Soak your straw or hay well in water and smooth it out flat and regular.
The steeper the roofs the longer the thatch will last. In this bog ken our
roof happens to be a rounded one, an arched roof; but it is sheltering a
temporary house and the thatch will last as long as the shack. While the
real pioneer uses whatever material he finds at hand, it does no harm for
him to know that to make a really good thatch one should use only straw
which is fully ripe and has been thrashed clean with an old-fashioned
flail. The straw must be clear of all seed or grain and kept straight, not
mussed up, crumpled, and broken. If any grain is left in the straw it will
attract field-mice, birds, domestic mice and rats, domestic turkeys and
chickens, and these creatures in burrowing and scratching for food will
play havoc with the roof.
Fig. 66. Fig. 67. Fig. 68. Fig. 69.
[Illustration: Details of bog ken.]
It is not necessary to have straight and even rafters, because the humps,
bumps, and hollows caused by crooked sticks are concealed by the mattress
of straw. Take a bundle of thatch in your hands, squeeze it together, and
place it so that the butt ends project about three inches beyond the floor
(_A_, Fig. 66); tie the thatch closely to the lower rafter and the one
next above it, using for the purpose twine, marlin, raffia, or
well-twisted white hickory bark. This first row should be thus tied near
both ends to prevent the wind from getting under it and lifting it up.
Next put on another row of wisps of thatch over the first and the butt
ends come even with the first, but tie this one to the third row of
rafters not shown in diagram. The butts of the third row of thatch (_B_,
Fig. 66) should be about nine inches up on the front rows; put this on as
before and proceed the same way with _C_, _D_, _E_, and _F_, Fig. 66,
until the roof is completed. The thatch should be ten or twelve inches
thick for a permanent hut but need not be so for a temporary shed.
As there is no comb to this roof the top must be protected where the
thatches from each side join, and to do this fasten a thatch over the top
and bind it on both sides but not in the middle, so that it covers the
meeting of the thatches on both sides of the shack; this top piece should
be stitched or bound on with wire if you have it, or fastened with willow
withe or even wisps of straw if you are an expert. A house, twenty by
thirty feet, made of material found on the place and thatched with straw
costs the builder only fifty cents for nails and four days' work for two
persons. A good thatched roof will last as long as a modern shingle roof,
for in olden days when shingles were good and split out of blocks, not
sawed, and were well seasoned before using, they were not expected to last
much over fifteen years; a well-made thatched roof will last fifteen or
twenty years.
Fig. 70.
[Illustration: Snow-shoe foundation for bog ken.]
But a real bog ken is one that is built over boggy or marshy places too
soft to support an ordinary structure. To overcome this difficulty
required considerable study and experiment, but at length the author hit
upon a simple plan which has proved effective. If you wish to build a duck
hunter's camp on the soft meadows, or for any other reason you desire a
camp on treacherous, boggy ground, you may build one by first making a
thick mattress of twigs and sticks as shown by Fig. 70. This mattress acts
on the principle of a snow-shoe and prevents your house from sinking by
distributing the weight equally over a wide surface. The mattress should
be carefully made of sticks having their branches trimmed off sufficiently
to allow them to lie in regular courses as in the diagram. The first
course should be laid one way and the next course at right angles to the
first, and so on, until the mattress is sufficiently thick for the
purpose.
Standing on the mattress, it will be an easy matter with your hands to
force the sharpened ends of your upright posts _A_, _B_, _C_, and _D_ down
into the yielding mud, but be careful not to push them too far because in
some of these marshes the mud is practically bottomless. It is only
necessary for the supports to sink in the mud far enough to make them
stand upright.
Fig. 71.
[Illustration: Framework of simple bog ken.]
The next step is to lay, at right angles to the top layer of brush, a
series of rods or poles between your uprights as shown in Fig. 70; then
take two more poles, place them at right angles to the last ones, and
press them down until they fit snugly on top of the other poles, and there
nail them fast to the uprights as shown in Fig. 70, after which to further
bind them you may nail a diagonal from _A_ to _D_ and _B_ to _C_, but this
may not be necessary.
When you have proceeded thus far you may erect a framework like that shown
in Fig. 71, and build a platform by flooring the crosspieces or horizontal
bars with halves of small logs, Fig. 71.
It is now a simple matter to erect a shack which may be roofed with bark
as in Fig. 72 or thatched as in Fig. 74. Fig. 72 shows the unfinished
shack in order that its construction may be easily seen; this one is being
roofed with birch bark. A fireplace may be made by enclosing a bed of mud
(Fig. 73) between or inside of the square formed by four logs. On this
clay or mud you can build your camp-fire or cooking fire or mosquito
smudge with little or no danger of setting fire to your house.
The mosquito smudge will not be found necessary if there is any breeze
blowing at all, because these insects cling to the salt hay or bog-grass
and do not rise above it except in close, muggy weather where no breeze
disturbs them. I have slept a few feet over bog meadows without being
disturbed by mosquitoes when every blade of grass on the meadows was black
with these insects, but there was a breeze blowing which kept the
mosquitoes at home.
Fig. 72. Fig. 73. Fig. 74.
[Illustration: Adaptation of a bark shack to the bog ken foundation.]