shed, not a cabin.”

“Ho, ho — too bad,” Venie called back. We booed.

We laid the poles that Riggy and Sonja had collected the day before over fitted slabs to make the roof. I was inside the cabin helping to lay the floor. The slabs of wood were laid rounded side down, side by side, to make a reasonably flat floor, what is called a puncheon floor. If we had had the time, we would have smoothed the flat sides, but as it was, we couldn’t. The result was a floor that I wouldn’t recommend walking on in bare feet unless you have a genuine affection for splinters, but it was a good solid floor. Jimmy was on the roof laying slabs, stuffing moss, and placing poles. A little of the moss filtered through as they worked, but the roof closed in quickly over our heads and when they were done it looked as solid as our floor.

We were clearly beaten by Mr. Marechal’s group, which finished almost an hour before we did and then came over and made comments, but we were done before noon, too. I looked over the other building when we were done along with some curious friends and I’ll have to honestly say that I preferred our cabin to their shed — better workmanship.

In the afternoon we relaxed with an easy hike and then a swim, this one in suits, not in our clothes. After that, I got out my notebook again and made some more ethics notes — these about an easy one, the philosophy of power.

In effect, the philosophy of power says that you should do anything you can get away with. If you don’t get away with it, you were wrong.

You really can’t argue with this, you know. It is a self-contained system, logically self-consistent. It makes no appeal to outside authority and it doesn’t stumble over its own definitions.