In the days of log drives on the rivers of New England, whenever a riverman was killed in the drive, his comrades hung his spiked boots on a tree to mark the spot. As a youth, Robert Pike spotted such a pair of bookts, and from that moment was born his lifelong fascination with the history of the New England logging industry. The tales collected are narrated here by "Old Vern," a cantankerous back woods character. Here are legends and wild anecdotes of the loggers and rivermen who worked in the woods and on the Connecticut and Androscoggin Rivers, plying their romantic, dangerous trade in the early part of the 20th century. Others tell of "quaint characters" and "unusual specimens of God's carelessness" - people like Ginseng Willard, who slept in a coffin for two years just to get used to it, or Ervin Palmer, a hermit who dreamed of making a violin that would duplicate the sounds of the natural world.