With buckets and spiles ready when the momentous day came, the large, iron caldron kettle was loaded on a stoneboat together with the sap cask and log chain, the axe and various other utensils, and as many children as could find standing room; and then the oxen were hitched on and the procession started across the rough pasture to the woods where it eventually arrived after numerous stops for reloading almost everything but the kettle. When we came to the boiling-place we lifted the kettle into place and flanked it with two great logs, against which the fire was to be kindled. Meanwhile the oxen and stoneboat had returned to the house for a load of buckets; and the oxen blinking with bowed heads or with noses lifted aloft to keep the underbrush from striking their faces "geed and hawed" up hill and down dale through the woods, stopping here and there while the man with the auger bored holes in certain trees near other holes which had bled sweet juices in years gone by. When the auger was withdrawn the sap followed it and enthusiastic young tongues met it half way though they received more chips than sweetness therefrom. Then the spiles were driven in tightly with a wooden mallet. [Illustration: _Fig. 291. Sugar making in New York._] The next day after "tapping," those of us large enough to wear the neck-yoke donned this badge of servitude and with its help brought pails of sap to the kettle, and the "boiling" began. As the evening shades gathered, how delicious was the odor of the sap steam permeating the woods farther than the shafts of fire-light pierced the gloom! How weird and delightful was this night experience in the woods! and how cheerfully we swallowed the smoke which the contrary wind seemed ever to turn toward us! We poked the fire to send the sparks upward and now and then we added more sap from the barrel and removed the scum from the boiling liquid with a skimmer which was thrust into the cleft end of a stick to provide it with a sufficiently long handle. As the evening wore on we drew closer to each other as we told the stories of the Indians and the bears and panthers that had roamed these woods when our father was a little boy; and there came to each of us a disquieting suspicion that perhaps they were not all gone yet, for everything seemed possible in those night-shrouded woods; and our hearts suddenly jumped into our throats when nearby there sounded the tremulous, blood-curdling cry of the screech owl. It was the most fun to gather the sap in the warmer mornings, when on the mounds the red squaw-berries were glistening through a frosty veil; then we looked critically at the tracks in the snow to see what visitors had come sniffing around our buckets. We felt nothing but scorn for him who could not translate correctly those hieroglyphics on the film of soft snow that made white again the soiled drifts. Rabbit, skunk, squirrel, mouse, muskrat, fox: we knew them all by their tracks.