“My! I wish I had a drink,” exclaimed Bert, speaking aloud, as he had done a number of times since setting out alone to bring help to Nan and Mrs. Bimby. “I wish I had a drink of water!”
Now Bert Bobbsey knew better than to eat dry snow. Once when he was a small boy, smaller even than Freddie, he had been playing out in the snow and had eaten it whenever he felt thirsty. As a result he had been made ill.
“Never eat snow again, Bert,” his father had told him at the time. And to make Bert remember Mr. Bobbsey had read the boy a story of travelers in the Arctic regions searching for the North Pole. The story told how, no matter how tired or cold these travelers were, they always stopped to melt the snow and make water or tea of it when they were thirsty. They never ate dry snow.
“I’ve either got to find a spring to get a drink, or melt some of this snow,” said Bert to himself, as he walked on, limping a little, though his leg was feeling better than at first. “But I guess if I did find a spring it would be frozen over. Now how can I melt some snow?”
Bert had been on camping trips with his father, and he had often seen Mr. Bobbsey make use of things he found beside the road or in the woods to help out in a time of some little trouble. With this in mind, the boy began to look around for something that would help him get a drink of water, or to melt some snow into water which he could drink after it had cooled.
But to melt snow needed a fire, he knew, and also something that would hold the snow before and after it was melted.
“I need a pan or a can and a fire,” decided Bert. “I wonder if I have any matches?”
He felt in his pockets and found some, though he did not usually carry them, for they are rather dangerous for children. But Bert felt that he was now getting to be quite a boy.
“Well, here’s a start,” he said to himself as he felt the matches in his pocket. But he did not take them out, for the snow was blowing about, and Bert knew that a wet match was as bad as none at all. He must keep his matches dry as the old settlers were advised to “keep their powder dry.”
“If I could only make a fire,” thought Bert, coming to a stop and looking about him at a spot that looked as if it might once have been a camp. All he could see was a waste of snow and some trees. But wood for fires, he knew, grew on trees, though any wood which could be made to burn must be dry.