HUNTING KNIFE.
BIRCH BARK CUP.
The articles which need to be cooled can be kept fresh in a nearby brook. Dead fish, however, should never be allowed to lie in water, but should be wrapped up in ferns or large leaves. If you are camping for any length of time, by making a little runway out of a trough you can have freshly flowing water, cooling butter and other food stuffs, all the time. Or a receptacle constructed something like a wire bait box will prove as good as the flowing water. This sunk into a cool pond or lake, makes an admirable ice chest, into which the finny creatures cannot get. In some rotation which you have decided upon, the care of the food should receive the especial attention from one girl every day. In this way hedgehogs, skunks, mice, rats, ants, will all be kept at a distance.
There are in addition to these various food stuffs and their care, as I said in the first chapter, many articles necessary for camp life about which we must think. If you are going off for a few days with a guide, he will attend to these things for you. But if you are setting up a camp for yourself, you will need to have them in mind. They are, two or three tin pails of convenient sizes nesting or fitting into one another so that they can be easily carried, a tin reflector baker for outdoor cooking, a coffee pot if you are foolish enough to take coffee, enameled ware plates and cups, basins, pans, dishpans, a dishmop, a chain pot-cleaner, a double boiler, a broiler, knives and forks, spoons big and little, pepper and salt shakers, flour sifter, a rotary can opener, a frypan, long-handled and short-handled, a carving knife and a fish knife if you intend to do a great deal of fishing. There are many kinds of cooking kits. There is a good one for four persons which may be obtained at about six dollars from any large hardware dealer. Add to these things which have been mentioned fish hooks, a lantern, lantern wicks, nails of different sizes, a hammer—don’t forget the hammer!—toilet paper, woolen blankets, mosquito netting (if it is a mosquito-infested district), fly dope to rub on hands and face, oilcloth for camp table, some twine and some tacks.
Equipped with these articles and what you carry in your knapsacks and what you wear, there is almost no wilderness in which a girl cannot have a good time, improve her health, and be the wiser for having entered the wilderness.