Woodcraft | Page 9

and comfortable and stands a pretty
heavy rain when properly put up. This is how it is made: Let us say you
are out and have slightly missed your way. The coming gloom warns
you that night is shutting down. You are no tenderfoot. You know that
a place of rest is essential to health and comfort through the long, cold
November night. You dive down the first little hollow until you strike a
rill of water, for water is a prime necessity. As you draw your hatchet
you take in the whole situation at a glance. The little stream is gurgling
downward in a half choked frozen way. There is a huge sodden
hemlock lying across it. One clip of the hatchet shows it will peel.
There is plenty of smaller timber standing around; long, slim poles,
with a tuft of foliage on top. Five minutes suffice to drop one of these,
cut a twelve-foot pole from it, sharpen the pole at each end, jam one
end into the ground and the other into the rough back of a scraggy
hemlock and there is your ridge pole. Now go--with your hatchet- -for
the bushiest and most promising young hemlocks within reach. Drop
them and draw them to camp rapidly. Next, you need a fire. There are
fifty hard, resinous limbs sticking up from the prone hemlock; lop off a
few of these and split the largest into match timber; reduce the splinters

to shavings, scrape the wet leaves from your prospective fireplace and
strike a match on the balloon part of your trousers. If you are a
woodsman you will strike but one. Feed the fire slowly at first; it will
gain fast. When you have a blaze ten feet high, look at your watch. It is
6 P.M. You don't want to turn in before 10 o'clock and you have four
hours to kill before bedtime. Now, tackle the old hemlock; take off
every dry limb and then peel the bark and bring it to camp. You will
find this takes an hour or more.
Next, strip every limb from your young hemlocks and shingle them
onto your ridge pole. This will make a sort of bear den, very well
calculated to give you a comfortable night's rest. The bright fire will
soon dry the ground that is to be your bed and you will have plenty of
time to drop another small hemlock and make a bed of browse a foot
thick. You do it. Then you make your pillow. Now, this pillow is
essential to comfort and very simple. It is half a yard of muslin, sewed
up as a bag and filled with moss or hemlock browse. You can empty it
and put it in your pocket, where it takes up about as much room as a
handkerchief. You have other little muslin bags--an' you be wise. One
holds a couple of ounces of good tea; another, sugar; another is kept to
put your loose duffle in: money, match safe, pocket-knife. You have a
pat of butter and a bit of pork, with a liberal slice of brown bread; and
before turning in you make a cup of tea, broil a slice of pork and
indulge in a lunch.
Ten o'clock comes. The time has not passed tediously. You are warm,
dry and well-fed. Your old friends, the owls, come near the fire-light
and salute you with their strange wild notes; a distant fox sets up for
himself with his odd, barking cry and you turn in. Not ready to sleep
just yet.
But you drop off; and it is two bells in the morning watch when you
waken with a sense of chill and darkness. The fire has burned low and
snow is falling. The owls have left and a deep silence broods over the
cold, still forest. You rouse the fire and, as the bright light shines to the
furthest recesses of your forest den, get out the little pipe and reduce a
bit of navy plug to its lowest denomination. The smoke curls lazily

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