"Don't worry, I'm not going to hit you with a branch. This one here," he said, indicating as he started to hack at it with the little axe.
He made fairly quick work of it cutting a few branches down from the tree, warning Maria which he was working on before he actually started, and then he climbed back down the tree after handing her the hatchet again so that he wouldn't hurt himself doing it.
"All right, so those three will be your support beams, now we can just find whatever we happen to find that's already fallen to help round out the structure some."