“Suppose there are no eats at the carnival,” the kid said, “what are we going to do? Then we can’t get anything till morning, because there are no more towns after that and Chocolate Drop will be asleep when we get to camp.”
I said, “Didn’t you tell us once a scout never has to starve? That he can cook moss and make stew out of sassafras and birch bark and maple gum and cobble-stones and things. All we have to do is to squeeze the juice out of a couple of hunks of granite and stew up some willow twigs and sprinkle dirt over them like Daniel Boone used to do, I don’t think, in Wilderness Lore page two hundred fifty-’leven for the information of maniacs that get lost in the woods of Maine.”
“That shows how much you know about—about—nature—nature’s resources!” the kid screamed.
All the while we were hiking along the road and all the fellows were laughing like they always do when Pee-wee and I are engaged in mortal come-back. He knows how to make nature yield—you know, all that kind of stuff. He can’t starve when he’s crossing a vacant lot, he can make table d’hote dinners out of roots like hunters lost in darkest Africa. If it gets chilly he can make Chile sauce out of the weather. Some scout. He’s so hungry he swallows everything he reads. He can find his way in the back yard by noticing the angle of an angleworm.
I said, “If they don’t have any pop-corn at the carnival, we should worry. We can just take some holes and tie them together and make a fish net and catch some fish in the forest.”
“You think you’re very smart,” he shouted. “You think the Catskills are a trackless wilderness. Those things are for when you’re in trackless wildernesses. I suppose you don’t know what unfathomable depths are,” he hollered at me.
“I wouldn’t know one if I met it in the street,” I said. “But I never said that a large school of fish is a college.”
“Did I say that?” he fairly yelled.
“Sure, you told Mary Temple,” I said. “You told her a blazed trail is one that’s on fire.”
“You’re crazy!” he screamed.