And here is the way to do it, the recipe, so to speak, for happy camping. If you are going to live in a cabin, take with you a small screen tent, bobbinet is best, to put over your bed or bunk. If you are going to live in a tent, that tent must be absolutely mosquito-proof, which means that it must have a sod cloth all around the bottom and that the opening must be protected by a double piece of mosquito-netting or by a piece of good bobbinet. The mosquito-netting or the bobbinet is sewed to one flap and is pinned to the other flap with safety-pins. [[149]]If a hole is left one inch square, the tent will fill up with mosquitoes and make sleep impossible.
Some mosquitoes will always find their way into the tent. Every one of these must be killed before the campers try to sleep. They should be burnt with a candle as they are found sitting in the tent. With reasonable care, canvas and bobbinet will not catch fire in this process, but a lighted candle must not be brought in contact with the ordinary mosquito-netting or with cheese-cloth. A person who fights mosquitoes at night does not know the A B C of camping.
There are other pests in the woods in early summer: wood-ticks, horse-flies, deer-flies, and once the writer was besieged in his cabin for a whole day by the common barn-fly. There are also the little “no-see-’ems,” but they never last long. The arch-demon in the whole list of abominations is the mosquito; the female mosquito. Mosquitoes come early in the season, stay late, and work day and night. [[150]]
One is sometimes asked about the danger from snakes and wild animals in the North Woods. There are no poisonous snakes in the North Woods. The most dangerous wild creature in summer is the mosquito, and the only good mosquito is a dead mosquito. There is one thing that may be even worse than mosquitoes, and that is the toothache; therefore, every wise camper sees his dentist before he leaves town.
It is now fitting that we should again take up the thread of our story. [[151]]
CHAPTER XIX
ON WILD LAKES
On a lake, which is now called Whitefish Lake, the travellers secured the young moose they had been looking for, and here they stopped a few days to smoke and dry the meat and to rest. Until now they had been living on fresh and smoked fish and on rabbits.
Ganawa then told the lads that they would now travel northward. An old Indian at Michipicoten Bay had told him that two white men had gone northward to look for gold rock on a high cliff on one of the big lakes. He thought it was Oba Lake. Now Ganawa wanted to try to find the white men and the gold rock and he also wished to see several big lakes on which his father once made a great hunting trip, but which Ganawa had never seen. His white sons could now go with him, he said. He did [[152]]not have to provide any longer for his Indian sons and daughters, and so he wished to see these big lakes before he was too old to go on long hard journeys.