Woodcraft by Nessmuk — Free Audiobook

1 01 - Overwork and Recreation - Outing and Outers - How to do it, and why they miss it 10:35

Woodcraft is dedicated to the Grand Army of Outers as a pocket volume of reference on Woodcraft. For brick and mortar breed filth and crime, with a pulse of evil that throbs and beats, and men are withered before their prime by the curse paved in with the lanes and streets, and lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed in the smothering reek of mill and mine, and death stalks in on the struggling crowd, but he shuns the shadow of oak and pine. Nesmuk. Chapter One. Overwork and Recreation, Outing and Outers, How to do it, and why they miss it.

It does not need that Herbert Spencer should cross the ocean to tell us that we are an overworked nation, that our hair turns gray ten years earlier than the Englishman's, or that we have somewhat too much of the gospel of work, and it is time to preach the gospel of relaxation. It is all true, but we work harder, accomplish more in a given time, and last quite as long as slower races. As to the gray hair, perhaps gray hair is better than none, and it is a fact that the average Briton becomes bald as early as the American turns gray. There is, however, a sad significance in his words when he says, In every circle I have met men who had themselves suffered from nervous collapse, due to stress of business or named friends who had either killed themselves by overwork, or had been permanently incapacitated, or had wasted long periods in endeavors to recover health.

Too true, and it is the constant strain, without let-up or relaxation, that in nine cases out of ten snaps the cord and ends in what the doctors call nervous prostration, something akin to paralysis, from which the sufferer seldom wholly recovers. Mr. Spenser quotes the quaint old chronicler, Foixor, as saying, The English take their pleasures sadly after their fashion, and thinks if he lived now he would say of Americans, They take their pleasures hurriedly after their fashion. Perhaps. It is an age of hurry and worry. Anything slower than steam is apt to get left. Fortunes are quickly made and freely spent. Nearly all busy, hard-working Americans have an intuitive sense of the need that exists for at least one period of rest and relaxation during each year, and all, or nearly all, are willing to pay liberally—too liberally, in fact—for anything that conduces to rest, recreation, and sport.

I am sorry to say that we mostly get swindled. As an average, the summer outer who goes to the forest, lake, or stream for health and sport gets about ten cents worth for a dollar of outlay. A majority will admit, to themselves at least, that after a month's vacation they return to work with an inward consciousness of being somewhat disappointed and beaten. We are free with our money when we have it. We are known throughout the civilized world for our lavishness in paying for our pleasures, but it humiliates us to know that we have been beaten, And this is what most of us know at the end of a summer vacation. To the man of millions, it makes little difference. He is able to pay liberally for boats, buckboards, and body service if he chooses to spend a summer in the north woods.

He has no need to study the questions of lightness and economy in a forest and stream outing. Let his guides take care of him, and unto them and the landlords he will give freely of his substance. I do not write for him, and can do him little good. But there are hundreds of thousands of practical useful men, many of them far from being rich, mechanics, artists, writers, merchants, clerks, businessmen, workers, so to speak, who sorely need and well deserve a season of rest and relaxation at least once a year. To these and for these I write. Perhaps more than fifty years of devotion to woodcraft may enable me to give a few useful hints and suggestions to those whose dreams During the closed season of work, are of camp life by flood, field, and forest.

I have found that nearly all who have a real love of nature and out-of-door camp life spend a good deal of time and talk in planning future trips, or discussing the trips and pleasures gone by, but still dear to memory. When the mountain streams are frozen and the norland winds are out, when the winter winds are drifting the bitter sleet and snow, When winter rains are making out-of-door life unendurable, when season, weather, and law combine to make it clothes-time for beast, bird, and man, it is well that a few congenial spirits should, at some favorite trysting-place, gather around the glowing stove and exchange yarns, opinions, and experiences. Perhaps no two will exactly agree on the best ground for an outing, or half a dozen other points that may be discussed.

But one thing I'll admit. Each and every one has gone to his chosen ground with too much impedimentia, too much duffel, and nearly all have used boats at least twice as heavy as they need to have been. The temptation to buy this or that bit of indispensable camp kit has been too strong, and we have gone to the blessed woods, handicapped with a load fit for a pack mule. This is not how to do it. Go light, the lighter the better, so that you have the simplest material for health, comfort and enjoyment. Of course, if you intend to have a permanent camp and can reach it by boat or wagon, lightness is not so important, though even in that case it is well to guard against taking a lot of stuff that is likely to prove of more weight than worth, only to leave it behind when you come out.

As to clothing for the woods, a good deal of nonsense has been written about strong, coarse woolen clothes. You do not want coarse woolen clothes. Fine, woollen cashmere, of medium thickness for coat, vest, and pantaloons, with no cotton lining. Color, slate-gray or dead leaf, either is good. Two soft, thick, woollen shirts, two pairs of fine but substantial woollen drawers, two pairs of strong woollen socks or stockings. These are what you need, and all you need, in the way of clothing for the woods, excepting hat and boots or gaiters. Boots are best, providing you do not let yourself be inviggled into wearing a pair of long-legged heavy boots with thick soles, as has been often advised by writers who knew no better.

Heavy, long-legged boots are a weary, tiresome encumbrance on a hard tramp through rough woods. Even moccasins are better. Gaiters, all sorts of high shoes, in fact, are too bothersome about fastening and unfastening. Leg boots are best. Not thin, unserviceable affairs. but light as to actual weight. The following hints will give an idea for the best footgear for the woods. Let them be single-soled, single backs and single fronts, except light short foot linings. Back of solid country kip. Fronts of substantial French calf. Heel one inch high, with steel nails. Countered outside, straps narrow, a fine French calf, put on a straddle, and set down to the top of the back. The out-souled, stout, spanish oak and pegged rather than sewed, although either is good.

They will weigh considerably less than half as much as the clumsy, costly boots usually recommended for the woods, and the added comfort must be tested to be understood. The hat should be fine soft felt, with moderately low crown and wide brim, color to match the clothing. The proper covering for head and feet is no slight affair, and will be found worth some attention. Be careful that the boots are not too tight or the hat too loose. The above rig will give the tourist one shirt, one pair of drawers, and a pair of socks to carry as extra clothing. A soft, warm blanket bag, open at the ends and just long enough to cover the sleeper, with an oblong square of waterproof cotton cloth, six by eight feet, will give warmth and shelter by night and will weigh together five or six pounds.

This, with the extra clothing, will make about eight pounds of dry goods to pack over carries, which is enough. Probably also it will be found little enough for comfort. During a canoe cruise across the northern wilderness in the late summer, I met many parties at different points in the woods, and the amount of unnecessary duffel with which they encumbered themselves was simply appalling. Why a shrewd businessman, who goes through with a guide and makes a forest hotel his camping-ground nearly every night, Should handicap himself with a five-pack-basket full of gray woolen and gum blankets, extra clothing, pots, pans, and kettles, with a nine-pound ten-bore and two rods, yes, and an extra pair of heavy boots hanging astride of the gunwale, it is one of the things I shall never understand.

My own load, including canoe, extra clothing, blanket bag, two-days rations, pocket-axe, rod, and knapsack, never exceeded twenty-six pounds. and I went prepared to camp out any and every night. People who contemplate an outing in the woods are pretty apt to commence preparations a long way ahead, and to pick up many trifling articles that suggest themselves as useful and handy in camp. All well enough in their way, but making at least a too heavy load. It is better to commence by studying to ascertain just how light one can go through without a special discomfort. A good plan is to think over the trip during leisure hours, and make out a list of indispensable articles, securing them beforehand and having them stowed in handy fashion, so that nothing needful may be missed, just when and where it cannot be procured.

The list will be longer than one would think, and need not be cumbersome or heavy. As I am usually credited with making a cruise or long woods tramp with exceptionally light duffel, I will give a list of articles I take along. Going on foot over carries or through the woods.

2 02 - Knapsack, Hatchet, Tinware, Fishing Tackle, Rods, Ditty-bag 14:15

3 03 - Getting Lost - Camping Out - Roughing It or Smoothing It - Insects - Camps, and how to make them 29:53

GETTING LOST, CAMPING OUT, ROUGHING IT OR SMOOTHING IT, INSECTS, CAMPS AND HOW TO MAKE THEM. With a large majority of prospective tourists and outers, camping out is a leading factor in the summer vacation. And during the long winter months they are prone to collect in little knots and talk much of camps fishing, hunting, and roughing it. The last phrase is very popular, and always cropping out in the talks on matters pertaining to a vacation in the woods. I dislike the phrase. We do not go out to the green woods in crystal waters to rough it. We go to smooth it. We get it rough enough at home, in towns and cities, in shops, offices, stores, banks, anywhere we may be placed, with the necessity always present of being on time and up to our work, of providing for the dependent ones, of keeping up, catching up, or getting left, alas for the lifelong battle whose bravest slogan is bread.

As for the few fortunate ones who have no call to take a hand in any strife or struggle, who not only have all the time there is, but a great deal that they cannot dispose of with any satisfaction to themselves or anybody else. I am not writing for them, but only to those of the world's workers who go or would like to go every summer to the woods. And to these I would say, don't rough it. Make it as smooth, as restful, and pleasurable as you can. To this end, you need pleasant days and peaceful nights. You cannot afford to be tormented and poisoned by insects, nor kept awake at night by cold and damp, nor to exhaust your strength by hard tramps and heavy loads. Take it easy, and always keep cool.

Nine men out of ten, on finding themselves lost in the woods, fly into a panic and quarrel with the compass. Never do that. The compass is always right, or nearly so, and it is not many years since an able-bodied man, sportsman of course, lost his way in the north woods, and took fright, as might be expected. He was well armed and well found for a week in the woods. What ought to have been only an interesting adventure became a tragedy. He tore through the thickets and swamps in his senseless panic until he dropped and died through fright, hunger, and exhaustion. A well-authenticated story is told of a guide in the Oswagatchee region, who perished in the same way. Guides are not infallible. I have known more than one to get lost.

Wherefore, should you be trapping through a pathless forest on a cloudy day, and should the sun suddenly break from under a cloud in the northwest about noon, don't be scared. The last day is not at hand, and the planets have not become mixed. Only you are turned. You have gradually swung around until you are facing northwest when you meant to travel south. It has a muddling effect on the mind, this getting lost in the woods. But if you can collect and arrange your gray brain matter and suppress all panicky feeling, it is easily got along with. For instance, it is morally certain that you commence swinging to the southwest, then west to northwest. Had you kept on until you were heading directly north, you could rectify your course simply by following a true south course.

But as you have varied three-eighths of the circle, set your compass, and travel by it to the southeast until, in your judgment, you have about made up the deviation. Then go straight south, and you will not be far wrong. Carry the compass in your hand, and look at it every few minutes, for the tendency to swerve from a straight course when a man is once lost, and nearly always to the right, is a thing past understanding. As regards poisonous insects, It may be said that to the man with a clean, bleached, tender skin, they are at the start an unendurable torment. No one can enjoy life with a smarting, burning, swollen face, while the attacks on every exposed inch of skin are persistent and constant.

I have seen a young man, after two days' exposure to these pests, come out of the woods with one eye entirely closed, and the brow hanging over it like a clam-shell, while face and hands were almost hideous from inflammation and puffiness. The St. Regis and St. Francis Indians, although born and reared in the woods, by no means make light of the blackfly. It took the man who could shoot Phantom Falls to find out. Its bite is not severe, nor is it ordinarily poisonous. There may be an occasional exception to this rule, but, besides the bite of the mosquito, it is comparatively mild and harmless. And again, gnats, in my way of thinking, are much worse than the blackfly or mosquito. So says Murray.

Our observations differ. A thousand mosquitoes and as many gnats can bite me without leaving a mark, or having any effect save the pain of the bite while they are at work, but each bite of the blackfly makes a separate and distinct boil that will not heal and be well in two months. While fishing for brook trout in July last, I ran into a swarm of them on Moose River and got badly bitten. I had carelessly left my medicine behind. On the first of October, the bites had not ceased to be painful, and it was three months before they disappeared entirely. Frank Forrester says, in his Fish and Fishing, Page Three Seventy One, that he has never fished for the red-fleshed trout of Hamilton County, being deterred therefrom by dread of that curse of the summer angler, the blackfly, which is to me especially venomous.

Adirondack Murray gives extended directions for beating these little pests by the use of buckskin gloves with chamois gauntlets, Swiss maul, fine muslin, etc. Then he advises a mixture of sweet oil and tar, which is to be applied to face and hands, and he adds that it is easily washed off, leaving the skin soft and smooth as an infant's, all of which is true. But more than forty years of experience in the woods has taught me that the following recipe is infallible, anywhere that Sancudos, Mokwams, and our own poisonous insects do most abound. It was published in Forest and Stream in the summer of 1880, and again in 83. It has been pretty widely quoted and adopted, and I have never known it to fail.

Three ounces of pine-tar, two ounces of castor oil, one ounce of pennyroyal oil, Simmer all together over a slow fire, and bottle for use. You will hardly need more than a two-ounce vialful in a season. One ounce has lasted me six weeks in the woods. Rub it in thoroughly and liberally at first, and after you have established a good glaze, a little replenishing from day to day will be sufficient. Don't fool with soap and towels where insects are plenty. A good safe coat of this varnish grows better the longer it is kept on, and it is cleanly and wholesome. If you get your face and hands crocky or smutty about the campfire, wet the corner of your handkerchief and rub it off, not forgetting to apply the varnish at once wherever you have cleaned it off.

Last summer I carried a cake of soap and a towel in my knapsack through the North Woods for seven weeks' tour, and never used either a single time. When I had established a good glaze on the skin, it was too valuable to be sacrificed for any weak whim connected with soap and water. When I struck a woodland hotel, I found soap and towels plenty enough. I found the mixture gave one's face the ruddy tanned look supposed to be indicative of health and hard muscle. A thorough ablution in the public wash-basin reduced the color, but left the skin very soft and smooth. In fact, as a lotion for the skin, it is excellent. It is a soothing and healing application for poisonous bites already received. I have given some space to the insect question, but no more than it deserves or requires.

The venomous little wretches are quite important enough to spoil many a well-planned trip to the woods, and it is best to beat them from the start. You will find that immunity from insects and a comfortable camp are the two first and most indispensable requisites of an outing in the woods. And just here I will briefly tell how a young friend of mine went to the woods, some twenty-five years ago, He was a bank clerk, and a good fellow withal, with a leaning toward camp life. For months, whenever we met, he would introduce his favorite topics—fishing, camping out, etc. At last, in the hottest of the hot months, the time came. He put in an appearance with a fighting cut on his hair, a little stiff straw hat, and a soft skin, bleached by long confinement in a close office.

I thought he looked a little tender, but he was sanguine. He could rough it and sleep on the bare ground with the root of a tree for a pillow. As for mosquitoes and punkies, he never minded them. We went in a party of five—two old hunters and three youngsters, the latter all enthusiasm and pluck at first. Toward the last end of a heavy eight-mile tramp, they grew silent, and slapped and scratched nervously. Arriving at the camping spot, they worked fairly well, but were evidently weakening a little. By the time we were ready to turn in, they were reduced pretty well to silence and suffering, especially the bank clerk, Jean L. The Punkies were eager for his tender skin, and they were rank poison to him.

He muffled his head in a blanket and tried to sleep, but it was only a partial success. When, by suffocating himself, he obtained a little relief from insect bites, there were stubs and knotty roots continually poking themselves among his ribs or digging into his backbone. I have often had occasion to observe that stubs, roots, and small stones, etc., have a perverse tendency to abrade the anatomy of people unused to the woods. Mr. C. D. Warner has noticed the same thing, I believe. On the whole, Gene and the other youngsters behaved very well. Although they turned out in the morning with red, swollen faces and half-closed eyes, they all went trouting and caught about a hundred and fifty small trout between them.

They did their level bravest to make a jolly thing of it. But Gene's attempt to watch a deer lick resulted in a wetting through the sudden advent of a shower, and the shower drove about all the punkies and mosquitoes in the neighborhood under our roof for shelter. I never saw them more plentiful or worse. Gene gave in and varnished his pelt thoroughly with my punky dope, as he called it. But too late. The mischief was done, and the second trial was worse to those youngsters than the first. More insects, more stubs and knots. Owing to these little annoyances, They arrived at home several days before their friends expected them, leaving enough rations in camp to last old Sile and the writer a full week.

And the moral of it is, if they had fitted themselves for the woods before going there, the trip would have been a pleasure instead of a misery. One other little annoyance I will mention, as a common occurrence among those who camp out, this is the lack of a pillow. I suppose I have camped fifty times with people, who, on turning in, were squirming around for a long time, Trying to get a rest for the head. Boots are the most common resort. But when you place a bootleg or two of them under your head, they collapse, and make a headrest less than half an inch thick. Just why it never occurs to people that a stuffing of moss, leaves, or hemlock brows would fill out the bootleg, and make a passable pillow is another conundrum I cannot answer.

But there is another and a better way of making a pillow for camp use, which I will describe further on. And now I wish to devote some space to one of the most important adjuncts of woodcraft, i.e. camps, how to make them, and how to make them comfortable. There are camps and camps. There are camps in the North Woods that are really fine villas, costing thousands of dollars, and there are log-houses and shanties and bark camps and A-tents and walled tents and shelter tents and shanty tents. But I assume that the camp best fitted to the wants of the average outer is the one that combines the essentials of dryness, lightness, portability, cheapness, and is easily and quickly put up. Another essential is that it must admit of a bright fire in front by night or day.

I will give short descriptions of the forest shelters I have found handiest and most useful. Firstly, I will mention a sort of camp that was described in a sportsman's paper and has since been largely quoted and used. It is made by fastening a horizontal pole to a couple of contiguous trees and then putting on a heavy covering of hemlock boughs, shingling them with the tips downward, of course. A fire is to be made at the roots of one of the trees. This, with plenty of boughs, may be made to stand a pretty stiff rain, But it is only a damp arbor, and no camp, properly speaking. A forest camp should always admit of a bright fire in front, with a lean-to or shed roof overhead, to reflect the fire heat on the bedding below.

Any camp that falls short of this lacks the requirements of warmth, brightness, and healthfulness. This is why discard all closed canvas tents. The simplest and most primitive of all camps is the Indian camp. It is easily and quickly made. Is warm and comfortable, and stands a pretty heavy rain when properly put up. This is how it is made. Let us say you are out and have slightly missed your way. The coming gloom warns you that night is shutting down. You are no tenderfoot. You know that a place of rest is essential to health and comfort through the long, cold November night. You dive down the first little hollow until you strike a rill of water, for water is a prime necessity. As you draw your hatchet, you take in the whole situation at a glance.

The little stream is gurgling downward in a half-choked, frozen way. There is a huge sodden hemlock lying across it. One clip of the hatchet shows it will peel. There is plenty of smaller timber standing around, long, slim poles with a tuft of foliage on top. Five minutes suffice to drop one of these. Cut a twelve-foot pole from it. Sharpen the pole at each end. Jam one end into the ground and the other into the rough back of a scraggly hemlock. And there is your ridge pole. Now go with your hatchet for the bushiest and most promising young hemlocks within reach. Drop them and draw them to camp rapidly. Next you need a fire. There are fifty hard, resinous limbs sticking up from the prone hemlock.

Lop off a few of these and split the largest into match timber. Reduce the splinters to shavings. Scrape the wet leaves from your prospective fireplace, and strike a match on the balloon part of your trousers. If you are a woodsman, you will strike but one. Feed the fire slowly at first. It will gain fast. When you have a blaze ten feet high, look at your watch. It is six p.m. You don't want to turn in before ten o'clock, and you have four hours to kill before bedtime. Now tackle the old hemlock. Take off every dry limb, and then peel the bark, and bring it to camp. You will find this takes an hour or more. Next, strip every limb from your young hemlocks, and shingle them on to your ridge-pole.

This will make a sort of bear-den, very well calculated to give you a comfortable night's rest. The bright fire will soon dry the ground that is to be your bed, and you will have plenty of time to drop another small hemlock and make a bed of brows a foot thick. You do it. Then you make your pillow. Now, this pillow is essential to comfort and very simple. It is half a yard of muslin, sewed up as a bag and filled with moss or hemlock brows. You can empty it and put it in your pocket, where it takes up about as much room as a handkerchief. You have other little muslin bags, and you be wise. One holds a couple of ounces of good tea, another sugar, another is kept to put your loose duffel in, money, match-safe, pocket-knife, You have a pat of butter and a bit of pork, with a liberal slice of brown bread, and before turning in you make a cup of tea, broil a slice of pork, and indulge in a lunch.

Ten o'clock comes. The time has not passed tediously. You are warm, dry, and well fed. Your old friends, the owls, come near the firelight and salute you with their strange wild notes. A distant fox sets up for himself with his odd barking cry, and you turn in, not ready to sleep just yet. But you drop off, and it is two bells in the morning watch when you awaken with a sense of chill and darkness. The fire has burned low, and snow is falling. The owls have left, and a deep silence broods over the cold, still forest. You rouse the fire, and, as the bright light shines to the furthest recesses of your forest den, get out the little pipe and reduce a bit of navy-plug to its lowest denomination.

The smoke curls lazily upward. The fire makes you warm and drowsy, and again you lie down, to again awaken with a sense of chilliness, to find the fire burn low and daylight breaking. You have slept better than you would in your own room at home. You have slept in an Indian camp. You have also learned the difference between such a simple shelter and an open-air bivouac under a tree or beside an old log. Another easily made and very comfortable camp is the brush shanty, as it is usually called in northern Pennsylvania. The frame for such a shanty is a cross-pole resting on two crotches about six feet high, and enough straight poles to make a foundation for the thatch. The poles are laid about six inches apart, one end on the ground, the other on the cross-pole, and at a pretty sharp angle.

The thatch is made of the fan-like boughs, cut from the thrifty young hemlock, and are to be laid bottom upward and feather-end down. Commence to lay them from the ground and work up to the cross-pole. shingling them carefully as you go. If the thatch be laid a foot in thickness and well done, the shanty will stand a pretty heavy rain, better than the average bark roof, which is only rain-proof in dry weather. A bark camp, however, may be a very neat sylvan affair, provided you are camping where spruce or balsam fir may be easily reached, and in the hot months when bark will peel and you have a day in which to work at camp. The best bark camps I have ever seen are in the Adirondacks. Some of them are rather elaborate in construction, requiring two or more days hard labor by a couple of guides.

When the stay is to be a long one and the camp permanent, perhaps it will pay. As good a camp as I have ever tried, perhaps the best, is the shanty tent, shown in the illustration. It is easily put up, is comfortable, neat, and absolutely rainproof. Of course, it may be of any required size. But for a party of two, the following dimensions and directions will be found all sufficient. Firstly, the roof. This is merely a sheet of strong cotton cloth, nine feet long by four or four and a half feet in width. The sides of the same material to be four and a half feet deep at the front and two feet deep at the back. This gives seven feet along the edge of the roof, leaving two feet for turning down at the back end of the shanty.

It will be seen that the sides must be cut by us to compensate for the angle of the roof. Otherwise the shanty will not be square and ship-shaped when put up. Allowing for waste in cutting, it takes nearly three yards of cloth for each side. The only labor required in making is to cut the sides to the proper shape and stitch them to the roof. No buttons, strings, or loops. The cloth does not even require hemming. It does, however, need a little waterproofing. For which the following receipt will answer very well, and add little or nothing to the weight. To ten quarts of water, add ten ounces of lime and four ounces of alum. Let it stand until clear. Fold the cloth snugly and put it in another vessel.

Pour the solution on it and let it soak for twelve hours. Then rinse in lukewarm rainwater. Stretch and dry in the sun, and the shanty-tent is ready for use. To put it up properly, make a neat frame as follows. Two strong stakes are posts for the front, driven firmly into the ground four feet apart. At a distance of six feet ten inches from these, drive two other posts, these to be four feet apart, for the back end of the shanty. The front posts to be four and a half feet high, the back rests only two feet. The former also to incline a little toward each other above, so as to measure from outside of posts just four feet atop. This gives a little more width at the front end of the shanty, adding space and warmth.

No crotches are used in putting up the shanty tent. Each of the four posts is fitted on the top to receive a flat-end cross-pole and admit of nailing. When the posts are squarely ranged and driven, select two straight hardwood rods, two inches in diameter and seven feet in length, or a little more. Flatten the ends carefully and truly. Lay them alongside on top from post to post, and fasten them with a light nail in each end. Now select two more straight rods of the same size, but a little over four feet in length. Flatten the ends of these as you did the others. Lay them crosswise from side to side, and lapping the ends of the other rods. Fasten them solidly by driving a sixpenny nail through the ends and into the post.

You have a square frame seven by four feet, but it is not yet complete. Three light rods are needed for the rafters. These are to be placed lengthwise of the roof, at equal distances apart, and nailed or tied to keep them in place. Then take two straight poles, a little over seven feet long, and some three inches in diameter. These are to be accurately flattened at the ends, and nailed to the bottom of the posts, snug to the ground, on outside of posts. A foot log and head log are indispensable. These should be about five inches in diameter, and of a length just to reach from the outside to outside of posts. They should be squared at the ends, and the foot-log placed against the front post, outside and held firmly in place by two wooden pins.

The head-log is fastened the same way, except that it goes against the inside of the back posts, and the frame is complete. Round off all sharp angles or corners with knife and hatchet, and proceed to spread and fasten the cloth. Lay the roof on evenly, and tack it truly to the front cross-rod, using about a dozen six-ounce tacks. Stretch the cloth to its bearings, and tack it at the back end in the same manner. Stretch it sideways, and tack the sides to the side-poles fore and aft. Tack front and back ends of the sides to the front and back posts. Bring down the two-foot flap of roof at the back end of shanty. Stretch and tack it snugly to the back posts. And your sylvan house is done. It is rainproof, windproof, warm and comfortable.

The foot and head-logs define the limits of your forest dwelling, within which you may pile fragrant hemlock-brows as thick as you please, and renew it from day to day. It is the perfect camp. You may put it up with less care and labor, and make it do very well, but I have tried to explain how to do it in the best manner, to make it all sufficient for an entire season, and it takes longer to tell it on paper than to do it. When I go to the woods with a partner, and we arrive at our camping-ground, I like him to get his fishing rig together and start out for half a day's exercise with his favorite flies, leaving me to make the camp according to my own notions of woodcraft. If he will come back about dusk with a few pounds of trout, I will have a pleasant camp and a bright fire for him.

And if he has enjoyed wading in icy stream more than I have making the camp, he has had a good day. Perhaps it may not be out of place to say that the camp, made as above, calls for fifteen bits of timber, posts, rods, etc., a few shingle nails, and some sixpenny rot nails, with a paper of six-ounce tacks. Nails and tacks will weigh about five ounces, and are always useful. In tacking the cloth, turn the ryeage in until you have four thicknesses, as a single thickness is apt to tear. If you desire to strike camp, it takes about ten minutes to draw and save all the nails and tacks. Fold the cloth smoothly and deposit the hole in your knapsack. If you wish to get up a shelter tent on fifteen minutes notice, cut and sharpen a twelve-foot pole.

As for the Indian camp, stick one end in the ground and the other in the rough bark of a large tree. Hemlock is best. Hang the cloth on the pole, fasten the side to the rods and the rods to the ground with inverted crotches, and your shelter tent is ready for you to creep under. The above description of the shanty tent may seem a trifle elaborate, but I hope it is plain. The affair weighs just three pounds, and it takes a skilful woodsman about three hours of easy work to put it in the shape described. Leaving out some of the work, and only aiming to get it up in square shape as quickly as possible, I can put it up in an hour. The shanty as it should be is shown in the illustration very fairly, and the shape of the cloth, when spread out, is shown in the diagram.

On the whole, it is the best form of closed side tent I have found. It admits of a bright fire in front, without which a forest camp is just no camp at all to me. I have suffered enough in close, dark, cheerless, damp tents. More than thirty years ago, I became disgusted with the clumsy, awkward, comfortless affairs that under many different forms went under the name of camps. Gradually I came to make a study of camping out. It would take too much time and space should I undertake to describe all the different styles and forms I have tried, but I will mention a few of the best and worst. The old Down East Coal Cabin embodied the principle of the Indian camp. The frame was simply two strong crotches set firmly in the ground at a distance of eight feet apart and interlocking at the top.

These supported a stiff ridge-pole, fifteen feet long. The small end sharpened and set in the ground. Refuse boards, shooks, stakes, etc. were placed thickly from the ridge-pole to the ground. A thick layer of straw was laid over these, and the whole was covered a foot thick with earth and sods, well beaten down. A stone wall five feet high at the back and sides made a most excellent fireplace, and these cabins were weatherproof and warm, even in zero weather. But they were too cumbersome, and included too much labor for the ordinary hunter and angler. Also, they were open to the objection that, while wide enough in front, they ran down to a dismal cold peak at the far end. Remembering, however, the many pleasant winter nights I had passed with the coal-burners, I brought a supply of oilcloth and rigged it on the same principle.

It was a partial success, and I used it for one season. But that cold, peaked, dark space was always back of my head, and it seemed like an iceberg. It was in vain that I tied a handkerchief about my head or drew a stocking leg over it. That miserable icy angle was always there, and would only shelter one man anyhow. When winter drove me out of the woods, I gave it to an enthusiastic young friend, bought some more oilcloth, and commenced a shanty-tent that was meant to be perfect. A good many leisure hours were spent in cutting and sewing that shanty, which proved rather a success. It afforded a perfect shelter for a space seven by four feet, but was a trifle heavy to pack, and the glazing began to crack and peel off in a short time.

I made another, and a larger one, of stout drilling, soaked in lime-water and alum, and this was all that could be asked when put up properly on a frame. But the sides and ends being sewn to the roof made it unhandy to use as a shelter when shelter was needed on short notice. So I ripped the back ends of the sides loose from the flap, leaving it when spread out as shown in the diagram. This was better. When it was necessary to make some sort of shelter in short order, it could be done with a single pole, as used in the Indian camp. Laying the tent across the pole and using a few tacks to keep it in place at sides and center. This can be done in ten minutes and makes a shelter tent that will turn a heavy rain for hours.

On the whole, for all kinds of weather, the shanty tent is perhaps the best style of camp to be had, at equal expense and trouble. For summer camp, however, I have finally come to prefer the simple lean-to or shed roof. It is the lightest, simplest and cheapest of all cloth devices for camping out. and I have found it sufficient for all weathers from June until the fall of the leaves. It is only a sheet of strong cotton cloth, nine by seven feet, and soaked in lime and alum water as the other. The only labor in making it is the sewing of two breaths of sheeting together. It needs no hemming, binding, loops, or buttons, but is to be stretched on a frame, as described for the brush shanty, and held in place with tacks.

The one I have used for two seasons costs sixty cents and weighs two and a quarter pounds. It makes a good shelter for a party of three, and if it be found a little too breezy for cool nights, a sufficient windbreak can be made by driving light stakes at the sides and weaving in a siding of hemlock boughs. Lastly, whatever cloth structure you may elect to use for a camp, do not fail to cover the roof with a screen of green boughs before building your campfire. Because there will usually be one fellow in camp who has a penchant for feeding the fire with old mulchy dead wood and brush for the fun of watching the blaze and the sparks that are prone to fly upward, forgetting that the blazing cinders are also prone to drop downward on the roof of the tent, burning holes in it.

I have spoken of some of the best camps I know. The worst ones are the A and Wall tents, with all closed camps in which one is required to seclude himself through the hours of sleep in damp and darkness, utterly cut off from the cheerful, healthful light and warmth of the camp-fire.

4 04 - Campfires and their importance - The wasteful wrong way they are usually made, and the right way to make them 12:52

5 05 - Fishing, with and without flies - Some Tackle and Lures - Discursive remarks on the Gentle Art - The Headlight - Frogging 29:59

Fishing with and without flies, some tackle and lures, discursive remarks on the gentle art. The headlight, frogging. There is probably no subject connected with outdoor sport so thoroughly and exhaustively written up as fly-fishing, and all that pertains thereto. Fly-fishing for speckled trout always and deservedly takes the lead. Bass-fishing usually comes in next, though some riders accord second place to the lake trout, salmon trout or landlocked salmon. The mascalonge, as a game fish, is scarcely behind the smallmouth bass, and is certainly more gamey than the lake trout. The largemouth bass and pickerel are usually ranked about with the yellow perch. I don't know why. They are certainly gamey enough.

Perhaps it is because they do not leap out of the water when hooked. Both are good on the table. A dozen able and interesting authors have written books wherein trout, flies, and fly-fishing are treated in a manner that leaves the old backwoodsman little to say. Rods, reels, casting lines, flies, and fish are described and descanted in a way and in a language. The reading whereof reduces me to temporary insanity. And yet I seem to recollect some bygone incidents concerning fish and fishing. I have a well-defined notion that I once stood on Flat Rock in Big Pine Creek and caught over three hundred and fifty fine trout in a short day's fishing. Also that many times I left home on a bright May or June morning, walked eight miles, caught a twelve-pound creel of trout, and walked home before bedtime.

I remember that once in Michigan, on the advice of local fishermen, I dragged a spoon around Highbank Lake two days, with little results save a half-dozen blisters on my hands, and that on the next morning, taking a long tamarack pole in my own way of fishing, I caught before 10 a.m. 50 pounds of bass and pickerel, weighing from 2 to 10 pounds each. Gibson, whose spoon, line, and skiff I had been using, and who was the fishing oracle of that region, could hardly believe his eyes. I kept that country inn and the neighborhood as well supplied with fish for the next two weeks. It is truth to say that I have never struck salt or fresh waters where edible fish were at all plentiful without being able to take in some way all that I needed.

Notably and preferably with the fly, if that might be, if not, then with worms, grubs, minnows, grasshoppers, crickets, or any sort of doodle-bug their highnesses might affect. When a plump two-pound trout refuses to eat a tinseled, feathered frog, I am not the man to refuse him something more edible. That I may not be misunderstood, let me say that I recognize the speckled brook trout as the very emperor of all game fish, and angling for him with the fly as the neatest, most fascinating sport attainable by the angler. But there are thousands of outers who, from choice or necessity, take their summer vacations where Salmo Fontenales is not to be had. They would prefer him, either on the leader or the table, but he is not there, and a man has got a stomach, and we live by what we eat.

Wherefore, they go a-fishing for other fish, so that they are successful and sufficiently fed. The difference is not so material. I have enjoyed myself hugely catching caddies in the dark night from a skiff with a hand-line. I can add nothing in a scientific way to the literature of fly-fishing, but I can give a few hints that may be conducive to practical success, as well with trout as with less noble fish. In fly-fishing, one serviceable four-ounce rod is enough, and a plain click reel of small size is just as satisfactory as a more costly affair. Twenty yards of tapered waterproof line with a six-foot leader and a cast of two flies complete the rig, and will be found sufficient. In common with most fly-fishers, I have thrown a cast of three flies, but have found two just as effective and handier.

We all carry too many flies. Some of my friends have more than sixty dozen, and will never use a tenth of them. In the summer of eighty-eight, finding I had more than seemed needful, I left all but four dozen behind me. I wet only fifteen of them in a seven weeks' outing, and they filled the bill. I have no time or space for a dissertation on the hundreds of different flies made and sold at the present day. Abler pens have done that. I will, however, name a few that I have found good in widely different localities, i.e., the northern wilderness of New York and the upper waters of northern Pennsylvania. For the northern wilderness, Scarlet Ibis, Split Ibis, Romaine, White-winged Coachman, Royal Coachman, Red Hackle, Red-bodied Ashy, and Gray-bodied Ashy.

The Ashes were good for Black Bass also. For Northern Pennsylvania, Queen of the Waters, Professor, Red Fox, Coachman, Black May, White-winged Coachman, Wasp, Brown Hackle, Seth Green. Ibisflies are worthless here. Using the dark flies in bright water and clear weather, and the brighter colors for evening, the list was long enough. At the commencement of the open season, and until the young maple leaves are half grown, bait will be found far more successful than the fly. At this time, the trout are pretty evenly distributed along lake shores and streams, choosing to lie quietly in rather deep pools and avoiding swift water. A few may rise to the fly in a loggy and different way, but the best way to take them is bait-fishing, with well-cleansed dangleworms or white grubs, the latter being the best bait I have ever tried.

They take the bait sluggishly at this season, but on feeling the hook, wake up to their normal activity and fight gamely to the last. When young new-born insects begin to drop freely on the water about the 20th of May, trout leave the pools and take to the riffles, and from this time until the latter part of June, the fly fisherman is in his glory. It may be true that the skillful bait fisherman will rather beat his creel. He cares not for that. He can take enough, and he had rather take ten trout with a fly than a score with bait. As for the man who goes a-fishing simply to catch fish, the fly-fisher does not recognize him as an angler at all. When the sun is hot and the weather grows warm, trout leave the ripples and take to cold springs and spring holes, the largest fish of course monopolizing the deepest and coolest places, while the smaller ones hover around or content themselves with shallower water.

As the weather gets hotter, the fly-fishing falls off badly. A few trout of four to eight ounces in weight may still be raised, but the larger ones are lying on the bottom and are not to be fooled with feathers. They will take attempting bait when held before their noses, sometimes, at other times not, and to raise them with a fly as will attempt to raise a sick Indian with the temperance pledge. And yet they may be taken in bright daylight by a ruse that I learned long ago, of a youngster less than half my age, a little, freckled, thin-visaged young man, whose health was evidently affected by a daily struggle with a pair of toe-colored side-whiskers and a light mustache. There was hardly enough of the whole affair to make a doormat for a beehive, but he seemed so proud of the plant that I forbore to rig him.

He was better than he looked, as often happens. The landlord said, He brings in large trout every day when our best fly fishermen fail. One night, around an outdoor campfire, we got acquainted and I found him a witty, pleasant companion. Before turning in, I ventured to ask him how he succeeded in taking large trout, while the experts only caught small ones or failed altogether. Go with me tomorrow morning to a spring hole three miles up the river and I'll show you, he said. Of course we went, he rowing a light skiff and I paddling a still lighter canoe. The spring-hole was in a narrow bay that set back from the river, and at the mouth of a cold, clear brook. It was ten to twelve feet deep, and at the lower end a large balsam had fallen in with the top in just the right place for getting away with large fish, or tangling lines and leaders.

We moored some twenty feet above the spring-hole and commenced fishing, I with my favorite cast of flies, my friend with the tail of a minnow. He caught a one-and-a-half-pound trout almost at the outset. But I got no rise. Did not expect it. Then I went above, where the water was shallower, and raised a couple of half-pounders, but could get no more. I thought he had better go to the hotel with what he had, but my friend said wait. He went ashore and picked up a long pole with a bushy tip. It had evidently been used before. Dropping down to the spring-hole, he thrust the tip to the bottom, and slashed around in a way to scare and scatter every trout within a hundred feet. What does all that mean?

I asked. Well, he said, every trout will be back in less than an hour, and when they first come back they take the bait greedily. Better take off your leader and try bait, which I did. Dropping our hooks to the bottom we waited some twenty minutes. When he had a bite, and having strong tackle, soon took in a trout that turned the scale at two and a quarter pounds. Then my turn came, and I saved one weighing one and a half pounds. He caught another of one and a quarter pounds, and I took one of one pound. Then they ceased biting altogether. And now, said my friend, if you will work your canoe carefully around to that old balsam top, and get the light where you can see the bottom, you may see some large trout.

I did as directed, and making a telescope of my hand, looked intently for the bottom of the spring hole. At first I could see nothing but water. Then I made out some dead sticks, and finally began to dimly trace the outlines of large fish. There they were, more than forty of them lying quietly on the bottom like suckers, but genuine brook trout, every one of them. This, he said, makes the fifth time I have brushed them out of here, and I have never missed taking from two to five large trout. I have two other places where I always get one or two, but this is the best. At the hotel we found two fly fishers who had been out all morning. They each had three or four small trout. During the next week we worked the spring holes daily in the same way, and always with success.

I have also had good success by building a bright fire on the bank, and fishing a spring hole by the light, a mode of fishing especially successful with caddies and perch. A bright bull's-eye headlight strapped on a stiff hat so that the light can be thrown where it is wanted is an excellent device for night fishing. And during the heated term, when the fish are slow and sluggish, I have found the following plan works well. Bake a hard, well-salted water-johnny-cake, break it into pieces the size of a hen's egg, and drop the pieces into a spring hole. This calls a host of minnows, and larger fish follow the minnows. It will prove more successful on perch, caddies, chubs, etc., than on trout, however.

By this plan, I have kept a camp of five men well supplied with fish when their best flies failed, as they mostly do in very hot weather. Fishing for Maskellonge, pickerel and bass is quite another thing, though by many valued as a sport scarcely inferior to fly-fishing for trout. I claim no especial skill with the fly-rod. It is a good day when I get my tail-fly more than fifteen yards beyond the reel with any degree of accuracy. My success lies mainly with the tribes of Esauks and Mycopterus. Among these, I have seldom or never failed during the last thirty-six years when the water was free of ice, and I have had just as good luck when Bigmouth Bass and Pickrow were in the off-season as at any time.

For in many waters there comes a time, in late August and September, when neither Bass nor Peckerel will notice the spoon, be it handled never so wisely. Even the Maskellange looks on the flashing cheat with indifference, though a very hungry specimen may occasionally immolate himself. It was at such a season that I fished High Bank Lake, as before mentioned, catching from twenty to fifty pounds of fine fish every morning for nearly two weeks, After the best local fishermen had assured me that not a decent-sized fish could be taken at that season. Perhaps a brief description of the modes and means that have proved invariably successful for many years may afford a few useful hints, even to old anglers.

To begin with, I utterly discard all modern gangs and trains, carrying from seven to thirteen hooks each. These are all too small and all too many. Better calculated to scratch and tear than to catch and hold. Three hooks are enough at the end of any line, and better than more. These should be fined or honed to a perfect point, and the abrupt part of the barb filed down one half. All hooks, as usually made, have twice as much barb as they should have, and the sharp bend of the barb prevents the entering of the hook in hard bony structures, Wherefore, the fish only stays hooked so long as there is a taut pull on the line. A little loosening of the line and a shake of the head sets him free. But no fish can shake out a hook well sunken in mouth or gills, though two-thirds of a barb may be filed away.

For Mascalonger Pickerel, I invariably use wire snells made as follows. Lay off four or more strands of fine brass wire, thirteen inches long. Turn one end of the wire smoothly over a number one iron wire, and work the ends in between the strands below. Now with a pair of pincers, hold the ends, and using number one as a handle, twist the ends and body of the snell firmly together. This gives the loop. Next, twist the snell evenly and strongly from end to end. Wax the end of the snell thoroughly for two or three inches, and wax the tapers of two strong sproat or o'shaughnessy hooks, and wind the lower hook on with strong wax silk to the end of the taper. Then lay the second hook at right angles with the first and one inch above it.

Wind this as the other, and then fasten a third and smaller hook above that for a lip hook. This gives the snell about one foot in length, with the two lower hooks standing at right angles, one above the other, and a third and smaller hook in line with the second. The bait is the element of success. It is made as follows. Slice off a clean, white pork rind, four or five inches long, by an inch and a half wide. Lay it on a board, and with a sharp knife, cut it as nearly to shape of a frog as your ingenuity permits. Prick a slight gash in the head to admit the lip hook, which should be an inch and a half above the second one, and see that the back of the bait rests securely in the barb of the middle hook.

Use a stout bait rod in a strong line. Fish from a boat with a second man to handle the oars, if convenient. Let the oarsman lay the boat ten feet inside the edge of the lily pads, and make your cast say, with thirty feet of line, land the bait neatly to the right at the edge of the lily pads. Let it sink a few inches, and then, with the tip well lowered, bring the bait around on a slight curve by a quick succession of draws, with a momentary pause between each, the object being to imitate as nearly as possible a swimming frog. If this be neatly done, and if the bait be made as it should be, at every short halt the legs will spread naturally, and the imitation is perfect enough to deceive the most experienced bass or pickerel.

When a half-dozen casts to right and left have been made without success, it is best to move on, still keeping inside and casting outside the lily-pads. A pickerel of three pounds or more will take in all three hooks at the first snap, And as he closes his mouth tightly and starts for the bottom, strike quickly, but not too hard, and let the boatman put you out in deep water at once, where you are safe from the strong roots of the yellow lily. It is logically certain your fish is well hooked. You cannot pull two strong, sharp hooks through that tightly closed mouth without fastening at least one of them where it will do the most good. Oftener both will catch, and it frequently happens that one hook will catch each lip.

Holding the mouth nearly closed and shortening the struggles of a large fish very materially. On taking off a fish, and before casting again, see that the two lower hooks stand at right angles. If they have got turned in the struggle, you can turn them at any angle you like. The twisted wire is stiff enough to hold them in place. Every angler knows the bold, determined manner in which the mascalon strikes his prey. He will take in bait and hooks at the first dash, and if the rod be held stiffly, usually hooks himself. Barring large trout, he is the king of game fish. The bigmouth bass is less savage in his attacks, but is a free biter. He is apt to come up behind and seize the bait about two-thirds of its length, turn and bore down for the bottom.

He will mostly take in the lower hooks, however, and it is certain to get fastened. His large mouth is excellent for retaining the hook. As for the smallmouthed, mycopterus dolomiu if you want to be scientific, I have found him more capricious than any game fish on the list. One day he will take only dobsons or crawfish, the next he may prefer minnows, and again he will rise to the fly or a bucktail spinner. On the whole, I have found the pork frog the most successful lure in his case, but the hooks and bait must be arranged differently. Three strands of fine wire will make a snell strong enough, and the hooks should be strong, sharp, and rather small. The lower hooks placed only a half inch apart, and a small lip hook two and a quarter inches above the middle one.

As the fork of the bait will not reach the bend of the middle hook, it must be fastened to the snell by a few stitches, taken with stout thread, and the lower end of the bait should not reach more than a quarter of an inch beyond the bottom of the hook, Because the smallmouth has a villainous trick of giving his prey a stern chase, nipping constantly and viciously at the tail, and the above arrangement will be apt to hook him at the first snap. Owing to this trait, some artificial minnows with one or two hooks at the caudal end are very killing when he will take them. Lake or salmon-trout may be trolled for successfully with the above lure, but I do not much affect fishing for them. Excellent sport may be had with them, however, early in the season, when they are working near the shore, but they soon retire to water from fifty to seventy feet deep, and can only be caught by deep trolling or buoy-fishing.

I have no fancy for sitting in a slow-moving boat for hours, dragging three or four hundred feet of line in deep water, a four-pound sinker tied by six feet of lighter line some twenty feet above the hooks. The sinker is supposed to go bumping along the bottom, while the bait follows three or four feet above it. The drag of the line and the constant joggling of the sinker on rocks and snags make it difficult to tell when one has a strike, and it is always too long between bites. Sitting for hours at a baited buoy with a hand-line and without taking a fish is still worse, as more than once I have been compelled to acknowledge in very weariness of soul. There are enthusiastic anglers, however, whose specialty is trolling for lake trout.

A gentleman by the name of Thatcher, who has a fine residence at Racquet Lake, which he calls a camp, makes this his leading sport, and keeps a log of his fishing, putting nothing on record of less than ten pounds weight. His largest fish was booked at twenty-eight pounds, and he added that a well-conditioned salmon trout was superior to a brook trout on the table, in which I quite agree with him. But he seemed quite disgusted when I ventured to suggest that a well-conditioned caddy or bullhead caught in the same waters was better than either. "'Do you call the caddy a game-fish?' he asked. "'Yes, I call any fish a game-fish that is taken for sport with hook and line. I can no more explain the common prejudice against the catfish and eel than I can tell why an experienced angler should drag a gang of thirteen hooks through the water, ten of them being waned and superfluous.' Frank Forrester gives five hooks as the number for a trolling gang.

We mostly use hooks too small, and do not look after the points and barbs closely enough. A pair of number one O'Shaughnessy, or one and a half Sprout, or five tapered Blackfish hooks will make a killing rig for smallmouth bass, using number four Sprout for lip-hook. Larger hooks are better for the bigmouth, a four-pound specimen of which will easy take in one's fist. A pair of five-ought o'shaughnessies or sproats will be found none too large, and as for the mascalonge and the pickerel, if I must err, let it be on the side of large hooks and strong lines. It is idle to talk of playing the fish in water, where the giving of a few yards ensures a hopeless tangle among roots, tree-tops, etc., I was once fishing in western waters, where the pickerel ran very large, and I used a pair of the largest salmon-hooks with tackle strong enough to hold a fish of fifteen pounds without any playing, notwithstanding which I had five trains of three hooks each taken off in as many days by monster pickerel.

An expert Maskellonge fisherman, Davis by name, happened to take board at the farmhouse where I was staying, and he had a notion that he could beat some of them big fellows And he did it with three large cod-hooks, a bit of fine strong chain, twelve yards of codline, an eighteen-foot tamarack pole, and a twelve-inch sucker for bait. I thought it the most outlandish rig I had ever seen, but went with him in the early gray of the morning to see it tried, just where I had lost my hooks and fish. Raising the heavy bait in the air, he would give it a whirl to gather headway and launch it forty feet away with a splash that might have been heard thirty rods. It looked more likely to scare than catch, but was a success.

At the third or fourth cast, we plainly saw a huge pickerel rise, shut his immense mouth over the bait, hooks and a few inches of chain, turned lazily and head for the bottom, where Mr. D. let him rest a minute, and then struck steadily but strongly. The subsequent struggle depended largely on main strength, though there was a good deal of skill and cool judgment shown in the handling and landing of the fish. A pickerel of forty pounds or more is not to be snatched out of the water on his first mad rush. Something must be yielded, and with no reel there is little chance of giving line. It struck me my friend managed his fish remarkably well, towing him back and forth with a strong pull, never giving him a rest, and finally sliding him out on a low, muddy bank, as though he were a smooth log.

We took him up to the house and tested the size of his mouth by putting a quart cup in it, which went in easily. Then we weighed him, and he turned the scales at forty-four pounds. It was some consolation to find three of my hooks sticking in his mouth. Lastly, we had a large section of him stuffed and baked. It was good, but a ten-pound fish would have been better. The moral of all this, if it has any moral, is use hooks according to the size of the fish you expect to catch. And when you are in a permanent camp, and fishing is very poor, try frogging. It is not a sport of a high order, though it may be called angling, and it can be made amusing with hook and line. I have seen educated ladies in the wilderness fishing for frogs with all eagerness and enthusiasm not surpassed by the most devoted angler with his favorite cast of flies.

There are several modes of taking the festive Bektrakion. He is speared with a frog-spear, caught under the chin with snatch-hooks, taken with hook and line, or picked up from a canoe with the aid of a headlight or jack-lamp. The two latter modes are best. To take him with hook and line, a light rod, sixty-eight feet of line, a snell of single gut with a one-aught sprout or O'Shaughnessy hook, and a bit of bright scarlet flannel for bait. This is the rig. To use it, paddle up behind him silently and drop the rag just in front of his nose. He is pretty certain to take it on the instant. Knock him on the head before cutting off his legs. It is unpleasant to see him squirm and hear him cry like a child when you are sawing at his thigh-joints.

By far the most effective manner of frogging is by the headlight on dark nights. To do this most successfully, one man in a light canoe, a good headlight, and a light one-handed paddle are the requirements. The frog is easily located, either by his croaking or by his peculiar shape. Paddle up to him silently and throw the light in his eyes. You may then pick him up as you would a potato. I have known a Northwoods guide to pick up a five-quart pail of frogs in an hour on a dark evening. On the table, frogs' legs are usually conceded first place for delicacy and flavor. For an appetizing breakfast in camp, they have no equal in my judgment. The high price they bring at the best hotels and their growing scarcity attest the value placed on them by men who know how and what to eat.

And not many years ago, an old pork-gobbling backwoodsman threw his frying-pan into the river because I had cooked frog legs in it, while another, equally intelligent, refused to use my frying-pan because I had cooked eels in it, remarking sententiously, Eels is snakes, and I know it. It may be well, just here and now, to say a word on the importance of the headlight. I know of no more pleasant and satisfactory adjunct of a camp than a good light that can be adjusted to the head, used as a jack in floating, carried in the hand, or fastened up inside the shanty. Once fairly tried, it will never be ignored or forgotten. Not that it will show a deer's head seventeen rods distant with sufficient clearness for a shot, or your sights with distinctness enough to make it.

See Murray's Adirondacks. Page One Seventy Four. A headlight that will show a deer plainly at six rods, while lighting the sights of a rifle with clearness, is an exceptionally good light. More deer are killed in floating under than over four rods. There are various styles of headlights, jack-lamps, etc., in use. They are bright, easily adjusted, and will show rifle sights or a deer up to a hundred feet, which is enough. They are also convenient in camp, and better than a lantern on a dim forest path. Before leaving the subject of bait-fishing, I have a point or two I wish to make. I have attempted to explain the frog-bait, and the manner of using it, and I shall probably never have occasion to change my belief that it is, all the whole, the most killing lure for the entire tribes of Bass and Pickerel.

There is, however, another, which, if properly handled, is almost as good. It is as follows. Take a bass, pickerel, or yellow perch of one pound or less. Scrape the scales clean on the underside from the caudal fin to a point just forward of the vent. Next, with a sharp knife, cut up toward the backbone, commencing just behind the vent with a slant toward the tail. Run the knife smoothly along just under the backbone and out through the caudal fin, taking about one-third of the latter and making a clean white bait, with the anal and part of the caudal by way of fins. It looks very like a white minnow in the water, but is better, in that it is more showy and infinitely tougher. A minnow soon drags to pieces.

To use it, two strong hooks are tied on a wire snell at right angles, the upper one an inch above the lower, and the upper hook is passed through the bait, leaving it to draw without turning or spinning. The casting and handling is the same as with the frog bait, and is very killing for Basque, Pickerel, and Maskellonge. It is a good lure for Salmon-trout also, but for him it was found better to fasten the bait with the lower hook, in a way to give a spinning motion, and this necessitates the use of a swivel, which I do not like, because a rope is as strong as its weakest part, and I have more than once found the weakest part, the swivel. If, however, a swivel has been tested by a dead lift of twenty to twenty-five pounds, it will do to trust.

I have spoken only of brass or copper wire for snells, and for pickerel or mascalonge of large size nothing else is to be depended on, but for trout and bass strong gut or gimp is safe enough. The possibilities as to size of the mascalonge and northern pickerel no man knows. Frank Forrester thinks it is probable that the former attains a weight of sixty to eighty pounds, while he only accords the pickerel a weight of seventeen to eighteen pounds. I have seen several pickerel of over forty pounds, and one that turned the scale at fifty-three. I saw a mascalonge on Georgian Bay that was longer than a canuck guide who was toting the fish over his shoulder by a stick thrust in the mouth and gills.

The snout reached to the top of the guide's head, while the coddle fin dragged on the ground. There was no chance for weighing the fish, but I hefted him several times, carefully, and am certain he weighed more than a bushel of wheat. Just what tackle would be proper for such a powerful fellow I am not prepared to say, having lost the largest specimens I ever hooked. My best mascalonge weighed less than twenty pounds, my largest pickerel still less. I will close this discursive chapter by offering a bit of advice. Do not go into the woods on a fishing tour without a stock of well-cleansed dangleworms. Keep them in a tin can, partially filled with damp moss, and in a cool, moist place. There is no one variety of bait that the angler finds so consistently useful as the worm.

Isaac Walton by no means despised worm or bait-fishing.

6 06 - Camp Cookery - How it is usually done, with a few simple hints on plain cooking - Cooking Fire and the Outdoor Range 26:59

7 07 - More hints on cooking, with some simple receipts - Bread, Potatoes, Soups, Stews, Beans, Fish, Meat, Venison 33:48

More hints on cooking with some simple recipes. Bread, potatoes, soups, stews, beans, fish, meat, venison. We may live without friends, we may live without books, but civilized men cannot live without cooks. It is probably true that nothing connected with outdoor life in camp is so badly botched as the cooking. It is not through any lack of the raw material, which may be had of excellent quality in any country village. It is not from lack of intelligence or education, for the men you meet in the woods as outers or sportsmen are rather over than under the average in these respects. Perhaps it is because it has been dinned into our ears from early childhood that an appetite, A healthy longing for something good to eat, a tickling of the palate with wholesome appetizing food is beneath the attention of an aesthetic, intellectual man, forgetting that the entire man, mental and physical, depends on proper aliment and the healthy assimilation thereof, and that a thin, dyspeptic man can no more keep up in the struggle of life than the lightning express can make connections drawn by a worn-out locomotive.

I have never been able to get much help from cookbooks or the scores of recipes published in various works on outdoor span. Take, for example, Frank Forrester's Fish and Fishing. He has more than seventy recipes for cooking fish, over forty of which contain terms or names in French. I dare say they are good for a first-class hotel. I neither cook nor converse in French, and I have come to know that the plainest cooking is the best, so that it be well done and wholesome. In making up the rations for camping out, the first thing usually attended to is bread. And if this be light, well-made bread, enough may be taken along to last four or five days, and this may be eked out with Boston crackers, or the best hard-tack, for a couple or three days more, without the least hardship.

Also, there are few camps in which someone is not going out to the clearings every few days for mail, small stores, etc., and a supply of bread can be arranged for, with less trouble than it can be made. There are times, however, when this is not feasible, and there are men who prefer warm bread all the time. In this case, the usual resort, from Maine to Alaska, is the universal flapjack. I do not like it. I seldom make it. It is not good. But it may be eaten with maple syrup or sugar and butter. I prefer a plain water johnny cake made as follows. Supposing your tins are something like those described in Chapter Two. Put a little more than a pint of water in your kettle, and bring it to a sharp boil, adding a small teaspoonful of salt and two of sugar.

Stir in slowly enough good cornmeal to make a rather stiff mush. Let it cook a few minutes and set it off the fire. Then grease your largest tin dish and put the mush in it, smoothing it on top. Set the dish on the outdoor range described in the previous chapter, with a lively bed of coal beneath, but no blaze. Invert the second-sized tin over the cake, and cover the dish with bright live coals, that bottom and top may bake evenly and give it from thirty-five to forty minutes for baking. It makes wholesome, palatable bread which gains on the taste with use. Those who prefer wheat bread can make a passable article by using the best wheat flour with baking powders. Mixing three tablespoons of the powders to a quart of flour.

Mix and knead thoroughly with warm water to a rather thin dough and bake as above. Use the same proportions for pancake batter. When stopping in a permanent camp, with plenty of time to cook, excellent light bread may be made by using dry yeast cakes, Though it is not necessary to set the sponge as directed on the papers. Scrape and dissolve half a cake of yeast in a gill of warm water and mix it with the flour. Add warm water enough to make it pliable and not too stiff. Set in a warm place until it rises sufficiently and bake as directed above. It takes several hours to rise. I'm afraid I shall discount my credit on camp cooking when I admit that, if I must use fine flour, I prefer unleavened bread, what my friends irreverently call club bread.

Not that it is ever made or endorsed by any club of men that I know of, but because it is baked on a veritable club, sassafras or black birch. This is how to make it. Cut a club two feet long and three inches thick at its broadest end. Peel or shave off the bark smoothly and sharpen the smaller end neatly. Then stick the sharpened end in the ground near the fire, leaning the broad end towards a bed of live coals, where it will get screeching hot. While it is heating, mix rather more than half a pint of best Minnesota flour with enough warm water to make a dough. Add a half teaspoonful of salt and a teaspoonful of sugar, and mold and pull the dough until it becomes lively. Now work it into a ribbon two inches wide and half an inch thick.

Wind the ribbon spirally around the broad end of the club. Stick the latter in front of the fire so the bread will bake evenly and quickly to a light brown, and turn frequently until done, which will be in about thirty minutes. When done, take it from the fire. Stand the club firmly upright and pick the bread off in pieces as you want it to eat. It will keep hot a long time, and one soon becomes fond of it. To make perfect coffee, just two ingredients are necessary, and only two. These are water and coffee. It is owing to the bad management of the latter that we drink poor coffee. Mocha is generally considered to be the best type of coffee, with java a close second. It is the fashion at the present to mix the two in proportions to suit, Some taking two pans java to one of mocha, others reversing these proportions.

Either way is good, or the mocha is quite good alone. But there is a better berry than either for the genuine coffee-toper. This is a small, dark-green berry that comes to market under the generic name of Rio, that name covering half a dozen grades of coffee raised in different provinces of Brazil, throughout a country extending north and south for more than twelve hundred miles. The berry alluded to is produced along the range of high hills to the westward of Bahia, and extending north toward the Parnehiba. It is never arrested attention as a distinct grade of the article, but it contains more coffee or caffeine to the pound than any berry known to commerce. It is the smallest, heaviest, and darkest green of any coffee that comes to our market from Brazil, and may be known by these traits.

I have tested it in the land where it is grown, and also at home. I have been in the last ten years, and I place it at the head of the list, with mocha next. Either will make perfect coffee, if treated as follows. Of the berry, browned and ground, take six heaping tablespoons full, and add three pints of cold water. Place the kettle over the fire and bring to a sharp boil. Set it a little aside, where it will bubble and simmer until wanted, and just before pouring, drip in half a gill of cold water to settle it. That is all there is to it. The quantity of berry is about twice as much as usually given in recipes, but if you want coffee, you had better add two spoonfuls than cut off one. In 1867, and again in 1870, I had occasion to visit the West Indian Islands and Brazil.

In common with most coffee-topers, I had heard much of the super-excellence ascribed to West Indian coffee and Brazilian coffee. I concluded to investigate. I had rooms at the Hotel de Europa, Para, North Brazil. There were six of us, English and American boarders. Every morning, before we were out of our hammocks, a barefooted, half-naked Mena Negres came around and served each of us with a small cup of strong black coffee and sugar ad libitum. There was not enough of it for a drink. It was rather in the nature of a medicine, and so intended. To kill the Biscoes, they said. The coffee was above criticism. I went, in the dark of a tropical morning, with Senor Jiao to the coffee factory, where they browned the berry and saw him buy a pound, smoking hot, for which he paid twenty-five cents, or quite as much as it would cost in New York.

In ten minutes the coffee was at the hotel and ground. This is the way they brew it. A round-bottomed kettle was sitting on the brick range, with a half-gallon of boiling water in it. Over the kettle, a square piece of white flannel was suspended, caught up at the corners like a dip-net. In this the coffee was placed, and a small darky put in his time steadily with a soup-ladle, dipping the boiling water from the kettle and pouring it on the coffee. There was a constant stream percolating through the coffee in cloth, which, in the course of half an hour, became almost black and clear as brandy. This was Brazilian coffee. As the cups used were very small, and as none but the northerners drank more than one cup, I found that the hotel did not use over two quarts of coffee each morning.

It struck me that a pound of fresh real coffee-berry ought to make a half-gallon of rather powerful coffee. On my arrival home, not having any small darky or any convenient arrangement for the dip-net, I had a sack made of light white flannel, holding about one pint. In this I put one quarter pound of freshly ground berry, with water enough for five large cups. It was boiled thoroughly, and proved just as good as the Brazilian article, but too strong for any of the family except the writer. Those who have a fancy for clear, strong Brazilian coffee will see how easily and simply it can be made. But on a heavy knapsack and rifle-trap among the mountains, or a lone canoe cruise in a strange wilderness, I do not carry coffee.

I prefer tea. Often, when too utterly tired and beaten for further travel, I have tried coffee, whiskey, or brandy, and a long experience convinces me there is nothing so restful and refreshing to an exhausted man as a dish of strong green tea. To make it as it should be made, bring the water to a high boil and let it continue to boil for a full minute. Set it off the fire, and it will cease boiling. Put in a handful of tea, and it will instantly boil up again. Then set it near the fire, where it will simmer for a few minutes, when it will be ready for use. Buy the best green tea you can find, and use it freely on a hard tramp. Black or oolong tea is excellent in camp. It should be put in the pot with cold water and brought to the boiling point.

Almost any man can cook potatoes, but few cook them well. Most people think them best boiled in their jackets, and to cook them perfectly in this manner is so simple and easy that the wonder is how anyone can fail. A kettle of screeching hot water with a small handful of salt in it, good potatoes of nearly equal size, washed clean and clipped at the ends, these are the requisites. Put the potatoes in the boiling water, cover closely and keep the water at high boiling pitch until you can thrust a sharp sliver through the largest potato. Then drain off the water and set the kettle in a hot place, with the lid partly off. Take them out only as they are wanted. Lukewarm potatoes are not good. They will be found about as good as potatoes can be when cooked in their jackets.

But there is a better way, as thus. Select enough for a mess of smooth, sound tubers. Pair them carefully, taking off as little as possible, because the best of the potato lies nearest the skin. And cook them as above. When done, pour the water off to the last drop. Sprinkle a spoonful of salt and fine cracker-crumbs over them. Then shake, roll, and rattle them in the kettle until the outsides are white and floury. Keep them piping hot until wanted. It is the way to have perfect boiled potatoes. Many outers are fond of roast potatoes in camp, and they mostly spoil them in the roasting, although there is no better place than the campfire in which to do it. To cook them aright, scoop out a basin-like depression under the forestick, three or four inches deep, and large enough to hold the tubers when laid side by side.

Fill it with bright hardwood coals, and keep up a strong heat for half an hour or more. Next, clean out the hollow, place the potatoes in it, and cover them with hot sand or ashes. Top with a heap of glowing coals, and keep up all the heat you like. In about twenty minutes, commence to try them with a sharpened hardwood sliver. When this will pass through them, they are done, and should be raked out at once. Run the sliver through them from end to end to let the steam escape and use immediately, as a roast potato quickly becomes soggy and bitter. I will add that, in selecting a supply of potatoes for camp, only the finest and smoothest should be taken. A man can be a trout crank. He may have been looking forward for ten weary months to the time when he is to strike the much dreamed-of mountain stream, where trout may be taken and eaten without stint.

Occasionally, not often, his dream is realized. For two or three days he revels in fly-fishing and eating brook trout. Then his enthusiasm begins to subside. He talks less of his favorite flies and hints that waiting hour after hour in ice-water gives him cramps in the calves of his legs. Also he finds that brook trout, eaten for days in succession, pale on the appetite. He hankers for the flesh pots of the restaurant, and his soul yearns for the bean-pot of home. Luckily, someone has brought a sack of white beans, and the expert—there is always an expert in camp—is deputed to cook them. He accepts the trust, and proceeds to do it. He puts a quart of dry beans and a liberal chunk of pork in a two-quart kettle, covers the mess with water, and brings it to a rapid boil.

Presently, the beans begin to swell and lift the lid of the kettle. Their conduct is simply demonical. They lift up the lid of the kettle, they tumble out over the rim in a way to provoke a saint, and they have scarcely begun to cook. The expert is not to be beaten. As they rise, he spoons them out and throws them away until half of the best beans being wasted, the rest settle to business. He fills the kettle with water and watches it for an hour. When the bean-skins and scum arise, he uses the spoon, and when a greasy ring of salt forms around the rim of the kettle, he carefully scrapes it off, but most of it drops back into the pot. When the beans seem cooked to the point of disintegration, he lifts off the kettle and announces dinner.

It is not a success. The largest beans are granulated rather than cooked, while the mealy portion of them has fallen to the bottom of the kettle and become scorched thereon, and the smaller beans are too hard to be edible. The liquid that should be palatable bean soup is greasy salt water, and the pork is half raw. The party falls back, hungry and disgusted. Even if the mess were well cooked, it is too salty for eating. And why should this be so? Why should any sensible man spend years in acquiring an education that shall fit him for the struggle of life, yet refuse to spend a single day in learning how to cook the food that must sustain the life? It is one of the conundrums no one will ever find out.

There is no article of food more easily carried, and none that contains more nourishment to the pound than the bean. Limers are usually preferred, but the large white marrow is just as good. It will pay to select them carefully. Keep an eye on grocery stocks, and when you strike a lot of extra-large, clean beans, buy twice as many as you need for camp use. Spread them on a table, a quart at a time, and separate the largest and best from the others. Fully one-half will go to the side of the largest and finest, and these may be put in a muslin bag and kept till wanted. Select the expeditionary pork with equal care. Buy nothing but thick, solid, clear, with a pink tinge. Reject that which is white and lardy.

With such material, if you cannot lay over Boston baked beans, you had better sweep the cook out of camp. This is how to cook them. Put a pound or a little more of clean pork in the kettle, with water enough to cover it. Let it boil slowly half an hour. In the meantime, wash and parboil one pint of beans. Drain the water from the pork and place the beans around it. Add two quarts of water and hang the kettle where it will boil steadily but not rapidly for two hours. Pair neatly and thinly five or six medium-sized potatoes and allow them from thirty to forty minutes, according to size and variety, in which to cook. They must be pressed down among the beans so as to be entirely covered. If the beans be fresh and fine, they will probably fall to pieces before time is up.

This, if they are not allowed to scorch, makes them all the better. If a portion of pork be left over, it is excellent sliced very thin when cold and eaten with bread. The above is a dinner for three or four hungry men. It is usually the case that some of the party prefer baked beans. To have these in perfection, add one gill of raw beans and a piece of pork three inches square to the foregoing proportions. Boil as above until the beans begin to crack open. Then fork out the smaller piece of pork. Place it in the center of your largest cooking tin. Take beans enough from the kettle to nearly fill the tin. Set it over a bright fire on the range. Invert the second size tin for a cover. Place live hardwood coals on top and bake precisely as directed for bread.

Only, when the coals on top become dull and black, brush them off, raise the cover and take a look. If the beans are getting too dry, add three or four spoonfuls of liquor from the kettle, replace the cover and coals, and let them bake until they are of a rich, light brown on top. Then serve. It is a good dish. If Boston can beat it, I don't want to lay up anything for old age. Brown bread and baked beans have a natural connection in the average American mind, and rightly, they supplement each other, even as spring lamb and green peas with our transatlantic cousins. But there is a better recipe for brown bread than is known to the dwellers of the Hub, one that has captured first prizes at county fairs and won the approval of Epicure's from Maine to Minnesota, the one that brought honest old Greeley down on his strictures anent country bread.

And here is the recipe. Take it for what it's worth, and try it fairly before condemning it. It is for home use. One quart of sweet milk, one quart of sour, two quarts of Indian meal, and one quart of flour, and a cupful of dark, thin Puerto Rico molasses. Use one teaspoonful of soda only. Bake in a steady, moderate oven for four hours. Knead thoroughly before baking. Soup is, or should be, a leading food element in every woodland camp. I am sorry to say that nothing is, as a rule, more badly botched, while nothing is more easily or simply cooked as it should be. Soup requires time and a solid basis of the right material. Venison is the basis, and the best material is the bloody part of the deer, where the bullet went through.

We used to throw this away, and we have learned better. Cut about four pounds of the bloody meat into convenient pieces and wipe them as clean as possible with leaves or a damp cloth, but don't wash them. Put the meat into a five-quart kettle nearly filled with water and raise it to a lively boiling pitch. Let it boil for two hours. Have ready a three-tined fork made from the branch of birch or beech, and with this test the meat from time to time. When it parts readily from the bones, slice in a large onion. Pair six large smooth potatoes. Cut five of them into quarters and drop them into the kettle. Scrape the sixth one into the soup for thickening. Season with salt and white pepper to taste.

When, by skirmishing with the wooden fork, you can fish up bones with no meat on them, the soup is cooked and the kettle may be set aside to cool. Any hungry sportsman can order the next motion. Squirrels, red, black, gray, or fox, make nearly as good a soup as venison, and better stew. Hares, rabbits, grouse, quail, or any of the smaller game birds may be used in making soup, but all small game is better in a stew. To make a stew, proceed for the first two hours precisely as directed for soup. Then slice in a couple of good-sized onions and six medium potatoes. When the meat begins to fall from the bones, make a thickening by rubbing three tablespoons of flour and two spoonfuls of melted butter together.

Thin to the consistency of cream with liquor from the kettle, and drip slowly into the stew, stirring briskly meanwhile. Allow all soups and stews to boil two hours before seasoning, and use only the best table salt and white or black pepper. Season sparingly. It is easier to put salt in than to get it out. Cayenne pepper adds zest to a soup or stew, but as some dislike it, let each man season his plate to his own cheek. Fried squirrels are excellent for a change, but are mostly spoiled by poor cooks, who put tough old he's and tender young squirrels together, treating all alike. To dress and cook them properly, chop off the heads, tails, and feet with the hatchet. Cut the skin on the back crosswise, and, inserting the two middle fingers, pull the skin off in two parts, head and tail.

Clean and cut them in halves, leaving two ribs on the hindquarters. Put hind and forequarters into the kettle and parboil until tender. This will take about twenty minutes for young ones and twice as long for the old. When a sharpened sliver will pass easily through the flesh, take the hindquarters from the kettle, drain and place them in the frying-pan with pork fat hissing hot. Fry to a light rich brown. It is the only proper way to cook squirrels. The four quarters are to be left in the kettle for a stew. It sometimes happens that pigeons are very plentiful, and the camp is tempted into overshooting and overcooking until everyone is thoroughly sick of pigeons. This is all wrong. No party is or can be justified in wanton slaughter.

Just because birds happen to be plentiful, they will soon be scarce enough. Pigeons are hardly game, and they are not a first-class bird, but a good deal may be got out of them by the following method. Dress them at the rate of two birds to one man. Save the giblets. Place in the kettle and boil until a sliver will easily pierce the breasts. Fork them out, cut the thick meat from each side of the breastbone, roll slightly in flour, and put the pieces in the pan, frying them in the same way as directed for squirrels. Put the remainder of the birds in the kettle for a stew. Quail are good cooked in the same manner, but are better roasted or broiled. To roast them, parboil for fifteen minutes, and in the meantime cut a thin hardwood stick, eighteen inches long for each bird.

Sharpen the sticks neatly at both ends. Impale the birds on one end, and thrust the sticks into the ground near the fire, leaning them so the heat will strike strongly and evenly. Hang a strip of pork between the legs of each bird, and turn frequently until they are a rich brown. When the sharpened sliver will pass easily through the breast, they are done. Woodcock are to be plucked, but not drawn. Suspend the bird in bright, clear heat, hanging a ribbon of fat pork between the legs, and roast until well done. Do not parboil him. Rough grouse are excellent roasted in the same manner, but should first be parboiled. Mallards, teal, butterballs, all edible ducks, are to be treated the same as grouse.

If you are ever lucky enough to feast on a canvasback roasted as above, you will be apt to borrow a leaf from Oliver Twist. Venison steak should be pounded to tenderness, pressed and worked into shape with the hunting knife, and broiled over a bed of clean hardwood coals. A three-pronged birch fork makes the best broiler. For roast venison, the best portion is the forward part of the saddle. Trim off the flanky parts and the ends of the ribs. Split the backbone lengthwise, that the inner surface may be well exposed. Hang it by a strong cord or a bark string in powerful even heat. Lay thin strips of pork along the upper edge, and turn from time to time until done. It had better be left a little rare than overdone.

Next to the saddle for roasting comes the shoulder. Peel this smoothly from the side, using the hunting knife. Trim neatly and cut off the leg at the knee. Gash the thickest part of the flesh, and press shreds of pork into the gashes, with two or three thin slices skewered to the upper part. Treat it in the roasting as described above. It is not equal to the saddle when warm, but sliced and eaten cold is quite good. And do not despise the fretful porcupine. He is better than he looks. If you happen on a healthy young specimen when you are needing meat, give him a show before condemning him. Shoot him humanely in the head and dress him. It is easily done. There are no quills on the belly, and the skin peels as freely as a rabbit's.

Take him to camp, parboil him for thirty minutes, and roast or broil him to a rich brown over a bed of glowing coals. He will need no pork to make him juicy, and you will find him very like spring lamb, only better. I do not accept the decision that ranks the little grey rabbit as a hare, simply because he has a slit in his lip. At all events, I shall call him a rabbit for convenience. To distinguish him from his long-legged cousin, who turns white in winter, Never takes to a hole, and can keep ahead of hounds nearly all day, affording a game musical chase that is seldom out of hearing. He never, by any chance, has an ounce of fat on him, and is not very good eating. He can, however, be worked into a good stew or a passable soup, provided he has not been feeding on laurel.

The rabbit is an animal of different habits and different attributes. When jumped from his form, he is apt to dig out for a hole or the nearest stone heap. Sometimes an old one will potter around a thicket, ahead of a slow dog, but his tendency is always to pull. But he affords some sport, and as an article of food beats the long-legged hare out of sight. He is excellent in stews or soups, while the after half of him, flattened down with the hatchet, parboiled and fried brown in butter or pork fat, is equal to spring chicken. In the cooking of fish, as of flesh and fowl, The plainest and simplest methods are best, and for anything under two pounds it is not necessary to go beyond the frying-pan.

Trout of over a pound should be split down the back, that they may lie well in the pan and cook evenly. Roll well in meal, or a mixture of meal and flour, and fry to a rich brown in pork fat, piping hot. Larger fish may just as well be fried, but are also adapted to other methods. And there are people who like fish broiled and buttered, or boiled. To broil a fish, split him on the back and broil him for four minutes, flesh side down. Turn and broil the other side in equal time. Butter and season to taste. To boil, the fish should weigh three pounds or more. Clean and crimp him by gashing the sides deeply with a sharp knife. Put him in a kettle of boiling water, strongly salted and boiled twenty-five minutes.

For each additional pound above three, add five minutes. For gravy, rub together two tablespoons of flour and one of melted butter, adding one heaping teaspoonful of evaporated milk and thin with liquor from the cattle. When done, it should have the consistency of cream. Take the fish from the cattle, drain, pour the gravy over it, and eat only with white bread or hardtack, with butter. The simplest is best, healthiest and most appetizing. As a rule, on a mountain in tramp or a canoe cruise, I do not tote canned goods. I carry my duffel in a light, pliable knapsack, and there is an aggravating antagonism between the uncompromising rims of a fruit can and the knobs of my vertebrae that twenty years of practice have utterly failed to reconcile.

And yet I have found my account in a can of condensed milk, not for tea or coffee, but on bread as a substitute for butter. And I have found a small can of Boston-baked beans a most helpful lunch, with a nine-mile carry ahead. It was not epicurean, but had staying qualities. I often have a call to pilot some muscular young friend into the deep forest, and he usually carries a large pack-basket, with a full supply of quart-cans of salmon, tomatoes, peaches, etc. As in duty-bound, I admonish him kindly but firmly on the folly of loading his young shoulders with such effeminate luxuries. Often, I fear, hurting his young feelings by brusque advice. But at night, when the camp-fire burns brightly and he begins to fish out his tins, the heart of the old woodsman relents, and I make amends by allowing him to divide the groceries.

There is a method at cooking, usually called mudding up, which I have found to preserve the flavor and juiciness of ducks, grouse, etc. better than any other method. I described the method in forest and stream more than a year ago, but a brief repetition may not be out of place here. Suppose the bird to be cooked is a mallard, or better still, a canvasback. Cut off the head and most part of the neck. Cut off the pinions and pull out the tail feathers. Make a plastic cake of clay or tenacious earth an inch thick and large enough to envelop the bird and cover him with it snugly. Dig an oval pit under the forestick, large enough to hold him and fill with hot coals, keeping up a strong heat. Just before turning in for the night, clean out the pit and put in the bird.

Cover with hot embers and coals. Keep up a brisk fire over it all night. When taken out in the morning, you will have an oval, oblong mass of baked clay with a well-roasted bird inside. Let the mass cool until it can be handled. Break off the clay, and feathers and skin will come with it, leaving the bird clean and skinless. Season it as you eat, with salt, pepper, and a squeeze of lemon if you like, nothing else. In selecting salt, Choose that which has a gritty feel when rubbed between thumb and finger, and use white pepper rather than black, grinding the berry yourself. Procure a common tin pepper-box, and fill it with a mixture of fine salt and cayenne pepper, ten spoonfuls of the former and one of the latter.

Have it always where you can lay your hand on it. You will come to use it daily in camp, and if you ever get lost, you will find it of value. Fish and game leave a flat, flashy taste eaten without salt, and are also unwholesome. Do not carry any of the one hundred and one condiments, sauces, garnishes, etc., laid down in the books. Salt and pepper and lemons fill the bill in that line. Lobster sauce, shrimp sauce, majoram, celery, parsley, thyme, anchovies, etc., may be left at the hotels. It may be expected that a pocket volume on woodcraft should contain a liberal chapter of instruction on hunting. It would be quite useless. Hunters like poets are born, not made. The art cannot be taught on paper.

A few simple hints, however, may not be misplaced. To start aright, have your clothes fitted for hunting. Select good cashmere of a sort of dull, no-colored neutral tint, like a decayed stump, and have coat, pants, and cap made of it. For foot-gear, two pairs of heavy yarn socks, with rubber soles or buckskin moccasins. In hunting, silence is gold. Go quietly, slowly, and silently. Remember that the bright-eyed, sharp-eared woodfolk can see, hear, and smell with a keenness that throws our dull faculties quite in the shade. As you go lumbering and stick-breaking through the woods, you will never know how many of these quietly leave your path to right and left, allowing you to pass while they glide away unseen, unknown.

It is easily seen that a sharp-sensed light-body denizen of the woods can detect the approach of a heavy, bifurcated, booted animal a long way ahead, and avoid him accordingly. But there is an art, little known in practice, that invariably succeeds in out-thinking most wild animals, an art simple in conception and execution, but requiring patience, a species, so to speak, of high art in forestry, the art of sitting on a log, I could enlarge on this. I might say that the only writer of any note who has mentioned this phase of woodcraft is Mr. Charles D. Warner, and he only speaks of it in painting the character of that lazy old guide, Old Phelps. Sitting on a log includes a deal of patience, with oftentimes cold feet and chattering teeth, but, attended to faithfully and patiently, is quite as successful as chasing a deer all day on tracking snow.

While it can be practiced when the leaves are dry, and no other mode of still-hunting offers the ghost of a chance. When a man is moving through the woods, weary and watchful animals are pretty certain to catch sight of him. But let him keep perfectly still, and the conditions are reversed. I have had my best luck, and killed my best deer, by practically waiting hour after hour on runways. But the time when a hunter could get four or five fair shots in a day by watching a runway has passed away forever. Never any more will buffalo be seen in solid masses covering square miles in one pack. The immense bands of elk and droves of deer are things of the past, and the game must go.

8 08 - A Ten Days' Trip in the Wilderness - Going It Alone 21:41

A Ten Days' Trip in the Wilderness, Going and Alone About the only inducements I can think of for making a ten days' journey through a strong wilderness, solitary and alone, were a liking for adventure, intense love of nature in her wildest dress, and a strange fondness of being in deep forest by myself. The choice of route was determined by the fact that two old friends and schoolmates had chosen to cast their lots in Michigan, one near Saginaw Bay, the other among the pines of the Muskegon, and both were a little homesick, and both wrote frequent letters in which, knowing my weak point, they exhausted their adjectives and adverbs in describing the abundance of game and the marvelous fishing.

Now the Muskegon friend, Davis, was pretty well out of reach, but Pete Williams, only a few miles out of Saginaw, was easily accessible. And so it happened on a bright October morning, when there came a frost that cut from Maine to Missouri, that a sudden fancy took me to use my new Billinghurst on something larger than squirrels. It took about one minute to decide, and an hour to pack such duffels I needed for a few weeks in the woods. Remembering Pete's two brown-eyed kids, and knowing that they were ague-stricken and homesick, I made place for a few apples and peaches with a ripe melon. For Pete and I had been chums in Rochester, and I had bunked in his attic on Galooshia Street for two years.

Also, his babies thought as much of me as their father. The trip to Saginaw was easy and pleasant. A Redbird packet to Buffalo, the old propeller Globe to Lower Saginaw, and a ride of half a day on a buckboard brought me to Pete Williams' clearing. Were they glad to see me? Well, I think so. Pete and his wife cried like children, while the two little homesick kids laid their silken heads on my knees and sobbed for very joy. When I brought out the apples and peaches, assuring them that these came from the little garden of their old home—liar that I was—their delight was boundless. And the fact that their favorite tree was a sour bough, while these were sweet, did not shake their faith in the least.

I stayed ten days or more with the Williams family, and the fishing and hunting were all that he had said, all that could be asked. The woods swarmed with pigeons and squirrels. Grouse, quail, ducks, and wild turkeys were too plentiful, while a good hunter could scarcely fail of getting a standing shot at a deer in a morning's hunt. But what use could be made of fish or game in such a place? They were all half sick and had little appetite. Mrs. Williams could not endure the smell of fish. They had been cloyed on small game and were surfeited on venison. My sporting ardor sank to zero. I had the decency not to slaughter game for the love of killing and leave it to rot or hook large fish that could not be used.

I soon grew restless and began to think about the lumber camp on the Muskegon. By surveyors' lines, it was hardly more than sixty miles from Pete Williams' clearing to the Joe Davis camp on the Muskegon. But practically, said Pete, Joe and I are a thousand miles apart. White men, as a rule, don't undertake to cross this wilderness. The only one I know who has tried it is old Bill Hance. He can tell you all about it. Hance was the hunting and trapping genius of Saginaw Bay. A man who dwelt in the woods summer and winter, and never trimmed his hair or wore any other covering on his head. Not a misanthrope or a taciturn, but friendly and talkative, rather, liking best to live alone, but fond of tramping across the woods to gossip with neighbors.

A very tall man withal, and so thin, but as he went, rapidly winding and turning among fallen logs, you looked to see him tangle up and tumble in a loose coil like a wet rope, but he was better than he looked. He had a high reputation as trailer, guide, or trapper, and was mentioned as a bad man in a racket. I had met him several times, and as he was decidedly a character, had rather laid myself out to cultivate him. And now that I began to have a strong notion of crossing the woods alone, I took counsel of Bill Hance. Unlike Williams, he thought it perfectly feasible, and rather a neat gamey thing for a youngster to do. He had crossed the woods several times with surveying parties, and once alone.

He knew an Indian trail which led to an old camp within ten miles of the Muskegon, and thought the trail could be followed. It took him a little less than three days to go through, but, he added, I naturally travel a little faster in the woods than most men. If you can follow the trail, you ought to get through in little more'n three days, if you keep moggin'. One afternoon, I carefully packed the knapsack and organized for a long woods tramp. I took little stock in that trail, or the three days notion as to time. I made calculations on losing the trail the first day and being out a full week. The outfit consisted of rifle, hatchet, compass, blanket bag, knapsack, and knife. For rations, one loaf of bread, two quarts of meal, two pounds of pork, one pound of sugar, with tea, salt, etc., and a supply of jerked venison.

One tin dish, twelve rounds of ammunition, and the bullet molds filled the list, and did not make a heavy load. Early on a crisp, bright October morning, I kissed the little fellows good-bye, and started out with Hans, who was to put me on the trail. I left the children with sorrow and pity at heart. I am glad now that my visit was a golden hiatus in the sick monotony of their young lives, and that I was able to brighten a few days of their dreary existence. They had begged for the privilege of sleeping with me on a shake-down from the first, and when, as so often happened, a pair of little feverish lips would murmur timidly and pleadingly, I'm so dry. Can I have a drink? I am thankful that I did not put the pleater off with a sip of tepid water, but always brought it from the spring, sparkling and cold, for a twelvemonth later there were two little graves in the corner of the stump-blackened garden, and two sore hearts in Pete Williams' cabin.

Hance found the trail easily, but the Indians had been gone a long time, and it was filled with leaves, dim and not easy to follow. It ended as nearly all trails do. It branched off to the right and left, grew dimmer and slimmer, degenerated to a deer path, petered out to a squirrel track, ran up a tree, and ended in a knot-hole. I was not sorry, for it left me free to follow my nose, my inclination, and the compass. There are men who, on finding themselves alone in a pathless forest, become appalled, almost panic-stricken. The vastness of an unbroken wilderness subdues them, and they quail before the relentless untamed forces of nature. These are the men who grow enthusiastic, at home, about sylvan life, outdoor sports, but always strike camp and come home rather sooner than they intended.

And there be some who plunge into unbroken forest with a feeling of fresh, free, invigorating delight, as they might dash into a crisp ocean surf on a hot day. These know that nature is stern, hard, immovable, and terrible in unrelenting cruelty. When wintry winds are out and the mercury far below zero, she will allow her most ardent lover to freeze on her snowy breast without waving a leaf in pity, or offering him a match, and scores of her devotees may starve to death in as many different languages before she will offer a loaf of bread. She does not deal in matches and loaves, rather in thunderbolts and granite mountains, and the ashes of her camp-fires bury proud cities. But, like all tyrants, she yields to force and gives the more the more she is beaten.

She may starve or freeze the poet, the scholar, the scientist, all the same. She has in store food, fuel, and shelter, which the skilful, self-reliant woodsman can wring from her savage hand with axe and rifle. Only to him whose coat of rags has pressed at night her regal feet shall come the secrets, strange and sweet, of century pines and beetling crags. For him the goddess shall unlock the golden secrets which have lain ten thousand years through frost and rain deep in the bosom of the rock. The trip was a long, tiresome one, considering the distance. There were no hair-breadth escapes. I was not tackled by bears, treed by wolves, or nearly killed by a hand-to-claw racket with a panther, and there were no Indians to come sneak-hunting around after hair.

The animal life was abundant, exuberant even. The bright-eyed wood folk seemed tame, nay, almost friendly, and quite intent on minding their own business. It was a pigeon year, a squirrel year, and also a marvelous year for shack or mast. Every nut-bearing tree was loaded with sweet, well-filled nuts, and this, coupled with the fact that the Indians had left and the whites had not yet got in, probably accounted for the plentitude of game. I do not think there was an hour of daylight on that trip, when squirrels were not too numerous to be counted, while pigeons were a constant quantity from start to finish. Grouse in the thickets, and quail in the high oak openings or small prairies, with droves of wild turkeys among the heavy timber, were met with almost hourly, and there was scarcely a day on which I could not have had a standing shot at a bear.

But the most interesting point about the game was, to me at least, the marvelous abundance of deer. They were everywhere, on all sorts of ground, and among all varieties of timber. Very tame they were, too, often stopping to look at the stranger, offering easy shots at short range, and finally going off quite leisurely. No ardent lover of forest life could be lonely in such company and in such weather. The only drawback was the harassing and vexatious manner in which lakes, streams, swamps, and marshes constantly persisted in getting across the way, compelling long detours to the north or south, when the true course was nearly due west. I think there were days on which ten hours of pretty faithful tramping did not result in more than three or four miles of direct headway.

The headwaters of the Salt and Chippewa rivers were especially obstructive, and when more than half the distance was covered, I ran into a tangle of small lakes, marshes, and swamps not marked on the map, which cost a hard day's work to leave behind. While there were no startling adventures and no danger connected with the trip, There was a constant succession of incidents that made the lonely tramp far from monotonous. Some of these occurrences were intensely interesting and a little exciting. Perhaps the brief recital of a few may not be uninteresting at the present day, when game is so rapidly disappearing. My rifle was a neat, hair-triggered Billinghurst, carrying sixty round balls to the pound—a muzzle-loader, of course, and a nail-driver.

I made just three shots in ten days, and each shot stood for a plump young deer in the short blue. It seemed wicked to murder such a bright, graceful animal, when no more than the loins in a couple of slices from the ham could be used, leaving the balance to the wolves, who never failed to take possession before I was out of earshot. But I condone the excess, if excess it were, by the many chances I allowed to pass, not only on deer, but bear, and once on a big brute of a wild hog, the wickedest and most formidable-looking animal I ever met in the woods. The meeting happened in this wise. I had been bothered and wearied for half a day by a bad piece of low marshy ground, and had at length struck a dry rolling oak opening, where I sat down at the foot of a small oak to rest.

I had been scarcely resting ten minutes when I caught sight of a large dirty white animal slowly working its way in my direction through the low bushes, evidently nosing around for acorns. I was puzzled to say what it was. It looked like a hog, but stood too high on its legs. And how would such a beast get there anyhow? Nearer and nearer he came, and at last walked out into an open spot less than twenty yards distant. It was a wild hog of the ugliest and largest description. Tall as a yearling, with an unnaturally large head and dangerous-looking tusks that curved above his savage snout like small horns. There was promise of magnificent power in his immense shoulders, while the flanks and hams were disproportionately light.

He came out to the open leisurely munching his acorns, or amusing himself by plowing deep furrows with his nose, and not until within ten yards did he appear to note the presence of a stranger. Suddenly he raised his head and became rigid as though frozen to stone. He was taking an observation. For a few seconds he remained immovable. Then his bristles became erect, and with a deep guttural grunting noise he commenced hitching himself along in my direction sidewise. My hair raised, and in an instant I was on my feet with the cock rifled to my shoulder, meaning to shoot before his charge and then make good time up the tree. But there was no need. As I sprang to my feet, He sprang for the hazel bushes and went tearing through them with the speed of a deer, keeping up a succession of snorts and grunts that could be heard long after he passed out of sight.

I am not subject to buck fever, and was disgusted to find myself so badly rattled that I could scarcely handle the rifle. At first I was provoked at myself for not getting a good ready in shooting him in the head as he came out of the bushes, but it was better to let him live. He was not carnivorous or a beast of prey. and, as ugly as he was, certainly looked better alive than he would as a pork-hine corpse. No doubt he relished his acorns as well as though he had been less ugly, and he was a savage power in the forest. Bears love pork, and the fact that the hog was picking up a comfortable living in that wilderness is presumptive evidence that he was a match for the largest bear, or he would have been eaten long before.

Another little incident in which Bruin played a leading part rises vividly to memory. It was hardly an adventure, only the meeting of man and bear, and they parted on good terms, with no hardness on either side. The meeting occurred, as usually was the case with large game on dry oaklands, where the undergrowth was hazel, sassafras, and wild grapevine. As before, I had paused for a rest, when I began to catch glimpses of a very black animal working its way among the hazel bushes, under the scattering of oaks, and toward me. With no definite intention of shooting, But just to see how easy it might be to kill him, I got a good ready and waited. Slowly and lazily he nuzzled his way among the trees, sitting up occasionally to crunch acorns, until he was within twenty-five yards of me, with the bright bead neatly showing at the butt of his ear, and he sitting on his haunches, calmly chewing his acorns, oblivious of danger.

He was the shortest-legged, blackest, and glossiest bear I had ever seen, and such a fair shot. But I could not use either skin or meat, and he was a splendid picture just as he sat. Shot down and left to taint the blessed air, he would not look as wholesome, let alone that it would be unwarrantable murder. And so, when he came nosing under the very tree where I was sitting, suddenly I jumped up, threw my hat at him, and gave a Comanche yell. He tumbled over in a limp heap, grunting and whining for very terror. gathered himself up, got up headway, and disappeared with wonderful speed, considering the length of his legs. On another occasion, and this was in heavy timber, I was resting on a log, partially concealed by spice-bushes, when I noticed a large flock of turkeys coming in my direction.

As they rapidly advanced with their quick gliding walk, the flock drew to a drove. The drove became a swarm. An army! To right and on the left, as far as I could see in front, a legion of turkeys were marching. Steadily marching to the eastward. Among them were some of the grandest gobblers I had ever seen, and one magnificent fellow came straight toward me. Never before or since have I seen such a splendid wild bird. His thick, glossy black beard nearly reached the ground. His bronze uniform was of the richest, and he was decidedly the largest I have ever seen. When within fifty feet of the spot where I was nearly hidden, his wary eye caught something suspicious. and he raised his superb head for an instant in an attitude of motionless attention.

Then, with lowered head and drooping tail, he turned right about, gave the note of alarm, put the trunk of a large tree quickly between himself and the enemy, and went away like the wind. With the speed of thought, the warning note was sounded along the whole line, and in a moment the woods seemed alive with turkeys, running for dear life. In less time than it takes to tell, that gallinaceous army had passed out of sight forever, and the like of it will never again be possible on this continent. And again, on the morning of the sixth day out, I blundered on to such an aggregation of deer as a man sees but once in a lifetime. I had camped overnight on lowland among heavy timber, but soon after striking camp came to a place where the timber was scattered and the land had a gentle rise to the westward.

Scarcely had I left the lowland behind when a few deer got out of their beds and commenced lazily bounding away. They were soon joined by others, on the right flank, on the left, and ahead. They continued to rise and canter off leisurely, stopping at a distance of one to two hundred yards to look back. It struck me finally that I had started something rather unusual, and I began counting the deer in sight. It was useless to attempt it. Their white flags were flying in front and on both flanks, as far as one could see, and new ones seemed constantly joining their procession. Among them were several very large bucks with superb antlers, and these seemed very little afraid of the small, quiet biped and leaf-colored rig.

They often paused to gaze back, with bold, fearless front, as though inclined to call a halt and face the music, but when within a hundred yards would turn and canter leisurely away. As the herd neared the summit of a low-lying ridge, I tried to make a reasonable guess at their numbers, by counting apart and estimating the rest. but could come to no satisfactory conclusion. As they passed the summit and loped down the gentle decline toward heavy timber, they began to scatter, and soon not a flag was in sight. It was a magnificent, servine army with white banners, and I shall never look upon its like again. The largest drove of deer I had seen in twenty years consisted of seven only, and with much of interest, much of tramping, and not a little vexatious delay, I came at length to a stream that I knew must be the south branch of the Muskegon.

The main river could scarcely be more than ten miles to the westward, and might easily be reached in one day. It was time. The meal and pork were nearly gone. Sugar and tea were at low ebb, and I was tired of venison. Tired anyhow, ready for human speech and human companionship. It was in the afternoon of the ninth day that I crossed the south Muskegon and laid a course west by north. The traveling was not bad, and in less than an hour I ran on to the ruins of a camp that I knew to be the work of Indians. It had evidently been a permanent winter camp, and was almost certainly the Indian camp spoken of by Bill Hantz. Pausing a short time to look over the ruins, with the lonely feeling always induced by a decayed, rotting camp, I struck due west and made several miles before sundown.

I camped on a little rill near a huge dry stub that would peel, made the last of the meal into a johnny-cake, broiled the last slice of pork, and lay down with the notion that a ten days' tramp, where it took an average of fifteen miles to make six, ought to end on the morrow. At sunrise I was again on foot, and after three hours of steady tramping saw a smoky opening ahead. In five minutes I was standing on the left bank of the Muskegon. And the Joe Davis camp, was it upstream or down? I decided on the latter, and started slowly downstream, keeping an eye out for signs. In less than an hour I struck a dim log road which led to the river, and there was a landing with the usual debris of skids, loose bark, chalks, and some pieces of broken boards.

It did not take long to construct an efficient log raft of the dry skids, and as I drifted placidly down the deep wild river, munching the last bit of johnny-cake, I inwardly swore that my next wilderness cruise should be by water. It was in late afternoon that I heard, blessed sound, the eager clank-clank-clank of the old-fashioned sawmill. It grew nearer and more distinct. Presently I could distinguish the rumble of machinery as the carriage gigged back. Then the raft rounded a gentle bin, and a mill with its long log boarding-house came full in sight. As the raft swung into the landing, the mill became silent. A brown-bearded, red-shirted fellow came down to welcome me. A pair of strong hands grasped both my own, and the voice of Joe Davis said earnestly, "'Why, George, I was never so damned glad to see a man in my life!' The ten days' trap was ended.

It had been wearisome to a degree, but interesting and instructive. I had seen more game birds and animals in the time than I ever saw before or since in a whole season. And though I came out with clothes pretty well worn and torn off my back and legs, I was a little disposed to plume myself on the achievement. Even at this day I'm a little proud of the fact that, with so many temptations to slaughter, I only fired three shots on the route. Nothing but the exceptionally fine dry weather rendered such a trip possible in a wilderness so cut up with swamps, lakes, marshes, and streams. A week of steady rain or premature snowstorm, either likely enough at that season, would have been most disastrous, while a forest fire like that of fifty-six and later ones would simply have proved fatal.

Reader, if ever you are tempted to make a similar thoughtless reckless trip, don't do it.

9 09 - The Light Canoe and the Double Blade - Various Canoes for Various Canoeists - Reasons for preferring the Clinker-Built Cedar 16:06

10 10 - Odds and Ends - Where to go for an outing - Why a Clinker? - Boughs and Browse 13:26

Odds and Ends. Where to go for an outing? Why a clinker? Bows and browse. The often recurring question as to where to go for an outing can hardly be answered at all satisfactorily. In a general way, any place may, and ought to be, satisfactory, where there are fresh green woods, Pleasant scenery and fish and game plenty enough to supply the camp abundantly, with boating facilities and pure water. It is more in the man than it is in the land, and there are thousands of such places on the waters of the Susquehanna, the Delaware, the rivers and lakes of Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Canada. Among the lakes of central New York, one may easily select a camping ground. Healthy, pleasant, easily reached, and with the advantage of cheapness.

A little too much civilization, perhaps, but the farmers are friendly and kindly disposed to all summer outers who behave like gentlemen. For fine forest scenery and unequaled canoeing facilities, it must be admitted that the Adirondack region stands at the head. There is also fine fishing and good hunting, for those who know the right places to go for deer and trout. But it is a tedious, expensive job getting into the heart of the wilderness, and it is the most costly woodland resort I know of when you are there. You can keep expenses down, and also have a much better sport, by avoiding the hotels and going into camp at once and staying there. The best way is for two men to hire a guide, live in camp altogether, and divide the expense.

All along the Allegheny Range, from Maine to Michigan, and from Pennsylvania to the provinces, numberless resorts exist as pleasant, as healthy, as prolific of sport as the famed Adirondacks, and at half the cost. But for an all-summer canoe cruise, with more than six hundred accessible lakes and ponds, the northern wilderness stands alone. And as a wealthy cockney once remarked to me in Brown's tract, it's no place for a poor man. And now I will give my reasons for preferring the clinker-built cedar boat or canoe to any other. First, as to material, cedar is stronger, more elastic, more enduring, and shrinks less than pine or any other lightwood used in boat-siding. As one of the best builders in the country says, it has been thoroughly demonstrated that a cedar canoe will stand more hard knocks than an oak one, for where it only receives bruises, the oak streets will split, and he might add, the pine will break.

But I suppose it is settled beyond dispute that White Cedar stands at the head for boat streaks. I prefer it, then, because it is the best, and I prefer the clinker because it is the strongest, simplest, most enduring, and most easily repaired in case of accident. To prove the strength theory, take a cedar or pine strip eight feet long and six inches wide. Bend it to a certain point by an equal strain on each end, and carefully note the result. Next, strip it lengthwise with a rip-saw. Lap the two halves an inch and nail the lap as in boat-building. Test it again, and you will find it has gained in strength about twenty per cent. That is the clinker of it. Now work the laps down until the strip is of uniform thickness its entire length, and test it once more.

You will find it much weaker than on first trial. This is the smooth skin, sometimes called lap streak. They, the clinker canoes, are easily tightened when they spring a leak through being rattled over stones in rapids. It is only to hunt a smooth pebble for a clinch-head, and saddle the nails that have started with the hatchet, putting in a few new ones if needed. And they are put together, at least by the best builders, without any cement or white lead, naked wood to wood, and depending only on close work for waterproofing. And each pair of strips is cut to fit and lie in its proper place without strain, no two pairs being alike, but each pair, from garboards to the upper streak, having easy natural form for its destined position.

The veneer canoes are very fine for deep water, but a few cuts on sharp stones will be found ruinous, and if exposed much to weather, they are liable to warp. The builders understand this, and plainly say they prefer not to build fine boats for those who will neglect the proper care of them. The paper boat also will not stand much cutting on sharp stones, and it is not buoyant when swamped unless fitted with water-tight compartments, which I abhor. The canvas is a rather loggy limp son-of-craft, to my thinking, and liable to drown her crew if swamped. But each and all have their admirers, and purchasers as well, while each is good in its way, and I only mention a few reasons for my preference of the cedar.

When running an ugly rapid, or crossing a stormy lake, I like to feel that I have enough light-seasoned wood under me to keep my mouth and nose above water all day, besides saving the rifle and knapsack, which, when running into danger, I always tie to the ribbing with strong linen line, as I do the paddle also, giving it about line enough to just allow free play. I am not, to use a little modern slang, going to give myself away on canoeing, or talk of startling adventure, but for the possible advantage of some future canoeist, I will briefly relate what happened to me on a certain windy morning one summer. It was on one of the larger lakes, no matter which, between Paul Smith's and the Fulton chain.

I had camped overnight in a spot that did not suit me in the least, but it seemed the best I could do then and there. The night was rough, and the early morning threatening. However, I managed a cup of coffee, tied in, and made a slippery carry of two miles a little after sunrise. Arrived on the shore of the lake, things did not look promising. The whirling, twirling clouds were black and dangerous-looking. The crisp dark waves were crested with spume, and I had a notion of just making a comfortable camp and waiting for better weather. But the commissary department was reduced to six Boston crackers with a single slice of pork, and it was twelve miles of wilderness to the nearest point of supplies, four miles of it carries included.

Such weather might last a week, and I decided to go. For half an hour I sat on the beach, taking weather notes. The wind was northeast. My course was due west, giving me four points free. Taking five feet of strong line, I tied one end under a rib next the keelson, the other around the paddle. Stripping to shirt and drawers, I stowed everything in the knapsack, and tied that safely in the forepeak. Then I swung out. Before I was half a mile out, I fervently wished myself back. But it was too late. How that little Corky-like canoe did bound and snap! with a constant tendency to come up in the wind's eye that kept me on the key-v every instant. She shipped no water. She was too buoyant for that.

But she was all the time in danger of pitching her crew overboard. It soon came to a crisis. About the middle of the lake, on the north side, there is a sharp low gulch that runs away back through the hills, looking like a level cut through a railroad embankment. And down this gulch came a fierce thunder gust that was like a small cyclone. It knocked down trees, swept over the lake, and caught the little canoe on the crest of a wave, right under the garboard streak. I went overboard like a shot, but I kept a grip on the paddle. That grip was worth a thousand dollars to the Travelers Accidental, and another thousand to the Equitable Company, because the paddle, with its line, enabled me to keep the canoe in hand, and prevent her from going away to leeward like a dry leaf.

When I once got my nose above water and my hand on her after-stem, I knew I had the whole business under control. Pressing the stem down, I took a look inboard. The little jilt? She had not shipped a quart of water. And there was the knapsack, the rod, the little auxiliary paddle, all just as I had tied them in. Only the crew and the double paddle had gone overboard. As I am elderly and out of practice in the swimming line, And it was nearly half a mile to a lee shore, and as I was out of breath and water-logged, it is quite possible that little forethought and four cents' worth of fish-line saved the insurance company's two thousand dollars. How I slowly kicked the canoe ashore, how the sun came out bright and hot, how instead of making the remaining eleven miles, I raised a conflagration and a comfortable camp, dried out, and had a pleasant night of it.

All this is neither here nor there. The point I wish to make is, keep your duffel safe to float, and your canoe sufficiently in hand to always hold your breathing-works above the water level. So shall your children look confidently for your safe return, while the accidentals arise and call you a good investment. There is only one objection to the clinker-built canoe that occurs to me as at all plausible. This is that the ridge-like projections on her clinker laps offer resistance to the water, and retard her speed. Theoretically, this is correct. Practically, it is not proven. Her streaks are so nearly on her water line that the resistance, if any, must be infinitesimal. It is possible, however, that this element might lessen her speed one or two minutes in a mile race.

I am not racing, but taking leisurely recreation. I can wait two or three minutes as well as not. Three or four knots an hour will take me through to the last carry quite as soon as I care to make the landing. A few words of explanation and advice may not be out of place. I have used the words boughs and brows quite frequently. I am sorry they are not more in use. The first settlers in the unbroken forest knew how to diagnose a tree. They came to the Holland Purchase from the eastern states, with their families in a covered wagon, drawn by a yoke of oxen and the favorite cow patiently leaving behind. They could not start until the ground was settled, sometime in May. And nothing could be done in late summer, save erect a log cabin and clear a few acres for the next season.

To this end, the oxen were indispensable, and the cow was a first necessity where there were children. And cows and oxen must have hay. But there was not a lot of hay in the country. A few hundred pounds of coarse wild grass was gleaned from the margins of streams and small marshes, but the main reliance was browse. Through the warm months, the cattle could take care of themselves. But when the winter settled down in earnest, a large part of the settler's work consisted in providing browse for his cattle. First and best was the basswood, linden. Then came maple, beech, birch, and hemlock. Some of the trees would be nearly three feet in diameter, and when felled, much of the browse would be twenty feet above the reach of cattle, on the ends of huge limbs.

Then the boughs were lopped off, and the cattle could get at the browse. The settlers divided the tree into logs, limbs, boughs, and brows. Anything small enough for a cow or deer to masticate was brows, and that is just what you want for a camp in the forest. Not twigs that may come from a thorn, or boughs that may be as thick as your wrist, but brows, which may be used for a mattress, the healthiest in the world. Now for a little useless advice. In going into the woods, don't take a medicine chest or a set of surgical instruments with you. A bit of sticking salve, a wooden vial of anti-pain tablets, and another of rhubarb regulars. Your fly medicine and a pair of tweezers will be enough. Of course you have needles and thread.

If you go before the open season for shooting, take no gun. It will simply be a useless encumbrance and a nuisance. If you go to hunt, take a solemn oath never to point the shooting end of your gun toward yourself or any other human being. In still hunting? Swear yourself black in the face never to shoot at a dim moving object in the woods for a deer, unless you have seen that it is a deer. In these days there are quite as many hunters as deer in the woods, and it is a heavy, wearisome job to pack a dead or wounded man ten or twelve miles out to a clearing, let alone that it spoils all the pleasure of the hunt and is apt to raise hard feelings among his relations. In a word, act coolly and rationally.

So shall your outing be a delight in conception and the fulfillment thereof, while the memory of it shall come back to you in pleasant dreams, when legs and shoulders are too stiff and old for knapsack and rifle. That is me. That is why I sit here tonight, with the strong wind and sleet rattling the one window of my little den, writing what I hope younger and stronger men will like to take into the woods with them, and read. Not that I am so very old. The youngsters are still not anxious to buck against the muzzleloader in offhand shooting, but in common with a thousand other old greybeards, I feel that the fire, the fervor, the steel, at once carried me over the trail from dawn till dark is dulled and deadened within me.

We had our day of youth and may. We may have grown a trifle sober, but life may reach a wintry way, and we are only in October. Wherefore, let us be thankful that there are thousands of cool green nooks beside crystal springs, where the weary soul may hide for a time, away from debts, duns, and deviltries, and a while commune with nature in her undress. And with kindness to all true woodsmen, and with malice toward none save the trout-hog, the netter, the cruster, and skin-butcher, let us prepare to turn in.

queue_music Chapters 10