Five days later, the Mayflower herself arrived from Provincetown, and the people began the erection of the first common house for themselves and their goods—a log hut about twenty feet square, with a thatched roof. Soon, however, they abandoned building in common, and “agreed that every man should build his own house, thinking that by that course men would make more haste,” so promptly did human nature and winter's cold assert themselves over theory. The season, though stormy, happily proved unusually mild. Fortunately, also, the great sickness which had recently decimated the Indians, had killed off almost the entire native population about Plymouth and Massachusetts bays, and completely broken the spirit of the remainder, though this was as yet unknown to the settlers, who lived in constant fear of attack.[230] They occupied but a clearing on the edge of the vast and unknown wilderness. Mysterious and unexplored, it stretched interminably before them, while the midwinter North Atlantic tossed as endlessly behind them. In the woods, Indian yells had been heard, and an occasional savage had been seen skulking behind cover. John Goodman, going for a walk one evening with his dog, suddenly found the small beast taking refuge between his legs, chased by two wolves. He threw a stick at them, whereupon “they sat both on their tails grinning at him a good while.” Footnote 230: The nature of the disease is unknown. It was evidently neither yellow fever nor smallpox, as some have thought, and white men were not affected, even when they slept in the same huts with the Indians. _Cf._ C. F. Adams, _Three Episodes in Massachusetts History_ (Boston, 1893), vol. I, pp. 1-4. Soon, owing to exposure, many of the settlers fell ill; and so quickly did the disease spread, and so fatal were its effects, that by the end of March forty-four, or nearly one half of the little company, were dead. Sometimes two or three died in a day, and but six or seven were well enough to nurse the living and bury the corpses. Their kindness and courage under these trials were beyond all praise. Before the arrival of the first supply ship, in the following autumn, six more had died, including the governor, Carver, so that only one half the company remained. But the little colony was not to be crushed. Bradford was elected in Carver's place, and in March, in spite of the terrors which encompassed them, in spite of the graves of the dead, which far outnumbered the homes of the living, Winslow could yet note that “the birds sang in the woods most pleasantly.”