Outdoor Sports and Games

by Claude Harris Miller

It is a very common custom for beginners to make camp furniture, posts, and fences of white birch. This is due to the fact that the wood is easily worked and gives us very pretty effects. Birch however is not at all durable and if we expect to use our camp for more than one season we must expect to replace the birch every year or two. Rustic furniture made of cedar will last for years and is far superior to birch.

Getting lost in the woods may be a very serious thing. If you are a city boy used to signboards, street corners, and familiar buildings you may laugh at the country boy who is afraid to go to a big city because he may get lost, but he knows what being lost means at home and he fails to realize when he is in a city how easy it is to ask the nearest policeman or passer-by the way home. Most city boys will be lost in the woods within five minutes after they leave their camp or tent. If you have no confidence in yourself and if you are in a wilderness like the North woods, do not venture very far from home alone until you are more expert.

It is difficult to say when we are really lost in the woods. As long as we think we know the way home we are not lost even if we may be absolutely wrong in our opinion of the proper direction. In such a case we may soon find our mistake and get on the right track again. When we are really lost is when suddenly a haunting fear comes over us that we do not know the way home. Then we lose our heads as well as our way and often become like crazy people.

A sense of direction is a gift or instinct. It is the thing that enables a carrier pigeon that has been taken, shut up in a basket say from New York to Chicago, to make a few circles in the air when liberated and start out for home, and by this sense to fly a thousand miles without a single familiar landmark to guide him and finally land at his home loft tired and hungry.

No human being ever had this power to the same extent as a pigeon, but some people seem to keep a sense of direction and a knowledge of the points of compass in a strange place without really making an effort to do it. One thing is sure. If we are travelling in a strange country we must always keep our eyes and ears open if we expect to find our way alone. We must never trust too implicitly in any “sense of direction.”

Forest travellers are always on the lookout for peculiar landmarks that they will recognize if they see them again. Oddly shaped trees, rocks, or stumps, the direction of watercourses and trails, the position of the sun, all these things will help us to find our way out of the woods when a less observing traveller who simply tries to remember the direction he has travelled may become terrified.

Rules which tell people what to do when they are lost are rarely of much use, because the act of losing our way brings with it such a confusion of mind that it would be like printing directions for terror stricken people who are drowning.

Suppose, for example, a boy goes camping for a week or two in the Adirondacks or Maine woods. If he expects to go about alone, his first step should be to become familiar with the general lay of the land, the direction of cities, towns, settlements, mountain ranges, lakes, and rivers in the section where he is going, and especially with the location of other camps, railroads, lumber camps, and so on in his immediate neighbourhood, say within a five-mile radius. It is an excellent plan to take along a sectional map which can usually be bought of the state geologist. One can by asking questions also learn many things from the natives.

Such a boy may start out from his camp, which is on the shore of a lake, for example, on an afternoon’s fishing or hunting trip. If he is careful he will always consult his compass to keep in mind the general direction in which he travels. He will also tell his friends at camp where he expects to go. If he has no compass, he at least knows that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west and he can easily remember whether he has travelled toward the setting sun or away from it. Rules for telling the points of compass by the thickness of the bark or moss on trees are well enough for story books. They are not of much value to a man lost in the woods.

Suddenly, say at four o’clock, this boy decides to “turn around” and go back to camp. And then the awful feeling comes to him that he doesn’t know which way to turn. The woods take on a strange and unfamiliar look. He is lost. The harder he tries to decide which way the camp lies, the worse his confusion becomes. If he would only collect his thoughts and like the Indian say “Ugh! Indian not lost, Indian here. Wigwam lost,” he probably would soon get his bearings. It is one thing to lose your way and another to lose your head.