-The following story is excerpted from Visitin': Conversations with Vermonters collected by the Vermont Folklife Center (Volume 1, 1995), available from the Vermont Folklife Center, Box 442, Middlebury, Vermont, 05753.

" I Buried My Own Leg"

Pearl Lee recounts nearly a century of a brutally hardscrabble life in the North Country...

"... I'd go in the woods and work myself, just by myself. I had a big team and my wife didn't want me to go. She said you'll get hurt.

I says, 'If I get hurt I'll take the leads and bridle and fix it on the big old horse I had there and he'll come home and you'll know that I'm hurt.' I cut a lot of logs but I never got hurt very bad cutting logs.

I got my knee smashed rolling timber and I didn't tend to it as I'd ought. Of course there wasn't no hospitals or nothing then. And I had old Doc Powers, who put a blister on it. And he blistered it so bad, that the marrow of the bone run out. So it left the lower part of my leg no good. And I kept hopping along until I see I got to give up.

The doctor says to my wife, 'That leg has got to be cut off to save his life.'

'Well,' she says, 'cut it off.'

He asked my father what about it and my father said, 'I ain't going to say nothing about it. I ain't going to have it off.' And I said, 'Cut that leg off.'

And here I be. And I worked farming, logging... I buried my own leg. Bound it up in a big bed quilt and buried it down about six feet in the ground. Dug my own ditch, own hole and everything. On this leg -- this leg has done all of my work. It's carried me around ever since."