He had commenced while the hawthorn was just putting forth its first
spray, when the thickets and the trees were yet bare. Now the May bloom
scented the air, the forest was green, and his work approached
completion. There remained, indeed, but some final shaping and rounding
off, and the construction, or rather cutting out, of a secret locker in
the stern. This locker was nothing more than a square aperture chiselled
out like a mortice, entering not from above but parallel with the
bottom, and was to be closed with a tight-fitting piece of wood driven
in by force of mallet.

A little paint would then conceal the slight chinks, and the boat might
be examined in every possible way without any trace of this hiding-place
being observed. The canoe was some eleven feet long, and nearly three
feet in the beam; it tapered at either end, so that it might be
propelled backwards or forwards without turning, and stem and stern
(interchangeable definitions in this case) each rose a few inches higher
than the general gunwale. The sides were about two inches thick, the
bottom three, so that although dug out from light wood the canoe was
rather heavy.

At first Felix constructed a light shed of fir poles roofed with
spruce-fir branches over the log, so that he might work sheltered from
the bitter winds of the early spring. As the warmth increased he had
taken the shed down, and now as the sun rose higher was glad of the
shade of an adjacent beech.