By Justin Isherwood

Red squirrels abound in the woods where I trek on winter afternoons with my skid tractor and logging cable. I have noticed when the temperature is in the sub-20-degree range they disappear. To re-emerge on a balmy 23-degree day.

As a kid I was curious, if not slightly disgruntled why our father attended household wood-making during the coldest winter weather. A 12-degree sort of winter day that even defies the Geneva Convention for prisoners of war, if not equally protective of farmkids. The insult of doing heave-ho work in a climate the likes of Pluto because we were not accorded the benefits of prisoners of war.

The first act of a good winter woodsman is the reverse-style show as every woodsman knows. When temperatures are of the plus 25-degree range, logging and wood cutting are best left to loincloth and kilt because anything else is over-dressed.

At about 12 degrees you can leave your shirt on. When we were kids it was disturbingly strange that our father on preparing to go to the woods put a standard summer seed corn cap in his pocket.

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