“We’ll camp right here,” declared the curator. “It’s always home wherever we are, and there’s lots to do.”
“All right, and, as I have no camp to make, I’m going to find a nest or an egg if it takes all day!” declared Nicky. “I haven’t really begun to study this jungle yet, you know!”
“Not a bad idea,” agreed the curator, heartily. “Take Sadok along with you, so that you’ll turn up sometime,” he laughed. “Dwight and I will make camp and skin out the birds.”
The grove was an excellent one to camp in, clear and open under the great trees, and Dwight started his camp at once. Their system was an original and elastic one, each man for himself, each one eating or sleeping when and where he pleased. They had long ago discarded the old-fashioned camp where one man cooked for the crowd and all had to be in at mealtimes. Such a system was too rigid and conventional for such diverse tastes and occupations as these three.
Dwight opened his pack and unlimbered his steel pickax, driving down into the lava rock with its point to make holes for tent pegs and clear out rocks on his sleeping site. He chose a spot covered with small bushes like huckleberries, filled with a windfall of dried leaves. Here he spread out his sleeping bag, and over it went a light tent fly, on a rope stretched over two forked stakes. From the rope he hung a mosquito screen, with a small ring of cane cut in the jungle and bent into a hoop a foot in diameter, so as to hold the net gauze clear of his face. This hoop was tied inside the square of net about a foot below the central peak from which it hung, and the folds of the net draped over the head of the bag. Dwight’s sleeping bag was waterproof and insectproof, so that, with the net hung over his face and the fly over that, forming a sun and rain shade, he was well protected from insects and wet weather on very little weight—about five pounds all told for tent and bedding.
In front of his camp the lad built a small stone fireplace, with a row of his little food sacks hung handy around it on cross poles. He set about making a batter of flour, corn meal, dried egg powder, dried milk, and baking powder, and soon had cooked himself a pile of flapjacks. With the body of a paradise bird grilling on a forked stick, and a tin of tea steeping on the hearth, he was as well fed and comfortable as anywhere else in the world. After lunch he seized his pickax and went collecting for insects and beetles in the forest, the sharp pick point digging and prying into the bark of prone trees, where many a new form of jewel-bodied tropical beetle came to his collection box.
The curator had silently melted into the jungle, whence soon appeared the brown glint of sunlight from the tent fly spread over his hammock. A great bag of netting enveloped the latter, and it could be drawn in tight by a string after he had gotten inside. A handful of rockahominy washed down with a drink from his canteen and a bite of grilled bird satisfied him for lunch. After skinning out the paradise birds and hanging them in a row from a line stretched between two trees to keep them from the ants, he disappeared into the jungle on his favorite occupation of studying bird life.
Dwight found a bewildering world of new entomology awaiting him. His pickax, net, and magnifying glass were busy every moment, and the boy quivered with excitement, rushing hither and yon through the jungle, now after a leaf-winged butterfly, which would disappear with maddening legerdemain; now stooping to watch a fight between two male Brenthidæ, long armored beetles with fighting jaws at the end of a slender proboscis like a spear; now urged to frantic pursuit of the rare horned deer fly. The mystery of the leaf-winged butterfly was solved when he had examined a bush on which it lit more closely. One of the leaves turned out to be the creature itself, with wings folded, motionless on the stem, the under surface of its wings so closely resembling the leaves that only the closest scrutiny could detect the difference.
By late afternoon he returned to camp by compass, his box full of new and wonderful insects.
“Look at the day’s plunder, Mr. Baldwin!” cried the youth, enthusiastically. He drew out the cork slabs from his carrying tin, covered with the heterogenous collection impaled on pins.