Although 60-year-old Mr. Trafton completed these carvings in 1994 and 1995, he's been transforming wood into miniatures since he was a boy when he made his own toy whistles and trucks. About twenty years ago when he and his wife, Lois, had children of their own, he began to make toy trucks again as well as deer heads and a host of other carvings. "Oh, I'd make whatever came into my mind," laughs Mr. Trafton. "I'd just grab a piece of lumber, and I never knew what I was going to make, actually. I'd make something, and it would come out. But I never go with a pattern. I just make it up myself." That's when he began making the sleds, too -- and giving them away: "I gave them away to different people who liked horses and who were used to lumbering, a lot of the older guys, the old, old fellows" who worked in the days of the river drivers.

Then Mr. Trafton stopped making the sleds. Instead, he built birthday and Christmas presents for children and grandchildren as well as household items for his wife and his son's wife -- knickknack shelves, food dehydrators, doughnut turners, anything they needed and that could be hammered together from wood. "Never one special thing," he adds.

But recently, he's felt the pull of the miniatures again: "I'm more interested in these here," he explains, running his hand along the frame of the drag dray. "I like them. I've used one like this before; I used to cut and yard real wood with that. And I used to have a horse that weighed probably thirteen, fourteen hundred pounds. I used to do all my lumbering with the bucksaw. No chainsaw. Just a bucksaw, an ax, and a pulphook."

Born in Brighton in 1936, Mr. Trafton started in the woods right after he finished grammar school. "Thought I'd like the woods better than I did school," he explains. He remembers many of the changes in the Maine woods, including the appearance of chain saws. "It was a man-killer," he exclaims, remembering his first chain saw -- a Lombard, "but it was way ahead of a bucksaw!"

Mr. Trafton still works the woods. You'll find him and his 440 John Deere skidder off Route 154 somewhere between Athens and Brighton, as he cuts selectively on the woodlots of seven of his neighbors. "I work alone. And I don't cut everything," he says firmly, "I selective cut. But up in my area, they have those tree harvesters, and they just take everything out -- tops and everything. And when they go through, there's nothing left. I don't like to see that stripped land, but Scott Paper's starting to replant the trees now."

Made from pine and spruce and stretching to thirty-one inches in length, Mr. Trafton's detailed wooden models are built very carefully to scale. All the parts move. Pull the drag dray and it glides across the floor. When the wagon sled gets under way, its two sets of runners twist and turn, as if following a road. Tiny silver chains hang from the whiffletrees and show where the horses belong. Sticks of alder and yellow and silver birch fill up the rack sills of the wagon and the dray, teaching how the pulpwood lays. Woods tools dangle from the headboards: a four-inch-long ax, a two-inch pulphook, and a four-inch iron frame bucksaw rest on the drag dray. On the two-horse wagon sled lie a four-inch crosscut saw and a four-inch cant dog.

"They used the crosscut with the bigger wood," Mr. Trafton points out, "so the wagon sled would haul a lot more. And when the roads started to break up in the spring, a bigger sled would be too heavy, so they would go to this smaller drag dray and get some of the wood out like that." He paints all the tools red. "That's so they can find them easy in the woods, if they lose them," he laughs. He knows what he's talking about. He used to paint his own tools red; now they're flourescent orange: "If my pulphook drops down, I can see it."

This concern for exacting detail motivates Mr. Trafton and links him with other artists across the country who create what folk art scholars call "memory objects." Retired farmers have whittled old farm implements, grandmothers have stitched together portraits of their families on quilt tops, and loggers from Washington to Maine have assembled figures of men and machines to teach what work was like in the woods. Documenting and preserving a remembered past, memory objects enable their creators to become historians of their own experiences. Often returning to a craft practiced in younger years, memory artists celebrate what endures both in their own lives and in the lives of others in their communities.

Mr. Trafton loves what he does -- and loves to see just how far he can go with his experiments: "Well, I just always liked to do something with wood, even if it was just a little thing, I don't know. I was always making something. I just like to see what I can take a piece of lumber and turn it into." He carves almost every day: "When I get out of the woods, after supper, I go out back to my workshop, and I might fix a runner or two, or one sled. I just sold four of them. And I made one for a guy who liked horses; it was his wedding present." Modestly, Mr. Trafton laughs, "I just have scrap pieces of wood that I hate to throw away."

--Peggy Yocom