24. team standing the sticks on end in a tall conical pile

ready for sawing and splitting into junks for the stove.
He built his own dory and earned enough to buy a Yamaha 125 outboard motor to travel long distances up Wild River on his hunting and fishing trips. Often away from the cabin for weeks on end, Luke gradually had become as one with the land. He had been an outcast child who had found his home in the woods. He knew the trees and the lie-of-the-land as if they were his friends. It was his backyard. He had found that elusive peace and goodness inside himself that others spent a lifetime searching for without success. He woke at dawn and slept at dusk. He fed wild bears from his hand although he was wise enough to stay away from the temperamental grizzlies that could decapitate him with one swing of their mighty paws. He was strong, fit and hardened to the life of a true backwoodsman. His tracking skills become legendary amongst the Beothuck descendants, the native Indians of southern Labrador. Innu, Innuit and the more local Metis people had heard tell of a legendary tracker who lived outside Wild Bay. They had travelled on their teams to meet with him. He was The Supreme Woodsman. His hunting rifle had been given to him by a friendly Mick-Mack he had befriended whilst away one year on one of his hunting trips. When he went on the Outside for seal and ducks he always easily bagged as much as he could carry on his komatik. He had lost any desire to socialise with others; if it had ever been there in the first place. Although happy and contented in his world there was one thing that still occupied his thoughts and troubled him.
People in Wild Bay had told him bad things about his mother and father whom he had never known. So many wickedly bad things that he had started defending them for himself. He was always trying to protect that part of him that he had lost as a small child.