Fig. 212. Umbrella with Fly. Fig. 210, and makes a perfect protection against rain. The ponchos these men had were not quite long enough to cover the whole bed, so they fastened umbrellas to the head posts, as shown in Fig. 212. During a shower in the woods the rain comes straight down in large drops, caused by the water collecting on the leaves. To prevent these large drops from splashing through the umbrellas, they laid pieces of cloth over the umbrellas, which served, like the fly of a tent, to check the fall of rain drops.
A Nightmare.
I slept in the mummy case that night and Dutchy in the first sleeping bag. It must have been about midnight when I was awakened by a most unearthly yell. It sent the cold chills running up and down my back. A second scream brought me into action, and I struggled to throw back the head flap, which had become caught. It seemed an age before I could open it and wriggle out of the bag. Dutchy was sitting up in bed with a look of horror on his face, and his whole body was in a tremor of fear. One of the men dashed a glass of water in his face, which brought him back to his senses. It was only a nightmare, we found. Dutchy dreamed he had been injured in a railway accident and had been taken for dead to the morgue. He tried to let them know that he was alive, but couldn’t utter a sound, until finally he burst out with the yells that roused the camp. Then, as he awoke with the horror of the dream still on him, his eyes fell on the two stretcher beds that looked like biers and the black coffin-like sleeping bag. It was not much wonder that Dutchy was frightened. The camp did certainly have a most ghastly appearance in the vague moonlight that filtered through the trees, and it must have been still more gruesome to see the coffin and biers suddenly burst open and the corpses come running toward him. To prevent any further nightmare we set Dutchy’s sleeping bag under the “A” tent, where he would be saved the horror of again waking up in a morgue.
Pack Harness.
In the morning our friends broke camp and started westward. Dutchy and I watched them packing up their goods into a couple of very compact bundles, which they strapped to their backs with a peculiar pack harness. I took careful note
Fig. 213. Pack Harness. of the way the harness was put together, and when we returned to the island we made two sets for use on our tramping expeditions. A canvas yoke was first cut out to the form shown in Fig. 213. We used two thicknesses of the heaviest brown canvas we could find, binding the two pieces together with tape. The yoke was padded with cotton at the shoulders and a strap was fastened to each shoulder piece. These were arranged to be buckled to a pair of straps fastened to the back of the yoke and passing under the arms. Riveted to these straps were a pair of straps used for fastening on the pack. The yoke straps were attached with the rough side against the yoke, while the pack straps were riveted on with the rough side uppermost, as indicated in the drawing.
Riveting.