Please see the [Transcriber’s Notes] at the end of this text.

VACATION CAMPING
FOR GIRLS

VACATION
CAMPING FOR
GIRLS

By
JEANNETTE MARKS

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1913

Copyright, 1913, by
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

Copyright, 1912, by David C. Cook Publishing Company

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VACATION CAMPING
FOR GIRLS

CHAPTER I
CAMPING CHECK LISTS

There are some considerations in camping which are staple; that is, questions and needs all of us have to meet, just as there are staple foods which all of us must have. No one knows better than the old camper, who has shaken down his ideas, theories, practices, year after year in the experiment of camping how true this is. If one is wise, one goes well prepared even into the simple life of the woods or mountains or lakes; and it is in a practical way, and under three so-called check lists, (1) camp clothes, (2) camp food, and (3) camp equipment, that I wish to tell you something about camp life for girls.

From the point of view of clothes there are two kinds of camping: one more or less civilized, the other “rough.” In the first perhaps we shall be allowed a small box or trunk. In the second we have to depend entirely upon a duffle bag or a knapsack. To the camper who plans for a good many comforts, there is only one warning to be given: don’t be foolish and take finery of any sort with you. Not only will it be in the way, but also a girl does not look well in the woods dressed in clothes that belong to the home life of town or city.

There is an appropriate garb for the wilderness even as there is the right gown for an afternoon tea. Except for this warning, what you will put in your trunk will be simply an extension of the comforts which you have in duffle bag or knapsack.

As the capacity of duffle bag or knapsack is very limited, the check lists for its contents must be made out with rigid economy. The most important item is foot gear. A well-made pair of medium weight boots, carefully tanned, drenched with mutton tallow, viscol, neat’s-foot oil, or some similar waterproof substance, will prove the best for all-round usefulness. These boots must be broken in or worn before the camping expedition is undertaken. Nothing is so foolish as to start out in a new pair. Have in addition to the boots a pair of soft indoor moccasins. These are good to loaf around camp in. They are grateful to tired feet, and, rolled, take up but little space in the knapsack. To the boots and moccasins add from two to four pairs of hole-proof stockings of some reliable make. If you can get a really first-class stocking and are crowded for space, two pairs will do. One goes on to your feet and the other into your knapsack. There should also be several combination suits, preferably of two weights, high necked, and with shoulder and knee caps.

Now, see that the skirt you wear is of durable material; blue serge or tweed (corduroy is often too heavy); that it has been thoroughly shrunk, and is six inches off the ground anyway. Twelve would be better. Your skirt should be provided with ample pockets; the sweater and jacket also. Under the skirt wear a pair of bloomers, the lighter and slimsier they are, the better; and the stouter the material, the more practical for wear. I have tried many kinds, and believe percaline which is light, strong, slimsy and washable, the best. Silk is not suitable at all. A flannel shirt waist or blouse, a windsor or string tie, a soft felt hat with a sufficiently wide brim, but not too wide, complete your costume.

Into the knapsack put two coarse handkerchiefs, a silk neckerchief to tie around your neck, the stockings and combination suit already mentioned, a string of safety pins clipped one into another, a toothbrush, tubes of cold cream and tooth paste (tubes take up the least room and are the easiest to carry), a cotton shirtwaist, a nail file, comb, small bottle of the best cascara sagrada tablets, a pair of cotton gloves for rough work, a cake of castile soap, a towel, a stiff nail brush, and, if you are wise, a book for leisure hours, preferably an anthology of poems or a collection of essays which will afford food for reflection.

In your preparations let it be the rule to strip away every unnecessary article. Take pride in getting your kit down to the absolute minimum. Keep weeding out what you don’t need, and then after that, weed out again.

The same principle of rigid economy in selection will obtain in the check list for food. It is the minimum of expense in the woods that will bring the maximum of comfort. In arranging for the “duffle” to be taken with you there is one thing that can be counted upon with mathematical certainty: hunger. You are going to be hungrier than you have been in a long time. The problem is, then, how to tote enough food and get enough food to supply your wants. The carriage, the keeping, the nutritive value, all these things have to be taken into consideration in wood life. At home we have fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, fresh meats in abundance. How can we supply these things for our camp table? We can’t! But desiccated potatoes, dried apples, apricots, prunes, peaches, white and yellow-eye beans, dried lima beans, peas, whole or split, onions, rice, raisins, nuts, white and graham flour, corn meal, pilot biscuit, rolled oats, cream of wheat, cocoa (leave coffee and tea at home), sweet chocolate, syrup for flapjacks, baking soda, sugar, salt, a few candles (helpful for lighting a fire in wet weather, as well as good for illumination), matches, molasses, a little olive oil—all these things, with careful planning, we may have in abundance. To these items you should add good butter—the best salted butter is none too good—some cans of condensed milk and evaporated milk and cream, and a flitch of bacon. Meat makes a dirty camp, and a dirty camp means skunks and hedgehogs prowling around. In a properly thought-out dietary it will be entirely unnecessary to tote meat. All that is needed for use you can get at the end of your fish rod or through the barrel of your shotgun, and upon the freshness of what you catch or shoot you can depend. Dr. Breck, in his “Way of the Woods,” says that if he were obliged to choose between bacon and dried apples and chocolate, he would always take the apples and chocolate. Both portage and health will be served by avoiding the carriage of a lot of tin cans. The ration of each article needed you can work out with your mother or housekeeper, according to the number of people to be in the party, the menus you plan, and the length of your stay. For a cooler for your food, you will find a wire bait box, sunk in clean running water, excellent. The question of grub, or duffle, as it is called in camp life, in proper variety, abundance and freshness, is the most difficult question of all. To this problem a seasoned camper will give his closest attention.

There are other articles, plus the food stuffs, which we must add to our check lists—chiefly articles of equipment. Two or three pails nesting into each other, a tin reflector baker for outdoor cooking, enamel-ware plates, cups and bowls, pans, dishpans, dishmop, chain pot-cleaner, double boiler, broiler, knives, forks, spoons, pepper and salt shakers, flour sifter, rotary can opener, long-handled and short-handled fry pans, a carving knife and a fish knife. The cost of these things carefully bought, will be about six dollars. There should also be in your kit some nails and a hatchet, toilet paper, woolen blankets, mosquito netting (tarlatan is better), twine, tacks, oilcloth for camp table, and some fly dope.

With these articles, plus a little knowledge of woodcraft, there is almost no wilderness into which a capable girl cannot go and make an attractive home. But a little woodcraft we must know; the rest we can learn as we go. There is one fuel in the woods which skillfully used will kindle any fire, even a wet fire, and that is birch bark. You can always get an inner layer of dry birch bark from a tree. Keep a check list of different kinds of wood and have it handy until you learn these woods for yourself. Brush tops or slashings will help to start a quick blaze. Hickory is fine for a quiet hot fire. The green woods which burn readily are white and black birch, ash, oak and hard maple. Look for pitch, which you are most likely to find in old trees, and that will always help out and start any fire. Woods that snap, such as hemlock, spruce, cedar and larch, are not to be recommended for camp fires, as a rule. To be careless or stupid about the camp fire may be to endanger the lives not only of thousands of wild creatures in the wilderness, but also the lives of human beings.

Be careful to have pure water to drink. You cannot be too careful. If you are in doubt about the water, don’t drink it, or at least not until it has been thoroughly boiled. Take with you, besides those I give, a few useful recipes for cooking experiments. They will bring pleasure and variety on dull days. Choose a good place for your cabin or shack or tent, whichever you use, especially a place where the natural drainage is good. Know before you set out whether black flies, mosquitoes and midges have to be encountered and go prepared to meet them. They are sure to meet you more than halfway. Don’t take any risks on land or water. The people who know the way of the woods best are those who are least foolhardy. Common sense is the law that reigns in the wilderness, and, in having our good time, we cannot do better than to follow that law.

So much for skeleton check lists, many of which, in the chapters to come, at the cost of repetition, I shall amplify. Among the questions which I shall take up are the all-important ones of camp clothes, camp food, cooking, the place, camp fires, furnishing the camp, the pocketbook, the camp dog, the outdoor training school, the camp habit, wood culture, camp health, camp friendship, homemade camping, the canoe, fishing, and the trail. This great, big, beautiful country of ours is full of girls, real Camp Fire Girls, who love the keen air of out of doors and the smell of wood smoke and the freedom of hill and lake and plain, and to them I want my little book to come home and to be a camp manual which will go with them on all journeys into the wilderness.

CHAPTER II
CAMP CLOTHES

If you have been camping once, there is no need for any one to help you decide what wearing apparel to take the next time. Through the mistakes made and the discomforts involved, the girl will have learned her lesson too well to forget it. But there is always the girl who has not been camping. It is chiefly for her benefit that I am writing these chapters on camp life for girls.

In the first place, there are two kinds of camp clothes to be considered, for there are two kinds of camping: (1) the expedition which permits taking a box or trunk with you, and (2) the rougher camping that allows only the carrying of a duffle bag or a knapsack. If you are limited to a knapsack or a duffle bag, your kit must be of the most concentrated sort and chosen with the greatest care. You will find ten or fifteen pounds the most you wish to tote long distances, although at the beginning this size of pack may seem like nothing at all to you. As I have found personally, even seven pounds, with day after day of tramping, may make an unaccustomed shoulder ache under the strap.

MOCCASIN
BOOT

TOBIQUE MOCCASIN

HURON INDIAN
MOCCASINS

MOCCASIN SHOE

MECCOMOC OXFORD

ELKSKIN MOCCASIN

If you are to be limited to a small duffle bag, or a fairly capacious knapsack, what are the articles of clothing without which no girl can start? Let us take up the most important item first, and that is foot-gear. Wear a well-made pair of medium weight boots, thoroughly tanned, soaked with viscol, or rubbed with mutton tallow both on the inside and the outside, to make them waterproof. Never start out with a new pair of boots on your feet. If necessary, get your boots weeks beforehand, and wear them from time to time till they are thoroughly comfortable. In addition to these boots which you wear, take a soft pair of indoor moccasins. These can be worn when you are tired and loafing around camp, or while the guide is drying or greasing your boots. If you have ever worn moccasins and are going to tramp in a moccasin country, that is, a country of forest trails and ponds, then buy a pair of heavy outdoor moccasins; larrigans or ankle-moccasins are best. These should not be too snug. Worn over a heavy cotton stocking, or a light woolen one, or woolen stockings drawn over cotton, the moccasin is the most ideal foot-gear the wilderness world can ever know.[1] Neat’s-foot oil is also excellent for greasing moccasins. Buy from two to four pairs of hole-proof stockings of some reliable make. If these stockings are first class and can be depended upon, two pairs will do. One pair you will wear, the other goes into your knapsack. Have also several combination suits, some for your bag and one for your back. These suits should be high-necked and with shoulder and knee caps; of sufficient warmth for cold days and nights; in any case porous and of two weights.

[1] If you have room take with you an extra pair of shoes. When you have become a real woodswoman you will never be without woolen socks and moccasins. The thick, soft sole of sock and moccasin spare tender feet which are not accustomed to hard tramping and rough paths.

If you are going to tramp in a skirt, as you must if your route touches upon civilization, see that it is short. Six inches off the ground is none too much, and twelve is a good deal better. In an outing of this sort it is as poor form to wear a long skirt as it would be to wear a short skirt at an afternoon tea in civilization. The skirt should be of some good quality khaki, army preferably, or a tweed; it should be thoroughly shrunk, and if it seems desirable, it should be possible to put this camp skirt in water and wash it.[2] Have ample pockets on either side of the front seams. If I had to choose between the best of sweaters and a jacket with a lot of pockets in it, I should always choose the latter, and that is not on account of the pockets alone, but because it is a more convenient article of clothing. In case of cold weather it affords better protection, also better protection against rain as well as cold. You can have it made with two outside pockets and several inside—the more the merrier. Underneath the skirt wear a pair of bloomers. The lighter and stouter these are, the more of a comfort they will be. I have found a good quality of percaline to be the best investment. Percaline is light, strong, slimsy after a little wearing, and washes well. I have never yet found a silk that was practicable in the woods. Silk bloomers go well with the comforts of civilization, but they are not fit to endure the test of roughing it. A flannel shirtwaist or blouse, a Windsor or string tie, a soft felt hat—you may have it as pretty as you wish, provided it is not too large or over trimmed—complete the outfit which you carry on you, so to speak.

[2] You can buy an ideal hunting suit at any of the big shops in Boston, New York or Chicago for from $8 to $10.

Now to return to the outfit you carry in your pack and not on your back. A pair of indoor moccasins, an extra pair of hole-proof stockings (these you must have, not only on account of a possible wetting, but also because the stockings must be changed every day, for you cannot take too good care of your feet), two coarse handkerchiefs of ample size, a silk neckerchief to tie around your neck, an extra combination suit, a few safety pins clipped one into another until you have made a string of them, a tooth brush, a little tube of cold cream and a tube of tooth paste (the tubes are not breakable and take up the least room, they are therefore the best to carry), a cotton or linen shirtwaist of some kind, a nail file, a comb, a small vial of cascara sagrada tablets, several rolls of film for your camera—the camera itself can be slung on a strap from the knapsack—a pair of garden gloves for rough work with sooty pots and kettles, a good-sized cake of the best castile soap, a towel, a good stiff nail brush, and one or two books.

Personally I feel that the books are as indispensable as anything in the knapsack, for in moments of weariness, or when storm-bound, they prove the greatest comfort and resource. The volume taken must not be a novel which read through once one does not care to read again. Better to take some book over which you can or must linger. I have tramped scores of miles with the “Oxford Book of English Verse” in my knapsack, and it has proved the greatest imaginable pleasure and solace. A small anthology or a book of essays, or something that you wish to study, as, for example, guides about the birds or the trees or the flowers, are good sorts of volumes to tote with you—besides, of course, this camping manual.

Your kit for the rougher kind of camping, provided you have guides or men folks who will carry the food, or “grub,” as it is called in camp parlance, and the blankets, is now complete. But for the one girl who goes on this rougher sort of camping expedition, twenty go into the woods to be happy in a quite civilized log cabin or shanty. These girls will be taking a camp box with them, or a trunk, and can add to their wardrobe. There is no excuse, however, for adding the wrong sort of thing. There is no excuse for wearing unsuitable, unattractive old rags about camp, clothes which have served their civilized purpose and have no fitness for the wilderness life. Let me give you one other word, from an old timer at camping, about what you should wear. Don’t be foolish and put in any finery. The finery is as out of place in camp as your camp boots would be at a garden party at home. But several middy blouses, more shoes, more stockings, another skirt, a number of towels, a few more books—all will prove just that much added food for pleasure; first, last, and always, be comfortable in camp. There is no reason for being uncomfortable unless you enjoy discomfort. Anything, however, over and above what you actually need will be only a hindrance. Those who go camping, if they go in the right spirit, are looking for the simple life; they want to get rid of paraphernalia, not to add to it. To learn the happy art of living close to nature, means stripping away unnecessary things. There is no place in camp life for fussiness or display of any sort. All that is beyond the daily need is so much litter and clutter, making of camp life something that is a burden, something that is untidy, uncomfortable, confused. Of no thing is this more true than of a girl’s camp clothes.

CHAPTER III
FOOD

There are several reasons why the camp food is almost more important than any other consideration. To begin with, most girls are leading a more active life than they are accustomed to living at home. This makes them hungry, and, add to the exercise the natural tonic of invigorating air, the camper becomes fairly ravenous at meal time. There are other reasons, too, why food is an all-important question. If one is in the real wilderness, it will be difficult to get. One is obliged, therefore, to consider carefully beforehand the kinds of food necessary for a well-provided table and a well-balanced diet. Another reason for taking thought about this whole subject is the portage. All the foods must be toted in, and not all kinds will prove suitable or economical in the long run for this sort of portage. Finally, there is the question of the ways and means for keeping the food, after it is once safely in camp, in good condition.

As a rule, when we go on our expeditions we leave regions where it is easy to get a great variety of foods. The city or its suburb or a comfortable country town, is the place we call home. Our tables are filled the year long with fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, fresh meats, and all kinds of bread. This dietary in all its variety, to which we have been accustomed at home, is quite impossible of realization in the camp. We might just as well make up our minds to that at once. Yet accustomed to vegetables and fruits as we are, we need them both in wholesome quantities. How shall we get them? Potatoes of course, if the camping expedition is for any length of time, that is ten days or more, must be lugged. And lugging potatoes is heavy work over a trail. As for the other vegetables and fruits, and even meats, most people buy large quantities of tinned articles and so get rid of the whole question. Personally I think that this is a great mistake. It was a delight to me to find in Doctor Breck’s “Way of the Woods” that he, if obliged to choose between bacon and dried apples and chocolate, would always choose the chocolate and dried apples. And when the question of portage as well as health enters in, it may be said right here that it is quite impossible to carry a pack full of tins. But aside from the comfort of the guides, a tin-can camp is not likely to be a wholesome one. I am convinced that tin-can camping is responsible for whatever ills people experience when they go into the woods.

It is quite simple to get different kinds of dried vegetables and different kinds of dried fruits—and the best are none too good—in bulk. At present there are even evaporated potatoes on the market for campers. Such dried foods pack and carry best and are most wholesome. Both white and yellow eye beans, dried lima beans, peas, whole and split, onions, evaporated apples, dried prunes, dried peaches and apricots, rice, raisins, nuts of all kinds, lemons, oranges, and even bananas, if they are sufficiently green, can be quite easily taken into camp. Various sorts of flour and meal, too, will be needed. Find out how much it takes to bake the bread at home and add that to the length of your stay plus the number of the campers and plus a little more than you actually need, and you will be able to work out the flour problem for yourselves. There should be then white and graham flour, or entire wheat, corn meal, pilot bread (memories of toasted pilot bread in camp can make one smile from recollected joy), some rolled oats, cereals like cream of wheat which carries well, cooks easily, and is hearty, and various sorts of crackers.

Now the writer does not think meat necessary in camp. Except for the fish caught and the birds shot, none need be eaten. All the meat element or proteid necessary is provided for in the beans, peas, and nuts. But it is well to take a flitch of bacon or a few jars of it to use in broiling or frying the fish or game. Pork and lard are entirely uncalled-for in a properly thought out dietary.[3] Sufficient good fresh butter is very much needed. If campers feel that they must have other tinned meats, the best kinds to take are the most expensive, ox tongue, and that sort of thing. Several months ago four of us started off on a ten days’ camping expedition into a very northern wilderness unknown to us. One of the party, needlessly ambitious, took a preserved chicken in a glass jar bought from the finest provision house in Boston. By the time we reached our destination, the chicken was anything but preserved. Indeed, unless all signs failed, it had already embarked upon a new incarnation. No arm in the party was long enough to carry it out and set it on a distant rock for the skunks to visit. Nor shall I soon forget a certain meat ragout which we concocted in a Canadian wilderness. We had the ragout, but alas, we had a good deal else, too, including a doctor who had to cover half a county to reach us! Aside from the fact that people who live in cities and towns eat altogether too much meat, in camp there is not only the question of its uselessness, but also the fact that there are no ways to care for it properly. Meat makes a dirty camp.[4]

[3] A brother camper says that he thinks even the fish would feel neglected without pork. On the contrary, trout are very sensitive to good bacon—in short, prefer it to salt pork. If you do not believe this true fish story, then catch two dozen half pound trout, slice your bacon thin and draw off the bacon fat. Take out the bacon, put the fat back into the frying pan—don’t burn yourself—and pop in one-half dozen trout. After the first mouthful you will find that my contention that trout are most sensitive to bacon entirely true. Be sure to put a little piece of bacon on that first bite. Following that, all you have to do is to keep on biting until your share of the two dozen trout is consumed. Remarkable how those two dozen will fly—almost as if the little fellows had turned into birds! The reason I am opposed to pork and lard camping is that we all know nowadays how diseased such meat may be. To go into the woods for health and run any avoidable risks is folly. Get a flitch of the best bacon and the best bacon is Ferris bacon. From this you will get enough fat for all frying purposes; also, in case you use fat as a substitute for butter, there will be enough bacon fat for cakes, etc.

[4] I cannot emphasize too often the absolute importance of keeping a clean camp. Mr. Rutger Jewett, to whom this camping manual and its author are indebted for many wise suggestions, thinks that it is not always feasible to burn up everything. “Every camp,” he writes, “has some empty tin cans. It seems to me that the best plan in this case is to have a small trench dug, far enough from the camp to avoid all disagreeable results and yet not so far away that it is inaccessible. Here cans and unburnable refuse from the kitchen can be thrown and kept covered with earth or sand to avoid flies and odors. Everything that can be burned, should be.” The only difficulty in my mind is, in case the region is hedgehog-infested, that those charming creatures will form their usual “bread-line”—this time to the trench—and add digging to their accomplishments in gnawing. However! Better rinse out your tin cans; Sis Hedgehog is less likely to mistake the can for the original delicacy.

All food refuse should be burned up, anyway, never thrown out into the brush, and it is difficult to burn meat bones. The girl or woman who keeps a dirty camp is beneath contempt. There is likely to be one neighbor, if not more, in the vicinity of every camp, who will make things uncomfortable for the campers. He should be called the camp pig, and he is the hedgehog. Also his cousin, the skunk, will hang around to see what is carelessly thrown out or left for him to eat. The hedgehog is the greediest, most unwelcome fellow in the woods, and even the fact that the poet Robert Browning had one as a pet will not redeem him in the eyes of the practical camper. He hangs around any camp that is not kept clean, gnaws axe handles which the salty human hand has touched, licks out tin cans which have not been rinsed as they should be before they are thrown away—in short, he follows up every bit of camp slackness. There is only one way to keep off hedgehogs and that is to have an absolutely tidy camp.

In addition to the food stuffs already mentioned, there are several others which should be taken in the necessary quantities. Salt and pepper—better leave tea and coffee at home and take cocoa—soda, sugar, a few candles (helpful in lighting a fire in wet weather, as well as for illumination), matches, in a rubber box if possible, kerosene if your camp outfit will permit such a luxury, olive oil, maple syrup for flapjacks, molasses, condensed and evaporated milk or milk powder.

REFLECTOR BAKER.

HOLD-ALL.

PATENTED FRY PAN.

HUNTING KNIFE.

BIRCH BARK CUP.

The articles which need to be cooled can be kept fresh in a nearby brook. Dead fish, however, should never be allowed to lie in water, but should be wrapped up in ferns or large leaves. If you are camping for any length of time, by making a little runway out of a trough you can have freshly flowing water, cooling butter and other food stuffs, all the time. Or a receptacle constructed something like a wire bait box will prove as good as the flowing water. This sunk into a cool pond or lake, makes an admirable ice chest, into which the finny creatures cannot get. In some rotation which you have decided upon, the care of the food should receive the especial attention from one girl every day. In this way hedgehogs, skunks, mice, rats, ants, will all be kept at a distance.

There are in addition to these various food stuffs and their care, as I said in the first chapter, many articles necessary for camp life about which we must think. If you are going off for a few days with a guide, he will attend to these things for you. But if you are setting up a camp for yourself, you will need to have them in mind. They are, two or three tin pails of convenient sizes nesting or fitting into one another so that they can be easily carried, a tin reflector baker for outdoor cooking, a coffee pot if you are foolish enough to take coffee, enameled ware plates and cups, basins, pans, dishpans, a dishmop, a chain pot-cleaner, a double boiler, a broiler, knives and forks, spoons big and little, pepper and salt shakers, flour sifter, a rotary can opener, a frypan, long-handled and short-handled, a carving knife and a fish knife if you intend to do a great deal of fishing. There are many kinds of cooking kits. There is a good one for four persons which may be obtained at about six dollars from any large hardware dealer. Add to these things which have been mentioned fish hooks, a lantern, lantern wicks, nails of different sizes, a hammer—don’t forget the hammer!—toilet paper, woolen blankets, mosquito netting (if it is a mosquito-infested district), fly dope to rub on hands and face, oilcloth for camp table, some twine and some tacks.

Equipped with these articles and what you carry in your knapsacks and what you wear, there is almost no wilderness in which a girl cannot have a good time, improve her health, and be the wiser for having entered the wilderness.

CHAPTER IV
COOK AND COOKEE

Any of you who have ever seen a lumber camp will remember something of how it is constructed. Separate from the main building is the superintendent’s office, a little cabin built usually of tar paper and light timber; then there is the hovel, as it is called, in which the horses and cows are stabled, and finally there is the big main building where the crew sleep and eat. But separated from the men’s dormitory by a passageway that leads into the outdoors, is the big room used as kitchen and dining room. Just beyond this and opening into the kitchen, is the room in which the cook and his assistant sleep.

In these two rooms in the wilderness, cook and cookee reign supreme. They are the most important persons in the camp. They are the best paid. Their word is law. They have a room by themselves, partly for cleanliness’ sake, and also because the success of the whole camp depends more or less upon them. But it is not alone the lumber cook and cookee who make or mar the success of camp life. It is also the cook in the hotel camp, and even more, the cook in the hundreds of thousands of home camps which make glad our holiday season. The king pin of life, physically—and I might say morally, too, for wherever the health is excellent the morals are likely to be so—is good, pure, abundant food, properly cooked.

Nowhere is the art of cooking put so to the test as in camp. You have less to do with; you have bigger appetites to do for and more need physically for the food you eat. There is one article which, if you are planning to do more cooking out of doors than can be done in a pot of water over a fire and a frying pan, you must have, and that is a tin reflector baker. One year I was caught in the steadiest downpour which I have ever known while camping. We were on the West Branch of the Penobscot, in an isolated region at the foot of Mount Katahdin, the highest mountain in the state of Maine. We had nothing to sleep under except a tent fly, and the rain drove in night and day, keeping us thoroughly wet. Our Indian guides managed to make the fire go in front of the leaky tar paper shack which we used as a kitchen. There was nothing we could do profitably but cook, so I amused myself cooking. I managed to bake, in the rain, before an open fire, within that little tin reflector baker, some tarts which were very successful. Many other articles, too, were cooked and came out thoroughly edible. That was indeed a test of the little tin baker which I shall never forget.

There is one sort of kindling fuel unfailingly useful in the woods. Even the rain cannot dampen its blaze. The fuel to which I refer is birch-bark. It will light when nothing else will light, I suppose because of the large amount of oil in it. Even when you take it wet from the ground, instead of stripping it from a tree—and you can always get an inner layer of dry birch-bark from a tree—it will burn and kindle a good fire. A box of matches is a natural possession for a boy, but I am not so sure that this is true with a girl. Every camper should have a hard rubber box of matches in his possession, should know where it is—always in an inside pocket if possible—and should take good care of it. But to go back to that wet day and the shining little tin baker on the West Branch at the foot of Katahdin. There are some woods which are good for rapid, quiet burning and some that are poor, as every experienced woodsman will tell you. You must keep, until you know it by heart, a check list of different kinds of wood, just as you must keep a food check list and other check lists. If it is a big camp fire, which for jollity’s sake or the sake of warmth you wish to start, and do not care to keep going for a long time, almost any sort of wood will serve. Brush tops or slashings will do quite well to start such a blaze. Hickory is the best wood for use when you want a deep, quiet hot fire for cooking. There is scarcely any better wood for the camp cook to use than apple, but that most campers are not likely to be able to get. The green woods which burn most readily and are best to start a quick fire with are birch, white and black, hard maple, ash, oak, and hickory. The older the tree the more pitch there will be in it, and the pitch is an effective and noisy kindler of fires. Hemlock, spruce, cedar, and the larch, all snap badly. I have been obliged to use a good deal of cedar in an open Franklin in my camp study this last summer. It has never been safe to leave one of these cedar fires without shutting the doors of the Franklin stove. I have known the burning cedar to hurl sparks the entire length of the cabin. As the chinking is excelsior, you can imagine what one of those cedar sparks would do if it snapped onto a bit of the excelsior. Cabins not chinked with excelsior are usually chinked with moss, which is almost as inflammable. With woods that snap, the camper can never be too careful, and no fire made of snappy wood should ever be built near a cabin or a tent. One spark, and it might be too late to check the quickly spreading fire.

There is another thing about which the camp cook and all girls camping need to be very careful, and that is the drinking water. One cannot be too exacting in this matter, too scrupulous, too clean. Provided there is spring or lake water about whose purity there can be no doubt, the question is settled. In this connection it may be said of drinking: when in doubt, don’t. A quarter of a mile, a half a mile, a mile, is none too far to go to get the right sort of water. This can be done in squads, one set of girls going one day and another the next. This water must be used for the cooking, too. If there is any doubt about the water supply, it should be filtered or boiled or both. Go into camp ready to make pure water one of your chief considerations, and never, under any circumstances, drink water or eat anything, even fish, which may have been contaminated by sewage. How vigilant one has to be about this an experience of my own, some months ago, will show you. The pond to which we were going was indeed in the wilderness, inaccessible except by canoe. I had walked one long “carry,” paddled across a good-sized pond—two miles wide, I think—and had been poling up some quick-water. The “rips” were low, and scratching would better describe the efforts to which we were put than poling does. My hands became so dry from the incessant work with the pole that I had to wet them to get any purchase on it at all. A greased pig could not have been harder to hold than that pole. When finally we reached the little mountain-surrounded pond for which we were making up the quickwater, I was hot, breathless, exhausted. I could think of only one thing, and that was a drink of water. There were a few camps about the lake, but it did not enter my mind that they would empty their sewage into it and take their fish and their water out of it. Yet after I had drunk, the first thing I noticed, in passing one camp, was that they unmistakably did empty their sewage into the pond. No evidence was lacking that it all went into the water not far from where I had taken a drink. It is not a pleasant subject, but it is one about which it is necessary to speak.

It is well to take in your kit some place, unless you are an accomplished cook and have it all in your head, a small, good cook book. The first thing which you should recollect about the rougher sort of camping is that you will have no fresh eggs or milk with which to do your cooking. You should have recipes for making your biscuits, johnnycake, bread, corn-pone, cakes, flapjacks, cookies, potato soup, bean soup, pea soup, chowder, rice pudding, and for cooking game and fish. In that veteran book for campers, “The Way of the Woods,” some good recipes for the necessary dishes are given. Whatever dishes you plan to make in the wilderness should be simple and few. Anything beyond the simplest dietary is not in the spirit of camp life, and will only detract from rather than add to the general pleasure. Those recipes which seem to me absolutely necessary I will give to you in the next chapter.

CHAPTER V
LOG-CABIN COOKERY

Did you ever get to a camp fire or log-cabin stove at eleven o’clock and know that there must be a hearty meal by twelve? I have lots of times. The only way to do, if one must meet these emergencies on short notice, is to have what I call “stock” on hand. In using this word I do not mean soup stock, either. What I mean is that there must be some vegetables or cereals or other articles of food at least partially prepared for eating.

I remember one summer when I was very busy with my writing. I was chief cook and bottle washer, besides being my own secretary, and I had three members in my family to look out for—a friend with a hearty appetite, a big dog with a no less hearty appetite and a rather greedy little Maine cat. The question was how to carry on the work which was properly my own and at the same time attend to cooking and other household work. I hit upon a plan which served excellently with me. I do not recommend it to any one else, especially to girls who will be going into the woods for a vacation and will have no duties except those connected with their camp life. But this plan of mine demonstrated to me once and for all that, even if one is very busy, it is possible to have a bountifully supplied table.

The first day I tried the experiment I went into the kitchen at eleven o’clock. Never had I been more tired of the everlasting question of what to have to eat. It seemed to me that there was never any other question except that one, and I determined, with considerable savage feeling, to escape from it. At eleven o’clock I chopped my own kindling, started my own fire, and began twirling the saucepans, frying pans and baking tins which I wanted to use. I was set upon cooking up enough food to last for three or four days, and I did. At two o’clock not only was all the food cooked and set away for future consumption, but also we had eaten our dinner. In that time what had I prepared? There was a big double boiler full of corn meal. After this had been thoroughly boiled in five times its bulk of water and a large tablespoonful of salt, I poured it out into baking tins and set it away to cool. Various things can be done with this stock; among others, once cool, it slices beautifully, and is delicious fried in butter or in bacon fat, and satisfying to the hungriest camper. Also a large panful of rice had been cooked. This had been set aside to be used in croquettes, in rice puddings and to be served plain with milk at supper time. So much for the rice and the corn meal. I had broken up in two-inch pieces a large panful of macaroni. This was boiled in salt water, part of it cooled and set away for further use, some of it mixed with a canful of tomato and stewed for our dinner and the rest baked with tomato and bread crumbs, to be heated up for another day. On top of the stove, too, I had a mammoth vegetable stew. In this stew were potatoes, carrots, parsnips, cabbage, beets, turnips, plenty of butter and plenty of salt. The stew remained on the stove, carefully covered, during the time that the fire was lighted and was put on again the next day to complete the cooking, for it takes long boiling to make a really good stew. Inside the oven were two big platefuls of apples baking. These had been properly cored and the centers filled with butter and sugar and cinnamon; also two or three dozen potatoes were baking in the oven, some of which would serve for quick frying on another day. In addition to the food mentioned, I set a large two-quart bowl full of lemon jelly with vegetable gelatin. It took me exactly fifteen minutes to make this jelly and during that time I was giving my attention to other things besides. I made also a panful of baking powder biscuits which, considering the way they were hustled about, behaved themselves in a most long-suffering and commendable fashion, turning out to be good biscuits after all.

Now, the import of all this is that, with planning, a little practice and some hopping about, a good deal of cooking and preparation of food can be done in a short time. Unnecessary “fussing” about the cooking is not desirable in camp life. The simpler that life can be made and kept the better. The more we can get away from unwholesome condiments, highly seasoned foods, too much meat eating and coffee drinking, too many sweets and pastries, the better. The girl who goes into the woods with the idea of having all the luxuries—many of them wholly unnecessary and some of them undesirable—of her home life, is no true “sport.” The grand object for which we cook in camp is a good appetite and that needs no sauce and sweets.

What are some of the recipes a girl should have with her for log-cabin cooking? In the first place, we must take with us a good recipe for bread-making. There are so many I will give none. The best one to have is the one used at home, but let me say here that no flour so answers all dietetic needs in the woods as entire wheat. Delicious baking powder biscuits can be made from it as well as bread. Also know how to boil a potato. You think this is a matter of no importance? It would surprise you then, wouldn’t it, to know that there are some people devoting all of their time teaching the ignorant and the poor the art of boiling a potato. You can boil all the good out of it and make it almost worthless as food, as well as untempting, or you can cook it properly, making it everything it ought to be. Know, too, how to clean a fish. Oh, dear, you never could do that! It makes you shiver to think of such a thing. Very well then, camp is no place for you. Your squeamishness which might seem attractive some place else will only be silly there, making you a dead weight about somebody else’s neck. Does your brother Boy Scout know how to clean a fish? Did you ever know a real boy who did not know how to clean a fish? Why not a real girl, then, perhaps a Camp Fire Girl? Oh, but the cook—no, you will be the cook in camp or the assistant cook. Then get your brother to show you how to cut off its head and to scale it, if it is a scaly fish, how to slit it open, taking out the entrails, how to wash it thoroughly and dry it, how to dip it in flour or meal and to drop it into the sizzling frying pan, how to turn it and then finally the moment when, crisp and brown, it should be taken out and served. Know, too, how to pluck and clean a partridge.[5] One day this last summer I went up the cut behind my camp, intent upon finding a partridge for our supper. I hadn’t gone far before I found one and with the second shot of my rifle brought the poor fellow down. I took him home to the cook whom I had with me then, the daughter of a neighboring farmer. I gave her the bird and told her to get him ready for supper. She said she couldn’t; she didn’t know how.

[5] If your mother and brother have not taught you how to clean fish and pluck partridge, then it would be best to go to the butcher and fishman and take lessons of them. If it is possible to go on your first expedition with a good guide, that will settle the whole difficulty, for your guide will know the best way and be glad to teach you.

“Don’t know how?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

She said that she did not know how to pluck and clean a partridge.

“Well,” I replied, “you know how to clean a chicken, don’t you?”

“Mercy me, no!” she objected, looking pale and silly. “Mother always cleans the chickens.”

Mother always cleans the chickens! Mother does a good deal too much of the things that are somewhat unpleasant in this American home life of ours. This girl had been perfectly willing that her mother should do all the work which seemed to her too disagreeable or unpleasant to do herself. But I am glad to say, and her mother ought to have been grateful to me, she helped in dressing that partridge and I did not care a tinker when, after it had been cooked, she seemed to feel too badly to eat very much of it. I wonder how her mother had felt after all the hundreds of chickens she had killed, plucked, cleaned and cooked for that very girl of hers.

You must know, too, how to boil an egg, and do not do as I saw that same incompetent farmer’s daughter do—I suppose because she had left almost everything to her very competent mother—do not boil your eggs in the tea kettle. The water in the tea kettle should be kept as clean and fresh as possible. There is no excuse for a dirty tea kettle. We should be able in the woods, too, to know how to scramble eggs, if one has them, and to make omelets, and to boil corn meal, and the best ways for cooking rice and of baking fruits. Good apple pies, too, if you can make pastry without too much trouble, will not go amiss.

There are a few recipes which you must get out of the home cook book, besides the few which I will now give you. Baking powder biscuits are not easy to make. Even very good cooks sometimes do not have success with them. Do not be discouraged if at your first effort you should fail. Keep on trying. You must learn, for I think it can be said that baking powder biscuits constitute the bread of the woods. I know farming families in northern Maine who do not know what it is to make raised bread. They have nothing but baking powder or soda and cream of tartar bread. Use one quart of sifted flour, one teaspoonful of salt, three rounding teaspoonfuls of baking powder, one large tablespoonful of butter and enough milk, evaporated or powdered milk, or fresh if you have it, to make a soft dough. Mix these things in the order in which they are given, and when the dough is stiff enough to be cut with the top of a baking powder can or a biscuit cutter, sprinkle your bread and also your rolling pin with flour and roll out the dough. It will depend upon your oven somewhat, but probably it will take you from ten to fifteen minutes to bake these biscuits.

A recipe for corn meal cake, too, should be in one’s camp kit. The simpler that recipe the better. Some forms of corn bread take so long to prepare that they are not suitable for the woods. The one I shall give you will prove practicable. You might take one from your own home cook book, too, if you wish. Mix the ingredients in the order in which they are set down and bake them in a moderately hot oven. If you haven’t anything else to use, bread tins a third full will serve. One cup of whole corn meal, a half a teaspoonful of salt and a cup of sugar, a whole cup of flour, three teaspoonfuls of baking powder—these should be level—one egg, one cup of milk and a tablespoonful of melted butter.

Pancakes you must also know how to make. One can’t very well get along in the wilderness without some sort of griddle cake, the simpler the better. Sour milk pancakes are the best, particularly as it is not necessary to use eggs if one has sour milk, but that is not always feasible, as frequently you will have to use evaporated milk. Mix a pint of flour, a half a teaspoonful of salt, a teaspoonful of soda, one pint of sour milk, and two eggs thoroughly beaten. See that your frying pan, for in camp you will cook your cakes in the frying pan, has been on the stove some time. Grease it thoroughly with bacon fat or butter; never use lard unless you have to. Cook the cakes thoroughly. You will find turning your first hot cakes something of an adventure.

There should also be among our log-cabin recipes some directions for telling you how to make at least two kinds of nourishing soup without stock. Soup with stock in camp life is not practicable. Pea or bean soups are the most satisfying and satisfactory. The peas or beans must be soaked in cold water over night. Pea or bean soups take a long time to make, so that it is not always practicable to have them in camp. I will give you a recipe for split pea soup. Take with you, if you are likely to need it, also, a recipe for black bean soup. After soaking over night, pour the water off the split peas and add to the cup of peas three pints of cold water. Do not let the liquid catch on the sides of the pan in which the peas are simmering. When the peas are soft, rub them through a strainer and put them on to boil again, adding one tablespoonful of butter, one of flour, one-half teaspoonful of sugar and a teaspoonful of salt. You don’t need pepper—better leave pepper at home and if you get so that you don’t miss it in camp, then you need never use it again. It is wretched stuff, anyway, doing more to harm the human stomach than almost any other food poison in use.

Baked beans, too, make a prime dish for camp life, partly, I suppose, because, like corn meal and pea and bean soups, potatoes and the heartier kinds of food, they are so satisfying to the camper’s appetite. It isn’t necessary to cook your beans with pork, substitute some kind of nut butter, peanut butter or almond butter, or plenty of fresh dairy butter. The quart of pea beans should be soaked in cold water over night. In the morning these beans must be put into fresh water and allowed to cook until they are soft but not broken. Empty them into a colander and then put them in the bean pot, or if you haven’t a bean pot, a deep baking dish will do. Put in a quarter of a cup of molasses and a half cup of butter and pour a little hot water over the beans. Keep them all day long in an oven that is not too hot. Don’t put any mustard in your beans; mustard is as great an enemy to the human stomach as pepper, and that is saying a good deal.

Against a rainy day when you may wish to amuse yourselves with additional dishes, or a hungry day when you are cold and ravenous, I will add a few more recipes. Corn pone is good. This is just corn bread baked on a heated stone propped up before the fire till the surface is seared. Then cover with hot ashes and let it bake in them for twenty minutes. After that dust your cake and eat it. I have told you how to make corn meal mush. With butter and sugar (in case you have no milk) it is excellent. What do you say to some buckwheat cakes on a cold, rainy night? If you say “yes,” all you have to do is to mix the self-raising buckwheat flour with a proper amount of water and drop some good-sized spoonfuls into a hot, greased frying-pan. The turning of hot cakes is the next best fun to eating them. Mash your boiled potatoes, season with butter and salt and milk if you have it. After that, call it mashed potato. It is good to eat and keeps well for paté cakes or a scallop. When hungry, fried potatoes can be eaten with impunity by the most zealous dietarian. Fried potatoes are naughty but nice. Mushrooms are nice, too, but dangerous. If you have a trained botanist or someone who has always gathered mushrooms for eating, then perhaps it will be safe to cook this bounty the woods spread before you. If you must have bacon you cannot get bacon that is too good. Ferris bacon and hams are the finest and most reliable cured pork in this country. And since we are speaking of pork and therefore of frying, let me give you one caution: Never use the frying-pan when you can avoid doing so. No amount of care can make fried foods altogether wholesome. Even an out-of-door life cannot altogether counteract the bad effects of fried food. You can make good broth from small diced bits of game or whatever meat you have, when the meat is tender, add vegetables and allow the whole to boil for some time. Chowder, too, is a standard dish for camp life. Take out the bones from the fish and cut up fish into small pieces. “Cover the bottom of the kettle with layers in the following order: slices of pork, sliced raw potatoes, chopped onions, fish, hard biscuit soaked (or bread). Repeat this (leaving out pork) until the pot is nearly full. Season each layer. Cover barely with water and cook an hour or so over a very slow fire. When thick stir gently. Any other ingredients that are at hand may be added.” (Seneca’s “Canoe and Camp Cookery” and Breck’s “Way of the Woods.”) A white sauce for fish and other purposes will be found useful. Melt tablespoonful of butter in saucepan; stir in dessert-spoonful of flour; add ¹⁄₂ teaspoonful salt; mix with a cup of milk. Except for the ginger, gingerbread is not a bad cake for the woods. One cup of molasses, one cup of sugar, one teaspoonful of ginger, one teaspoonful of soda, one cup of hot water, flour enough to form a medium batter, ¹⁄₂ cup melted butter, and a little cinnamon will make it. You might experiment with Chinese tea cakes made with ¹⁄₄ cup butter, one cup brown sugar, ¹⁄₈ teaspoonful soda, one tablespoonful of cold water, and one cup of flour. Shape this mixture into small balls, and put on buttered sheets and bake in a hot oven. Molasses cookies are good and substantial, not a bad thing to put in the duffle bag on a day’s tramp. Use one cup of molasses, one teaspoonful of ginger, one teaspoonful of soda, two teaspoonfuls of warm water or milk, ¹⁄₂ cup of butter, enough flour to mix soft. Dissolve the soda in milk. Roll dough one-third of an inch thick and cut in small rounds. Two well known candy recipes will add to the pleasures of a rainy day and a sweet tooth. Penuche: Two cups brown sugar, ³⁄₄ cup milk, butter size of a small nut, pinch of salt, one teaspoonful of vanilla, ¹⁄₂ cup walnut meats. Boil the first four ingredients until soft ball is formed when dropped in water. Then add vanilla and nuts, and beat until cool and creamy. Fudge: 2 cups sugar, ³⁄₄ cup milk, 3 tablespoonfuls cocoa, a pinch of salt, butter size of small nut, ¹⁄₂ cup walnut meats if desired. Cook same as penuche.

Perhaps, in conclusion, I should advise you to learn something about the boiling of vegetables and tell you not to cut the top off a beet unless you want to see it bleed, and lose the better part of it. Put your beet in, top and all. When cooked, it will be time enough to cut it and pare it. Be sure if you cook cabbage that it is cooked long enough, and has become thoroughly tender. The same is true with parsnips and carrots. If you are in a hurry slice up your carrots or parsnips or cabbage or potatoes and they will cook more rapidly.

Be sure that your camp dietary has plenty of stewed fruits in it. That will be so much to the good in the camp health. A bottle of olive oil also will prove a great resource; in fact, a can of olive oil would be even more practical and the oil is always capital food. Although the most elaborate recipes are given for making a mayonnaise dressing it is really very simple to make, and once made can be kept on hand as “stock.” I have been making mayonnaise since I was a little girl, and, as I cook something like the proverbial darky, I do not know that I am able to give you any hard and fast directions for making the dressing. With me it is an affair of impulse; I use either the white of an egg or the whole egg, it does not make any difference—the shell you will not find palatable—beating it up thoroughly, gradually adding the oil, putting in a little lemon juice from time to time and plenty of salt. Cayenne pepper is ordinarily used in mayonnaise, but if the dressing is properly seasoned with salt and lemon it needs neither cayenne nor mustard. What it does need is thorough and long beating, a cool place, and a few minutes in which to harden after it is made.

You will learn one thing in the woods which perhaps will be a surprise. In that life it is men who are the good cooks. Indeed, it is surprising how much cleverness men show in domestic ways when they are left to their own devices and how helpless they become as soon as a woman is around. If you go astray any woodsman, any guide, almost any “sport” can help you out in the mysteries of cooking.

CHAPTER VI
THE PLACE TO CAMP

For most girls the place in which they are to camp will depend very largely on the locality in which they live. But few people want to, or feel that they can, travel long distances to secure their ideal camping ground. Yet there are some things about the place to camp which most of us can demand and get. When one has learned a little of the art of camping, it is really surprising how many good camping grounds may be found in one’s own immediate neighborhood.

The first question to be decided is the sort of expedition which we shall undertake. Are we going to rough it for a few days or a couple of weeks, taking things as they come and not expecting any of the comforts we ordinarily have? Are we going to sleep in the open, cook and eat in the open? If we are to “pack” all that we shall have along with us, is it to be a river trip or a lake trip in a canoe? Is it to be a walking expedition or with horses? The least expensive item will prove to be the one that involves taking the fewest number of guides, and which is carried out on shank’s mare. Every expedition which is continually on the move through an isolated and rough country should be equipped with one guide to each two people. If it is a stationary camp, one guide to three or four people will be the minimum. But that is the minimum. Registered guides command big pay for their work, usually about three dollars a day, and their food and lodging provided for them.

When we cannot make up for our oversight or mistakes or stupidities by trotting around the corner to procure what we have forgotten, or taking up a telephone and ordering it sent to us, or sending a message to the doctor, who must come because we have exhausted ourselves, or got indigestion from badly planned and badly cooked food, it behooves us to be careful. Only a word to the wise is necessary. To use a slang phrase which contains in a nutshell almost all that need be said on the subject: don’t bite off more than you can chew. If you are starting out on a strenuous walking expedition, be sure that all in the party are accustomed to hard walking and are properly shod and in fit condition for the work. With these requirements attended to, your duffle bags full of the right shelter and food stuff, a capable man or capable men in charge of the expedition, there is nothing in the world which could be better for a group of healthy girls than a walking tour. I have walked scores of miles with my own little pack on my back and been all the better for the hard work and the hard living. More of us need hard living as a corrective for our over-civilized lives than we need luxuries. If it is a canoe trip, it is well for several members of the party to know how to paddle and even to pole up over the “rips” of quickwater. Thank fortune that the girl of to-day has sloughed off some of the inane traits supposed to be excusably feminine, such, for example, as screaming when frightened. The modern girl doesn’t need to be told that screaming and jumping when she goes down her first quickwater in a canoe are distinctly out of order. I remember one experience in quickwater when I was not sure but that I should have to jump literally for my life. In some way the Indian with whom I was had got his setting pole caught in the rocks, and we were swung around sidewise over a four-foot drop of raging water. If the pole loosened before we could get the nose of the canoe pointed down stream, the end was inevitable. No one could have lived in those raging waters. The canoe would have been rolled over and we pounded to pieces or crushed upon the rocks. We clawed the racing water madly with the paddles, which seemed, for all the good they could do, more like toothpicks than paddles. But slowly, inch by inch, straining every muscle, we managed to work around. Needless to say, we escaped unharmed, except for a wetting. In this case as always, a miss is as good as a mile—a little “miss” which was most cordially received by me. The Indian said nothing, but I noticed that there was some expression in his face while this adventure was going on, and that is saying a good deal for an Indian.

After some of the questions connected with the kind of expedition are thought out, it is just as well to consider the place in which one wishes to camp, for that will determine much else. All things being equal, it is well to get a sharp contrast in locality, because that means the maximum of change and tonic. In my experience there are only two kinds of camping grounds to be avoided—no, I will say three. First, there is swampy, malarial land, infested by mosquitoes and other unpleasant creatures. Second, there is ground on which no water can be found. Camp life without access to water is an impossible proposition. And thirdly—a possibility fortunately which does not occur in many localities—ground that is infested by venomous snakes is unsafe. Even in so beautiful and fertile a region as the Connecticut Valley, where I live when not at my camp in the Moosehead region, and where I frequently go camping, the question of snakes has to be taken into consideration. I have encountered both the rattlesnake and the copperhead, two of the most deadly reptiles known, in the Connecticut Valley.

If, when you are at home, you live on land that is low, and high land is accessible for your expedition, I think you cannot do better than camp on the hills or the mountains. On the other hand, if you are ordinarily accustomed to living among the hills, a camping ground on low land by sea or lake will bring you the greatest change. Some girls might prefer to camp deep in the very heart of the woods. Personally I do not. I think it is likely to be very damp there, and to be so enclosed on every side that the life grows dull. I like a camping ground on the shore of a pond, or on a hill side with a big outlook, or at the mouth of a river.

One of the most beautiful camping grounds I have ever known is in a deserted apple orchard miles away from civilization. Once upon a time there was a farm there, but the buildings were all burned down. Remote, perfect, sheltered, I often think the original Garden of Eden could not have been more beautiful. And there is the original apple tree, but in this case most seductive as apple sauce. You make a mistake if, before you get up your camp appetite, you assume that apple sauce need not be taken into account. When your camp appetite is up, you will find that the original sauce on buttered bread will put you into the original paradisaic mood. And there are all sorts of extension of the apple that are as good as they are harmless, apple pie, apple dumpling, apple cake, and baked apples.

It may not seem romantic to you, but you will find it practical and, after all, delightful to camp a mile or so away from a good farmhouse, as far out on the edge of the wilderness as you can get, for, the farm within walking distance, it is possible to have a great variety of food: fresh milk and cream, eggs, an occasional chicken, new potatoes, and other vegetables in season. With the farm nearby, you can say, as in the “Merry Wives of Windsor”: “Let the sky rain potatoes!” and you have your wish fulfilled. It is probable, too, that the farmer in such an isolated region will be glad to help in pitching the tents, in lugging whatever needs to be lugged from the nearest village or station, in making camp generally and, finally, in striking the camp. It is likely that for a reasonable sum he will be glad to let you have one of his nice big farm Dobbins and an old buggy for cruising around the country. In any event, choose ground that affords a good run-off and is dry; select a sheltered spot where the winds will not beat heavily upon your tents, and never forget that clean drinking water is one of the first essentials. Keep away from contaminated wells and all uncertain supplies. With these injunctions in mind, you can find only a happy, healthful, invigorating home among the “primitive pines” or under the original apple tree.

CHAPTER VII
CAMP FIRES

“The way to prevent big fires is to put them out while they are small.”—Chief Forester Graves.

Lightly do we go into the woods, bent upon a holiday. There we kindle a fire over which we are to cook our camp supper. How good it all smells, the wood smoke, the odor of the frying bacon and fish and potatoes; how good in the crisp evening air the warmth of the camp fire feels; and above all, how beautiful everything is, the deep plumy branches on whose lower sides shadows from the firelight dance, the depth of darkness beyond the reach of the illuminating flame, the rich strange hue of the soft grass and moss on which we are sitting! It is all beautiful with not a suggestion of evil or terror about it, and yet, unchecked, there is a demon of destruction in that jolly little camp fire before which we sit. Now the supper! Nothing ever tasted better, nothing can ever taste so good again, the fish and bacon done to a turn, the potatoes lying an inviting brown in the frying pan, and the hot cocoa, made with condensed milk, steaming up into the cool evening air.

After supper we lie about the fire and sing or dream. Perhaps some one tells a story. The hours go so rapidly that we do not know where they have gone. And when the evening is over? The fire is still glowing, a bed of bright coral coals and gray ash. The fire will just go out if we leave it. Besides, we haven’t time to fetch water to put it out with. No, nine chances out of ten, if we leave the fire it will not go out, but smoulder on, and a breeze coming up in the night or at dawn, the fire springs into flame again, catching on the surrounding dry grass and pine needles. Soon, incredibly soon, it begins to leap up the trunks of trees. Before we know it, it is springing from tree to tree, faster than a man can leap or run.

NESSMUK RANGE.

SMALL COOK FIRE.

In dry weather you and I could go out into the woods anywhere, and with a match not much bigger than a good-sized darning needle, set a blaze that would sweep over a whole county, or from county to county, or from state to state. Millions of dollars’ worth of damage would be done, and the chances are that the careless, wanton act would be the means of having us put into prison—which is precisely where, given such circumstances, we should be.

Have we ever stopped to think for a moment, we who camp so joyfully, what loss and injury such carelessness on our part may mean to a whole community? To begin with, there are the forests themselves, and all they represent in actual timber, in promise for future growth, and in security for rain supply. Then in fighting the fire thousands of dollars’ worth of wages will have to be paid and hundreds of men’s lives will be in danger. The sweep and fury of such forest fires, unless one has lived in the neighborhood of one as I have, is beyond the comprehension or the imagination. Burning brands are blown sixty feet and more over the tops of the highest trees and the heads of the men who are fighting the fire. Before they can check the blaze of the fire nearest them, one beyond them has already been started.

Also there are the life aspects, big and small, of such a fire. Not only are the lives of the men who fight the blaze endangered, but all the homes, camps, farmhouses, villages, and their inmates are in imminent risk. What it has taken others years to gather together, to construct, may be swept away in a few hours. Helpless old people, equally helpless little children—all may be burned.

Beyond this question of human life, which every one will admit is a very great one, is still another which, I am sorry to say, will not seem so important to some girls. Maybe it is not, but if you have ever heard the screams of an animal, terrified by fire, being burned to death, as I have; if you have ever heard the blind frenzied terror of the stampede which takes place, the beating of hoofs and the screams of creatures that are trying to escape, but do not know how, as I have heard them—then you will have a new sense of the tragedy which a forest fire means to the creatures of the forest. Of a forest fire it may be said, as of an evil, that there is absolutely no good in it: it is all bad, all devastating, all injurious.

In a forest fire scores, hundreds, thousands of wild creatures are killed, those little creatures which, given the chance, are so friendly with their human brothers. Think, the little chickadees, tame, gay, resourceful, filling even the winter woods with their song, the tiny wrens, the beautiful thrushes, the squirrels and chipmunks, who need only half an invitation and something on the table to accept your offer of a nut cutlet, the rabbit who lets you come within a few feet of him while he still nibbles grass, and looks trustingly at you out of his round prominent eyes, the bear that thrusts his head out of the edge of the woods, full of curiosity to see what you are doing, the deer, even the little fawn, who will become your playmate and take sugar from your hand—all these trusting, interested, friendly creatures are killed by the hundreds of thousands in a forest fire. The smoke stifles them, the loud reports of the wood gases escaping from the burning trees terrify them, and the light and heat confuse them. It is difficult to find a single good thing to say for a forest fire. It spells devastation, loss, untold suffering, and in its path there is only desolation. The merciful fire-weed springs up after it, trying with its summer flame to cover the black ravage, the gutted ground, where the demon has burned deep into the peaty subsoil. Everywhere one sees what an awful fight for life has taken place: thousands of little birds, suffocated by the smoke, have dropped into the flames, thousands of creatures, tortured by the heat, have rushed into the fire instead of away from it. Worse than the flood is fire, because the suffering is so much the greater. Somehow there is something utterly, irredeemably tragic to any one who has gone over these great fire-swept stretches of land in our country; the thick stagnant water that is left, the charred bones, and the look of waste which shall never meet in the space of a human life with repair.

No time to put out the camp fire? That little fire will just go out of itself, will it? Yes, probably, when it has accomplished what I have described for you, when it has killed happy life, razed the beautiful trees, gutted out the earth, and devoured, careless of agony, all that it will have. Fire is the dragon of our modern wilderness, and it will be glutted and gorged, and not satisfied until it is. That jolly little camp fire is worth keeping an eye on, it is worth the trouble, even if we have to go half a mile to fetch it, to get a pail of water and ring the embers around with the wet so that the fire cannot spread. Never leave a camp fire burning; no registered guide would do such a thing, and no sportsman. It is only those who don’t know or who are criminally careless who would. If the public will not take responsibility in this matter, the fire wardens are helpless. Some enemies these men must inevitably fight: the lightning which strikes a dead, punky stump in the midst of dry woods, which, smouldering a long while, finally bursts into flame; the spark from an engine; even spontaneous combustion due to imprisoned gases acted upon by sun-heat. But there is one enemy which the fire wardens should not need to meet, and that is man: the boy or girl camping, the man who drops a cigar stump or match carelessly onto dry leaves, the hunter who uses combustible wadding in his shotgun. Let us help the fire wardens, those men who live on lonely mountain summits or in the midst of the wilderness with eyes ever vigilant to detect the starting of a fire—let us help, I say, these fire wardens to get rid of one nuisance at least, and let us keep our great, cool, wonderful American forests as beautiful as they have ever been and should always be for those who are in a holiday humor.

CHAPTER VIII
OTHER SMOKE

There will not be much opportunity to dwell on all the wealth of information that comes to the real camper. The life of the woods is not only a lively one, but one teeming with intelligences and the kind of information which one can get no place else. My years of camping have stored my mind full of pictures and full of memories about which I could write indefinitely. In the practical activities of camp life we mustn’t forget that the silent wonderful life of the wilderness is ours to study if we but bring keen eyes to it, quick hearing and receptive minds.

Let me tell you of one experience which I had some four years ago on the edge of a solitary little pond in the forest wilderness. Our way lay over a narrow trail, now through birches full of light, then through maples, past spruce and other trees, down, down, down toward the little pond which lay like a jewel at the bottom of a hollow. It was a favorite spot for beavers and we were going to watch them work. Their rising time is sundown, so we should be there before they were up. It was growing quieter and quieter in the ever-quiet woods, and when we hid ourselves behind some bushes near the edge of the pond on the opposite side from the beaver houses, there was scarcely a sound, and the drip of the water from a heron’s wings as the bird mounted in flight, seemed astonishingly loud.

Soon the beavers, unaware of us, came out of their houses and began to work, steadily and silently. We knew them for what they were, builders of dams, of bridges, of houses, mighty in battle so that a single stroke from their broad flat tails kills a dog instantly, wood cutters, carriers of mud and stone—animals endowed with almost human intelligence and with an industry greater than human. And I never saw work done more quietly, efficiently and silently than I did that night by the edge of Beaver Pond.

As we sat there peering through the bushes I thought instinctively of the silent work which we do within ourselves or which is done for us. Deep down within us so much is going on of which “we,” as we speak of the conscious outer self, are not aware. Take, for example, the frequent and common experience of forgetting a word or a name. Despite the greatest effort we cannot recall it, and finding ourselves helpless we dismiss the matter from our minds and go on to other things. Suddenly, without any seeming effort on our part the word has come to us. Now this reveals a great truth about a great silent power: all we have to do is to set the right forces to work and frequently the work is done for us. With this serviceable power within us, why not make use of it habitually? It renews itself constantly and waits for us to call upon it for protection, for comfort, for correction and strength. It insists only that we think as nearly rightly as we can. Beavers of silence are busy within us.

Much of the work of this silent power is done in our sleep-time. It is important, therefore, that our last thoughts at night and our first in the morning should be the best of which we are capable. Prayer is a profound acknowledgment of this power within us. We have all heard the expression, “the night brings counsel.” And probably most of us have said, “Oh, well, we’ll just sleep on that!” Why “sleep on it”? Because we have confidence in this silent power whose processes, whether we sleep or wake, are constantly at work within us, even as night and day, a natural power, directs the growth of tree and flower. Again we have counted upon the work of industrious beavers of silence—the silent workers within each one of us.

The woods are full of lessons never to be learned any place else. Insensibly are we, in this vast big intelligent life of the forest, led on to meditate about the things we see. I often wish not only that I could place myself at certain times in those solitary places by edge of pond, deep in forest, on the hillside, following the trail, but also that I might send a friend or two to the healing which can be found in the wilderness. For example, the girls who find nothing but troubles and vexations in life, who groan if the conversation languishes, are likely to have some of their troubles slip away from them and their talk become more cheerful. Who can be in the woods, who can live in the great out of doors and not feel optimistic, at least hopeful and interested? To every girl inclined to be moody, often to suffer from the conviction that living is difficult and perhaps not worth while, I commend camp life. Activity, distraction are its powerful and wholesome remedies for melancholy. In that life one is obliged to work mind and body much as the beavers work, one’s attention is held to something every minute. The whole current of our thoughts has been changed and for the time being we are distracted from the old bruised ways of thinking. The very alteration that comes with wood life gives us a chance to think rightly. Who can be troubled or bored or bad tempered and follow the trail? Who can be indifferent and be conscious of the energy and intelligence of beaver and squirrel, of rabbit and bird, of deer and moose? Soon the whole misery-breeding brood of cares, of doubts, of perplexities that existed before we left our home drop away from us. We can use the influence of this vast sane life of the wilderness for ourselves and by its strength make good.

CHAPTER IX
FITTING UP THE CAMP FOR USE

Any girl who has crossed the ocean knows how impossible, the first time she entered her little white cabin, that bit of space looked as a place in which to sleep and to spend part of her time. There seemed to be no room in it for anything; it was difficult to turn around in, there were so few hooks on which to hang things, and the berth—dear me, that berth! So her thoughts ran. Yet gradually, as she learned the ropes, she was able to make it homelike. With experience she learned that the more bags she had in which to put things, the easier it was to keep this little stateroom in order. The next time she took with her every conceivable sort of bag for every conceivable sort of object. Also she had learned that the more she could do without unnecessary things in her cabin and steamer trunk, the more comfort was hers to enjoy. By the time she had crossed the ocean often, she had learned the art of having little but all that she needed with her—the art of making herself comfortable in a stateroom.

Even so is there an art in learning how to camp, a happy art of which there is always something left to learn. The oldest campers never get beyond the point where they can make a slight improvement in their kit or their methods. In the end you will work out your own salvation for the kind of camping you wish to do. It is my intention to point out to you only what might be called the ground plan of fitting up a camp for use. Those little individual adaptations which every one of us makes, increasing familiarity with camp life will help you to make for yourselves.

First, last, and always, when making out your camp lists, revise them carefully with the idea of cutting out everything unnecessary. All besides what you actually need will be clutter. The best way to do is to make out your lists, putting down everything that comes to you. Then go over them by yourselves and a second time with some one else. Your check lists for camp are important and should always be conscientiously made out, with nothing left to chance, nothing done hit or miss.

If you are to furnish a camp, remember that your packing boxes can do great work in helping to set you up in your new home. In rough camping such boxes do well for dressers, washstands and, with a little carpentry, also for clothes presses. A piece of enameled cloth on the top of the one to be used as a washstand, and a towel or white curtain strung on a string in front of it, behind which you can put dirty clothes, make a thoroughly satisfactory article of furniture. In camp there is no need to think about elegance. Fitness and usefulness are all the girl need ever consider. It is astonishing how much beauty your homely cabin and white tent will acquire—a beauty all their own.

For tent camping the usual camp cot bed is probably most satisfactory, for it is light and readily carried. If you are on the march and carrying at the most a tent fly for protection, you will, of course, sleep on bough beds or browse beds. Small, cut saplings, well trimmed, make good springs for beds. Any guide can help you to make the beds, and you would better be about it early, for it takes a good three-quarters of an hour to make a comfortable bough bed. Perhaps a few suggestions will not come amiss. You will, of course, have both good hunting knives, worn in a leather sheath on a leather belt, and belt-sheath hatchets. With the hatchet cut down a stout little balsam tree. From this break the tips from the big branches, having them about one foot in length. These foot-length stems make good bed springs and are the only bed springs you will have on a balsam couch unless you provide the spring yourself because of some green worm who is industriously measuring off the length of your nose, no doubt in amazement that there should be anything so extraordinarily long in the world. However, he is a harmless little chap, and the balsam tree having treated him very kindly, he will be greatly surprised at any other kind of entertainment which he may receive from you. Now, having got your “feathers,” select a smooth piece of ground with a slight slope toward the foot. Press the stems of the feathers into the earth, laying them tier after tier as you have seen a roof shingled, until your bed is wide enough, long enough, and soft enough to give you a good and sweet-scented night of sleep upon it. Lay a fair-sized log along each side and across the foot. This balsam bough bed can be made up as often as you wish with fresh feathers. Place one blanket on top and it is ready for your use. If you have got pitch on your hands in doing this, rub them with a little butter or lard and it will come off.

DR. CARRINGTON’S SLEEPING BAG.

“KENWOOD” SLEEPING BAG.

RUSTIC CAMP COT.

There is still an easier bed to make. A bag of stout bed ticking, filled with leaves and grass, forms an excellent mattress and has the virtue of being portable, for the bag can always be emptied, folded up, packed, and refilled at the next camp ground. A thin rubber blanket or poncho laid over this makes it an absolutely dry bed at all times. If you are to camp in a log cabin, probably the most comfortable bed for you to plan is a spring, bought at the nearest village, and nailed onto log posts a foot and a half high. With your ticking mattress filled with straw, your day lived in the great out of doors, no one will need to wish you pleasant slumber.

It is well to have a good supply of tarlatan on hand. This is finer than mosquito netting and therefore more impervious to stinging insects. If you camp in June, or the first week or so in July, you are likely in many parts of the country to find black flies, mosquitoes, and midges to battle against. There should be enough tarlatan to use over the camp bed and also enough to cover completely a hat with a brim and to fall down about the neck, where it can be tied under the collar. A more expensive head-net of black silk Brussels net can be made. This costs a good deal more, but the great advantage of it is, that the black does not alter the colors of the world out upon which one looks. Don’t make any mistake about the importance of some kind of netting and fly dope, or “bug juice,” as the antidotes for insect bites are sometimes called. There are various kinds of fly dope, any one of which is likely to prove useful. There is an excellent recipe for the making of your own fly dope in Breck’s “Way of the Woods,” which I give here.[6] A tiny vial of ammonia will also prove useful. One drop on a bite will often stop further poisoning from an insect sting. Inquiries should always be made beforehand whether one is likely to encounter black flies and midges. Those who have met them once are not likely to wish to have a second unprotected meeting. They are the pests of the woods and the wilderness.

[6] “Breck’s Dope:

Heat the tar and oil and add the other ingredients; simmer over slow fire until well mixed. The tar may be omitted if disliked.”

I will give, just as they occur to me, a few other articles which will be useful in the camp life: a small cake of camphor to break over things in the knapsack and keep off crawlers; a small emergency box containing surgeon’s plaster and the usual things; vaseline, witch hazel; jack knife; tool kit; a map of the region in which you are camping and a diary in which to take notes. To these might be added sewing articles, a sleeping bag if you care to use one, and a folding brown duck waterpail. The catalog from any sporting goods place will suggest a thousand other articles which you may care to have.

With a few planks to saw up into lengths, and a few white birch saplings, a most attractive camp dinner table can be made. Over this a piece of white oilcloth should be laid and kept clean by the use of a little sapolio. It is best not to buy an expensive stove for the cabin. A second-hand kitchen range, which can be purchased for a few dollars, will do quite well for the cooking cabin or shack, and an open Franklin stove for the living cabin. If one is going to camp in tents and wants a stove in one of them, it will be necessary to buy a regular tent stove. Anything else would not be safe.

As far as actual furniture is concerned, except for camp stools or benches and camp chairs, if you wish to be very elegant, the camp is now furnished. But there are still to be considered the necessary utensils for cooking and other purposes. I will enumerate them again just as they occur to me, and not necessarily in the order of their importance: kerosene oil can, molasses jug, pails, a tin baker, a teapot, tin and earthen dishes, tin and earthen cups, basins for washing, pans for baking and for milk, dishpans, dishmop, double boiler, broiler, knives, forks, teaspoons, tablespoons, mixing spoons, pepper box, salt shaker, nutmeg grater, flour sifter, can opener, frying pans—one with a long handle for use in cooking over open fires—butcher knife, bread knife, lantern, bucket, egg beater, potato masher, rolling pin, axe, hatchet, nails, hammer, toilet paper, woolen blankets, rubber blankets, crash for dish towels, yellow soap, some wire, twine, tacks, and a small fireless cooker if you know how to use one. A good fireless cooker can be built on the premises.

Possessed of these articles, any one who knows anything about the woods can be most comfortable. They can, of course, be added to indefinitely. One may make camp life as expensive and complicated as one pleases. But to do that seems a pity, for it is against the very good and spirit of the wilderness life. The wood life and all its new and invigorating experience should take us back to nature. It is for that we go into the wilderness and not to bring with us the luxuries of civilization. Part of the wholesomeness of camp life lies in learning to do without, in the fine simplicity which we are obliged to practice there. Common sense is the law of the wilderness life, and let us be sure that we follow that law.

CHAPTER X
THE POCKETBOOK

One of the objects of some girls on their camping expeditions is to keep the trip from becoming too expensive. The maximum of value must be got from the minimum of pence. And I think that is as it should be, for, with economy, the life is kept nearer a simple ideal, is made more active and more wholesome. All sorts and conditions of camping have been my lot, the five-dollar-a-day camping in a log cabin (?) equipped with running water and a porcelain tub, and the kind of camping one does under a fly with the rain and sunshine and wind driving in at their pleasure. Although I do not advise the latter as far as health results are concerned, given that the party is in fair condition they will be none the worse for the experiment.

Camping for a party of four or five should usually cost something between eight dollars and eighteen dollars apiece per week. This rate includes a guide and a good deal of service, a rowboat, a canoe, and no care about food. But the longer I camp the more I am of the opinion that the simpler and more independent the life is, the greater health and pleasure it will bring. It has been said about camping, “Much for little: much health, much good fellowship and good temper, much enjoyment of beauty—and all for little money and, rightly judged, for no trouble at all.”

“TANALITE” WATERPROOF
WALL TENT.

TOILET TENT.

KHAKI STANDARD ARMY DUCK WALL TENT.

TENT STOVE-PIPE
HOLE.

FRAZER CANOE TENT.

WATERPROOF DINING FLYS FOR
WALL TENT.

The girl who is the right sort gets more fun out of camp life when she does at least part of the work herself. Let her economize and use her own ingenuity and do the work. Any group of three or four girls can provide all the necessary “grub” for themselves at $3 a week per capita. This sum does not include rental or purchase of tent. A good tent, 7 × 7, big enough for two at a pinch, can be bought complete (this does not include fly) for about $7. You can get tents second-hand often for a song, or as a loan, or you can rent your tent for 10 cents a day. Get at least a few numbers of one or several of the following sporting magazines: Outing, Country Life in America, Forest and Stream, Field and Stream, Recreation, Rod and Gun in Canada. Look in the advertisement pages of these magazines for the names of sporting goods houses and send for catalogs. Then choose your style of tent. The different kinds of tents are legion. The Kenyon Take-Down House, too, is a capital camp home. It is “skeet”-proof and fly-proof. Send to Michigan for a catalog, and then go like the classic turtle with your shell on your back. In groups of four or more, the $10 laid by for a vacation should bring two holiday weeks—possibly a day or so over; $15, three weeks and a bit over, and $20 a whole glorious month. Expensive camping may be the “style” in certain localities, but it is not necessarily the “fun.”

For eight weeks this past summer my family of two members camped with two servants. In addition we had the occasional services of a man who did all the heavy work. There was not enough for the servants to do in the cottage and log cabin of our establishment. They were discontented, faultfinding, and wholly out of the spirit of camp life. All of the day that their tone of voice reached was helplessly ruined. The only way to keep the camp joy and pleasure was to keep out of their way. On our camp table we had silver, embroidered linen cloths, the same food, in almost the same variety, that we had it at home, and the same amount of service. All I can say is that it was a perfect nuisance—as perfectly planned and executed a nuisance as one could well conceive. Everywhere these servants looked they found things which did not suit them. What I think they wished was a modest twenty-thousand-dollar cottage in that great and wonderful wilderness.

FRAME FOR BOUGH LEAN-TO.

BOUGH LEAN-TO.

In the autumn I camped alone for two weeks in a log cabin. I say alone. I was not alone, for I had three friends with me—a collie puppy, a blind fawn, and a year-old cat. They were the best of companions—for better I could not have asked. I never heard a word of faultfinding, and I was witness to a great deal of joy. It is a curious fact about camp life that if a girl has weak places in her character, if she is selfish or peevish or faultfinding or untidy, these weaknesses will all come out. But my four-footed friends were good nature itself, young, growing, happy, contented. And they had excellent appetites. I tell you this because I want you to see how much of an item their food was in the expenses I shall enumerate. This might be called a little intimate history of at least one camp pocketbook. The fawn had a quart of milk a day and much lettuce, together with the kind of food which deer live upon: leaves, grass, clover, ferns. I had to pay for her bedding of hay. The puppy and the cat shared another quart of milk between them. The cat hunted by night, but the puppy was fed entirely by hand on bread, milk, an occasional egg, cereals, and vegetables. My own fare consisted of all the bread and butter I wished, cocoa, condensed milk, bananas, apples, eggs, potatoes, beans, nuts, raisins, cauliflower, chocolate, and a few other articles. And there was, too, the denatured alcohol to be paid for—a heavy item, for I used only a chafing dish and a small spirit lamp. The milk was eight cents a quart on account of the carriage, the butter was thirty-eight cents a pound, the eggs twenty-five cents a dozen. Except for cutting up and splitting the wood for my open Franklin stove, the wood cost me nothing. But I paid a man a dollar for half a day’s work. We weren’t seven, but we were four in that camp community. How much do you think the food for all averaged per week in those two weeks? Three dollars a week, and we had all that we wanted and more, too.

When girls plan carefully and intelligently, when they exercise good sense in the cooking and care of food, there is no reason why, with a party of four or five girls, from three dollars to four dollars apiece per week should not cover all living, exclusive, of course, of the traveling expenses. And the camping can be done for less. I commend these expense items to all Vacation Bureaus and to Camp Fire Girls.

In the two weeks I camped alone I was very busy with my writing. To this I was obliged to give most of the daylight. Besides this, I had much business correspondence to attend to. It takes time to care properly for animals, and my pets had not only to be fed, but also to be brushed and generally cared for. I planned to spend some time every day with the blind fawn so that I might amuse her. I did all these things, took care of my little cabin, had time for a walk every afternoon, and went to bed when the birds did, to get up the next morning at five o’clock. Had I been able to give my thought entirely to the food question, I am certain that the expense of these items might have been made even less.

Some girls will think this is getting back to the simple life with a vengeance. So it was but I can assure you that those two weeks were most happy and profitable in every way—far better than the over-served, over-fed months which had preceded them. For any girl who needs to forget how superficial to the real needs of life the luxuries are; for any girl who is lazy in household ways; for any girl who needs character building; for any girl who is in need of deep breathing and the pines; for any girl who wants more active life than she gets in her own home; for any girl who is of an experimental or adventurous turn of mind; for any girl who needs to be drawn away from her books; for any girl who wants to form new friendships in a big, sane, and beautiful world where the greetings are all friendly; for any girl—for every girl—who wants much for little; the log cabin, the tent, the shack in the wilderness, by pond or lake, upon the hillsides or in the valleys, will prove a “joy forever.”

CHAPTER XI
THE CAMP DOG

When I began to go into the wilderness to camp, I was much more credulous than I am now. Everywhere I went in the woods I saw an implement which looked like a cross between a pickaxe with a long handle and the largest pair of tweezers ever seen. This was always lying up against something as if just ready for use, much as one sees an axe resting against a cabin wall or on a chopping block. I couldn’t make out what this could be used for. Finally, curiosity getting the better of me and no opportunity for seeing it used offering itself, I asked.

“Oh, that,” answered the guide with a twinkle in his eye, “that is the camp dog.”

“How nice!” I thought. “Why is it called camp dog?”

“Well, you see it does most of the work for us and being so faithful and handy we’ve just got naturally into the way of calling it a camp dog.”

I was still more impressed when he gave me then and there several illustrations of its usefulness. But the end of the tale of the camp dog is not yet,—in fact it was a very long tale for me, the end of which you shall have in good season.

Generally speaking it may be said that it is the guide and not this implement which is the camp dog. It is he who is faithful, always handy, always willing. And it is he who is more imposed upon than any other member of the camp community. The guide is a responsible person,—the responsible person. He is usually registered and his pay is always good. He needs every dollar he gets and every bit of authority, too, for he works hard and often for groups of people who are thorough in only one respect and that is in their irresponsibility. The guide has to be sure that fires are kindled in the right places and that they are really out when they should be; he must keep his party from foolhardy acts of any kind; he must be sure that they have a good time and certain that they are not overtaxed; if it comes off cold or is cold, he must keep them warm; he must see, despite every vicissitude, that they are enjoying themselves; he must do the cooking—and he must be a good cook,—boil the coffee, wash the dishes, pitch and strike the tents; he must pilot the members of the party to the best places for fishing, often bait their hooks or teach them how to bait, dig their worms; and give their first lessons in casting a fly; must instruct them in all necessary wood craft and keep them from shooting wildly; he must see that the game laws of the state are observed, also the fire laws; if anything should happen to a member of his party, he will, in all likelihood, be held responsible for it; and finally, always and all the time, no matter how he himself feels, he must be agreeable, obliging, useful.

Now if the man who has all these burdens to bear is not a camp dog, I should like to know what he is? To those of us who have been into the woods year after year, it is a sort of boundless irritation to see some members of the camping party sitting about idle while the guide does the work. Part of the value of camp life is its activity, its activities. Another part of its good is the skill which comes from learning to be useful in the woods. The life out-of-doors should be a constant training in manual work,—call it wood work if you wish. I am reminded of a story told in “Vanity Fair” about a lazy, indifferent student who was in the class of a famous physicist. The freshman sprawled in the rear seat and was sleeping or was about to go to sleep.

“Mr. Fraser,” said the physicist sharply, “you may recite.”

Fraser opened his eyes but he did not change his somnolent pose.

“Mr. Fraser, what is work?”

“Everything is work.”

“What, everything is work?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I take it you would like the class to believe that this desk is work?”

“Yes, sir,” wearily, “wood work.”

From the moment that school of the woods is entered every girl has her wood work cut out for her, if she is taking camping in the right spirit. It is all team play in the wilderness, or if it is not, it is a rather poor game. Helpfulness is one of the first rules and every camper should be willing to help the guide. Usually the guides are a fine set of self respecting, dignified, resourceful men. And I think it might be said with considerable truthfulness that when they are not what they ought to be, it is nine times out of ten due to the undesirable influence of the parties they have worked for. Your guide is your equal in most respects and your superior in others. He should be met on a footing of equality. I use this word advisedly and I do not mean familiarity. Well-bred girls do not meet anyone, whether in the wilderness or in civilization, on this footing immediately. The party should be willing and glad to help the guide in every possible way. That does not signify doing his work for him but it does indicate helping him.

A routine of some sort should be adopted and is one of the best ways to assist him. One girl should be on duty at one time and another at another and all in regular rotation. No camp life can go on successfully without some law and order of this sort. For it is just as necessary for the smooth running of household wheels in the log cabin as it is in the city home. Whoever occupies the guide’s position, that is the one who is chiefly responsible for everything, should be ably helped by the whole party but not by the whole party at the same time. Evolve a system for the particular conditions of the camp life in which you find yourself and stick to it. Let one girl or one set of girls help one day and another the next. Let the girl be detailed to do one kind of work one day and another another. This system, with proper rotation, means that nobody gets tired of her work. A girl cannot be too self-reliant if she is ever to be wise in the way of the woods. There is no need for discouragement if everything is not learned at once, for camping is like skating and is an art to be learned only through many tumbles and mistakes. Be prepared to take it and yourself lightly—in short, to laugh readily over the mistakes made in the art of living in the woods.

Now we have come to the very tip of the tail of the camp dog. You will be interested to know how an old timer was obliged to laugh at herself. I am ashamed to tell you how recently this occurred. I was in the northernmost wilderness of the state of Maine, and near a big lumber camp, when I saw a “camp dog” lying on the ground, its long axe handle shining from use, its pickaxe blade a bright steel color, and the tooth at the back looking as if it had been often used. I was delighted.

“Oh,” I said to my guide, “look at that camp dog lying there!”

He was particularly attentive to my pronunciation, for he said I pronounced some words, such as “girl,” as he had never heard them pronounced before. I saw a curious expression pass across his face.

“What did you say that was?” he asked.

“Why, that camp dog lying there.”

“Camp dog!”

Then he began to laugh and he kept right on until the woods echoed with his roars.

“Well,” he said finally, wiping away the tears, “if that doesn’t beat everything! That isn’t a camp dog, that’s a cant dog,—you know what you cant logs and heavy things over with, roll ’em over and pry ’em up with when you couldn’t do it any other way. My grief, to think of your calling that a camp dog all these years!”

And he went off into another guffaw.

CHAPTER XII
THE OUTDOOR TRAINING SCHOOL

Many girls think of outdoor life as of something to be enjoyed if they have plenty of time. As a matter of course they take their daily bath. But the outdoor exercise comes as an accessory. It is still unfortunately true that boys more than girls take camp life for granted. Yet girls, and students particularly, should realize that it is economy of time to be out of doors. This they need both for their work and for their health. Outdoor exercise, with its bath of fresh air and the natural bath of freshly circulating blood it brings with it, its training school for the whole girl, is as essential as the tub or sponge bath. But how many of us think of it in that way?

To be outdoors is to have the nerves keyed to the proper pitch. If fresh air is not a tonic to the nerves, then why is it that moodiness and depression fall away as we walk or row or lie under the trees, and we become saner and more serene? When one is depressed the best thing to do is to go out of doors. Altogether aside from any formal wisdom of book or student or teacher, there is wisdom with nature. If the head is tired, go out of doors! If the body is fagged, go out of doors! If the heart is troubled, go out of doors! The life out there, as no life indoors can, will make for health, for charity, for bigness. Petty things fall away, and with nature equanimity and poise are found again. It isn’t necessary to bother someone about woes real or imaginary. All that is necessary is to get out among the trees and flowers, the sky and clouds, the joyous birds and little creatures of field and wood, and hear what they have to say. There will be no complaining among them, even about very real difficulties.

A great deal is heard concerning hygiene in these days, the study of it, the practice of it. The biggest university of hygiene in the world is not within houses but outside, up that hillside where the trees are blowing, in the doorway of our tent, on the lawn in front of the house, out on the lake, even on a city house-top, and, last resort if necessary, by an open window. One reason why many people are concerned about this question of hygiene is because they know that not only are human beings happier when they are well and strong, but also because a healthy person is, nine times out of ten, more moral than one who is sick or sickly. Ill health means offense of some kind, often one’s own, against the laws of nature or society. We have, too, to pay for one another’s faults. But life lived on sound physical principles, with plenty of sunshine, cold water, exercise, wind, rain, simple food and sensible clothing, is not likely to be sickly, useless or burdensome.

BITTERN

LOON

PARTRIDGE

RED-BREASTED MERGANSER

WOODCOCK

MALLARD

The body is not a mechanism to be disregarded, but an exquisitely made machine to be exquisitely cared for. Nobody would trust an engineer to run an engine he knows nothing about. Yet most of us are running our engines without any knowledge of the machinery. Why should we excuse ourselves for lack of knowledge and care when, for the same reasons a chauffeur, for example, would be immediately dismissed? How many of us know that the nerves are more or less dependent upon the muscles for their tone? How many of us realize how important it is to keep in perfect muscular condition? We sit hour after hour in our chairs, all our muscles relaxed, bending over books, and begrudge one hour—it ought to be three or four!—out of doors. The person who can run furthest and swiftest is the one with the strongest heart. The person who can work longest and to the greatest advantage is the one who has kept his bodily health.... It may be laid down as an absolute rule that any individual can do more and better work when he is well than when he is not in good physical condition. Ceaseless activity is the law of nature and the body that is resolutely active does not grow old as rapidly as the one that is physically indolent.

Much out-of-door life, much camping, keep one young in heart, too. It isn’t possible to grow old or sophisticated among such a wealth of joyous, wholesome friendships as may be found in nature, where no unclean word is ever heard and where no unfriendliness, no false pride, no jealousy can exist. A great English poet, William Wordsworth, has told us more of the shaping power of nature, its quickening spirit, its power of restoration, than any other poet. It would be well for every girl to take that wonderful poem “Tintern Abbey” out of doors and read it there. Wordsworth, still a very young man when he wrote it, tells how he loved the Welsh landscape and the tranquil restoration it had brought him

“’mid the din
Of towns and cities.”

A higher gift he acknowledges, too, when through the harmony and joy of nature he had been led to see deeply “into the life of things.”

There is something the matter with a girl who hasn’t an appetite, as sharp as hunger, to escape from her books and camp out of doors. If outdoor life cannot engross her wholly at times, banishing all thoughts of work, then she should make an effort to forget books and everything connected with them for a while. A young girl ought to be skillful in all sorts of outdoor accomplishments, rowing, swimming, riding and driving if possible, canoeing, skating, sailing a boat, fishing, hunting, mountain climbing.

Fortunately there is more of the play-spirit connected with outdoor life than there used to be. Both school and college have fostered this wholesome attitude. If a girl doesn’t like active sports she should cultivate a love for them. You can always trust a person who is accomplished in physical ways, for anyone who has led an intelligent out-of-door life is more self-reliant. Her faculty for doing things, her inventiveness, her poise, her “nerve” are all strengthened. I recall an instance of this “faculty” and inventiveness. We were on a wild Maine lake when an accident happened to the canoe, a necessity to our return, for we were far away from all sources of help. Apparently there was nothing with which to mend it. But our Indian guide found there everything he needed ready for his use. He scraped gum off a tree, he cut a piece of bark, and then he rummaged about until he discovered an old wire. With these things he securely mended a big hole. Oftentimes it seems as if the very appliances with which city children are provided tend to make them incapable.

YELLOWBIRD

FIELD SPARROW

GOLDEN-CROWNED THRUSH

SONG SPARROW

CHIPPING SPARROW

YELLOWBIRD, FIELD SPARROW, SONG SPARROW, CHIPPING SPARROW, GOLDEN CROWNED THRUSH

WOOD THRUSH

HERMIT THRUSH

SWAINSON’S THRUSH

WILSON’S THRUSH

WOOD THRUSH, HERMIT THRUSH, SWAINSON’S THRUSH, WILSON’S THRUSH

PHŒBE BIRD

SCARLET TANAGER

MARYLAND YELLOWTHROAT

BLUEBIRD

PHŒBE BIRD, SCARLET TANAGER, MARYLAND YELLOWTHROAT, BLUEBIRD

WREN

BLUE JAY

CHICKADEE

RUBYTHROAT

WREN, BLUE JAY, CHICKADEE, RUBYTHROAT

WHIP-POOR-WILL

NIGHT HAWK

SCREECH OWL

WHIP-POOR-WILL, NIGHT HAWK, SCREECH OWL

The girl who lives out of doors acquires unlimited resourcefulness. Outdoor life quickens and sharpens the perception. And for the girl to have her power of observation sharpened is worth a great deal. The capacity for accurate and quick observation education from books does not always develop. One must go back to nature for that, one must live out in the woods and fields all one can, one must be able to tell the scent of honeysuckle from the scent of the rose, and know the fragrance of milkweed even before that homely weed is seen, and know spruce, balsam and white pine even as one knows a friend. Eyes must be able to detect the differences not only in colors and shapes of birds, but in their flight, and ears know every song of wood and field. Then the services of beauty, its music, its color, its form, will be always about us and nature’s health and strength and beauty become our own, not only her gaiety and “vital feelings of delight,” but also her restraint upon weakness, and her kindling to the highest life—the life that is spiritual.

BLACK SPRUCE