“When I was young, I used to think he was Santa Claus. He was an attraction. I just didn’t get a chance to see him that much. He paid a lot of attention to children. He didn’t shove us aside. I remember him telling how he killed a bear with his bow and arrows. Shot it several times until it bled out. He’d say, ‘I was a little leery because I only had five arrows with me.’

“Well, lucky thing you have a hermit here to teach you how to catch a fox,’ he’d tell me with a chuckle.” And, like other storytellers, Noah often had a twist to a telling, Burton revealed when he attempted to recreate his uncle’s instructions in a voice that is more rustic than Noah’s generally more sophisticated one: “You get yourself some boards and nails and a hammer and saw and build a box, a cage you see. Then you attach a door and a trip peg and tie a rope to the door. Lift it into the open position, hold on to the rope and get behind the box. Then you make a noise like a dead hen.”

Although Burton has told that story many times, he laughs as much now as he did when Uncle Noah first told it. “That’s the kind of thing that went on. Stories like that. As kids we were always plugging him to tell us stories and he liked that.”