Camp Grate.
If you want to keep a fire going all night to show or to warm you, put good-sized logs end to end star shaped—and one long one reaching to your hand so that you can push it in from time to time to the centre without trouble of getting up to stoke the fire.
If coals or wood are difficult to get for making fires at home, don't forget that old boots which you often find lying about on dustheaps, make very good fuel.
You can do a good turn to any poor old woman in winter time by collecting old boots and giving them to her for firing.
Another way to make a good cooking fire is one they use in America.
Drive two stout stakes into the ground about four feet apart, both leaning a bit backwards. Cut down a young tree with a trunk some fifteen feet high and ten inches thick; chop it into five-foot lengths; lay three logs, one on top of another, leaning against the upright stakes. This forms the back of your fireplace. Two short logs are then laid as fire-dogs, and a log laid across them as front bar of the fire. Inside this "grate" you build a pyramid-shaped fire, which then gives out great heat. The "grate" must, of course, be built so that it faces the wind.
Tongs are useful about a camp-fire, and can be made from a rod of beech or other tough wood, about four feet long and one inch thick. Shave it away in the middle to about half its proper thickness, and put this part into the hot embers of the fire for a few moments, and bend the stick over till the two ends come together. Then flatten away the inside edges of the ends so that they have a better grip—and there are your tongs.
A besom is also useful for keeping the camp clean, and can easily be made with a few sprigs of birch bound tightly round a stake.
Drying Clothes.—You will often get wet through on service, and you will see recruits remaining in their wet clothes until they get dry again; no old scout would do so, as that is the way to catch fever and get ill. When you are wet, take the first opportunity of getting your wet clothes off and drying them, even though you may not have other clothes to put on, as happened to me many a time. I have sat naked under a waggon while my one suit of clothes was drying over a fire. The way to dry clothes over a fire is to make a fire of hot ashes, and then build a small beehive-shaped cage of sticks over the fire, and then to hang your clothes all over this cage, and they will very quickly dry. Also, in hot weather it is dangerous to sit in your clothes when they have got wet from your perspiration. On the West Coast of Africa I always carried a spare shirt, hanging down my back, with the sleeves tied round my neck; so soon as I halted I would take off the wet shirt I was wearing and put on the dry, which had been hanging out in the sun on my back. By these means I never got fever when almost everyone else went down with it.