CAMP FIRE YARN.—No. 5.
OBSERVATION OF "SIGN."
Noticing "sign."—Details of People.—Sign round a dead body—Details in the Country—Use of eyes, ears, and nose by Scouts—Night Scouting—Hints to Instructors—Practices and Games in Observation—Books on Observation.
NOTICING SIGN.
"Sign" is the word used by scouts to mean any little details such as footprints, broken twigs, trampled grass, scraps of food, a drop of blood, a hair, and so on; anything that may help as clues in getting the information they are in search of.
Mrs. Smithson, when travelling in Kashmir last year, was following up with some native Indian trackers the "pugs" of a panther which had killed and carried off a young buck. He had crossed a wide bare slab of rock which, of course, gave no mark of his soft feet. The tracker went at once to the far side of the rock where it came to a sharp edge; he wetted his finger, and just passed it along the edge till he found a few buck's hairs sticking to it. This showed him where the panther had passed down off the rock dragging the buck with him. Those few hairs were what scouts call "sign."
Mrs. Smithson's tracker also found bears by noticing small "sign." On one occasion he noticed a fresh scratch in the bark of a tree evidently made by a bear's claw, and on the other he found a single black hair sticking to the bark of a tree, which told him that a bear had rubbed against it.
One of the most important things that a scout has to learn, whether he is a war scout or a hunter or peace scout, is to let nothing escape his attention; he must notice small points and signs, and then make out the meaning of them: but it takes a good deal of practice before a tenderfoot can get into the habit of really noting everything and letting nothing escape his eye. It can be learnt just as well in a town as in the country.
And in the same way you should notice any strange sound or any peculiar smell and think for yourself what it may mean. Unless you learn to notice "signs" you will have very little of "this and that" to put together and so you will be no use as a scout; it comes by practice.
Remember, a scout always considers it a great disgrace if an outsider discovers a thing before he has seen it for himself, whether that thing is far away in the distance, or close by under his feet.
If you go out with a really trained scout you will see that his eyes are constantly moving, looking out in every direction near and far, noticing everything that is going on, just from habit, not because he wants to show off how much he notices.