rope trick

Jörg, Paul and I resolved to leave the cabin with more firewood than we found it with. Since we'd already had a few fires in the wood stove, we decided to look for a fairly big tree to cut down. As luck would have it, just beyond the clearing in front of the cabin, there was a thick birch which was mostly trunk. I'm not sure if it had been struck by lightning, had most of its branches blown off in a wind storm or was just oddly sparse of branches.
We found a dull axe and a couple of bow saws in the cabin, and I had a little bow saw in the car that could be used for cutting off the few branches that were on the tree. There were also some splitting wedges and a coil of rope. One of the bow saws was big and symmetrical enough so two people could use it, one on either end.
There were a lot of small trees and brush around the base of this birch, so we had to hack it away to make room to work. We chopped at the base of the trunk for a while, but that was slow going, so we used the bow saw and made better progress. We cut about a third of the way through on one side, then cut a wedge out of the other side. The tree seemed to lean a little bit to one side, so we thought it would fall that way, but we weren't sure. Jörg said he'd climb up and tie the rope around the tree so we could pull it over. It seemed like a reasonable idea, but I didn't know how he was going to climb up high enough since there were no branches. He didn't have much trouble though. He grabbed the trunk and shimmied up to just below the first branch. He started tying the rope, but he was tying the middle of the rope to the tree. I didn't think the rope was long enough to be tied like that, so I suggested he untie the knot he was making and tie the end of the rope to the tree so it could be pulled from further away. He tried to explain to me that we needed to have the ends available to pull on. I told him that every piece of rope has two ends, and he could tie one to the tree and two people could pull the other end. He made a comment about what a good job I was doing supervising while he was up in the tree doing the work, and he continued with his middle of the rope knot.
I went and got my camera to try to take a picture at the moment the tree fell. I stood a safe distance away and focused on the tree and watched as he and Paul each got an end of the rope and started pulling. I'm not sure what the idea was exactly, maybe that the tree would fall fairly slowly and they'd be able to move backwards out of the way, or it would fall right between them since they were pulling from slightly different directions. When it started to fall, it looked like it twisted a little and I snapped a picture just as Jörg was leaping over some brush out of the way of the falling trunk. There was a thud that shook the ground even where I was standing. As I lowered the camera, Jörg was standing in the clearing, just beyond the fallen tree, but Paul had disappeared. There was that moment of stunned silence again, seeming even more silent after the crash of the falling tree. If Paul had been under that tree when it fell, he could easily be broken in many places, or dead. Jörg said, "Paul?" There was a rustling in the brush, and Paul was extricating himself from the bushes which had grabbed him as he tried to get out of the way, and the branches of the small tree which had been knocked down next to him by the big tree. He was unharmed but for a few scrapes and scratches.
We used the car to drag the trunk over close to the cabin and started sawing away. It took a hell of a long time to cut the tree into wood stove appropriate lengths with the bow saws. It seemed like an especially long time to me since I was used to chain saw speed. We were still working on that when it started to get dark. As the sun went down, the frogs started chirping. And the chirping was extremely loud. I went inside to fix some food while Paul and Jörg were still outside cutting wood. Then I heard Jörg yelling.