If you should miss your way, the first thing to remember is like the Indian, "You are not lost; it is the teepee that is lost." It isn't serious. It cannot be so, unless you do something foolish.

The first and most natural thing to do is to get on a hill, up a tree, or other high lookout, and seek for some landmark near the camp. You may be sure of these things:

You are not nearly as far from camp as you think you are.

Your friends will soon find you.

You can help them best by signalling.

The worst thing you can do is to get frightened. The truly dangerous enemy is not the cold or the hunger, so much as the fear. It is fear that robs the wanderer of his judgment and of his limb power; it is fear that turns the pa.s.sing experience into a final tragedy. Only keep cool and all will be well.

If there is snow on the ground, you can follow your back track.

If you see no landmark, look for the smoke of the fire. Shout from time to time, and wait; for though you have been away for hours it is quite possible you are within earshot of your friends. If you happen to have a gun, fire it off twice in quick succession on your high lookout, then wait and listen. Do this several times and wait plenty long enough, perhaps an hour. If this brings no help, send up a distress signal--that is, make two smoke fires by smothering two bright fires with green leaves and rotten wood, and keep them at least fifty feet apart, or the wind will confuse them. Two shots or two smokes are usually understood to mean "I am in trouble." Those in camp on seeing this should send up one smoke, which means "Camp is here."

In a word, "keep cool, make yourself comfortable, leave a record of your travels, and help your friends to find you."

EDIBLE WILD PLANTS

No one truly knows the woods until he can find with certainty a number of wild plants that furnish good food for man in the season when food is scarce; that is, in the winter or early spring.

During summer and autumn there is always an abundance of familiar nuts and berries, so that we may rule them out, and seek only for edible plants and roots that are available when nuts and berries are not.

_Rock Tripe._ The most wonderful of all is probably the greenish-black rock tripe, found on the bleakest, highest rocks in the northern parts of this continent. There is a wonderful display of it on the cliffs about Mohonk Lake, in the Catskills. Richardson and Franklin, the great northern explorers, lived on it for months. It must be very carefully cooked or it produces cramps. First gather and wash it as clear as possible of sand and grit, washing it again and again, snipping off the gritty parts of the roots where it held onto the mother rock. Then roast it slowly in a pan till dry and crisp. Next boil it for one hour and serve it either hot or cold. It looks like thick gumbo soup with short, thick pieces of black and green leaves in it. It tastes a little like tapioca with a slight flavoring of licorice. On some it acts as a purge.

_Ba.s.swood Browse or Buds._ As a child I ate these raw in quant.i.ties, as did also most of my young friends, but they will be found the better for cooking. They are particularly good and large in the early spring. The inmost bark also has food value, but one must disfigure the tree to get that, so we leave it out.

_Slippery Elm._ The same remarks apply to the buds and inner bark of the slippery elm. They are nutritious, acceptable food, especially when cooked with sc.r.a.ps of meat or fruit for flavoring. Furthermore, its flowers come out in the spring before the leaves, and produce very early in the season great quant.i.ties of seed which are like little nuts in the middle of a nearly circular wing. These ripen by the time the leaves are half grown and have always been an important article of food among the wild things.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Wild Food--Plants

Rock tripe

Crinkle-root

Ba.s.swood

Slippery Elm

Wapato

Hog Peanut

Calopogon or Gra.s.s pink

Prairie Turnip

Indian Cuc.u.mber

Bog Potato

Jack-in-a-Pulpit

Solomons Seal

False Solomons Seal]

Many Indian tribes used to feed during famine times on the inner bark of cedar and white birch, as well as on the inner bark of the slippery elm and ba.s.swood, but these cannot be got without injury to the tree, so omit them.

When the snow is off the ground the plants respond quickly, and it is safe to a.s.sume that all the earliest flowers come up from big, fat roots.

A plant can spring up quickly in summer, gathering the material of growth from the air and soil, but a plant coming up in the early spring is doing business at a time when it cannot get support from its surroundings, and cannot keep on unless it has stored up capital from the summer before. This is the logic of the storehouse in the ground for these early comers.

_Wapato._ One of the earliest is wapato, or duck potato, also called common Arrowleaf, or Sagittaria. It is found in low, swampy flats, especially those that are under water for part of the year. Its root is about as big as a walnut and is good food, cooked, or raw. These roots are not at the point where the leaves come out but at the ends of the long roots.

_Bog Potato._ On the drier banks, usually where the sedge begins near a swamp, we find the bog potato, or Indian potato. The plant is a slender vine with three, five, or seven leaflets in a group. On its roots in spring are from one to a dozen potatoes, varying from an inch to three inches in diameter. They taste like a cross between a peanut and a raw potato, and are very good cooked or raw.

_Indian Cuc.u.mber._ In the dry woods one is sure to see the pretty umbrella of the Indian cuc.u.mber. Its root is white and crisp and tastes somewhat like a cuc.u.mber, is one to four inches long, and good food raw or boiled.

_Calopogon._ This plant looks like a kind of gra.s.s with an onion for a root, but it does not taste of onions and is much sought after by wild animals and wild people. It is found in low or marshy places.

_Hog Peanuts._ In the early spring this plant will be found to have a large nut or fruit, buried under the leaves or quite underground in the dry woods. As summer goes by the plant uses up this capital, but on its roots it grows a lot of little nuts. These are rich food, but very small. The big nut is about an inch long and the little ones on the roots are any size up to that of a pea.

_Indian Turnip or Jack-in-the-Pulpit._ This is well known to all our children in the East. The root is the most burning, acrid, horrible thing in the woods when raw, but after cooking becomes quite pleasant and is very nutritious.

_Prairie or Indian Turnip, Bread-root or Pomme-blanche of the Prairie._ This is found on all the prairies of the Missouri region. Its root was and is a staple article of food with the Indians. The roots are one to three inches thick and four to twelve inches long.

_Solomon's Seal._ The two Solomon's Seals (true and false) both produce roots that are long, b.u.mpy storehouses of food.

_Crinkle-root._ Every school child in the country digs out and eats the pleasant peppery crinkle-root. It abounds in the rich dry woods.

MUSHROOMS, FUNGI OR TOADSTOOLS

We have in America about two thousand different kinds of Mushrooms or Toadstools; they are the same thing. Of these, probably half are wholesome and delicious; but about a dozen of them are deadly poison.

There is no way to tell them, except by knowing each kind and the recorded results of experience with each kind. The story about cooking with silver being a test has no foundation; in fact, the best way for the Woodcraft Boy or Girl is to know definitely a dozen dangerous kinds and a score or more of the wholesome kinds and let the rest alone.

_Sporeprint._ The first thing in deciding the nature of a toadstool is the sporeprint, made thus: Cut off the stem of the toadstool and lay the gills down on a piece of gray paper under a vessel of any kind. After a couple of hours, lift the cap, and radiating lines of spores will appear on the paper. If it is desired to preserve these, the paper should be first covered with thin mucilage. The _color_ of these spores is the first step in identification.

All the deadly toadstools have _white_ spores.

No black-spored toadstool is known to be poisonous.

POISONOUS TOADSTOOLS

The only deadly poisonous kinds are the Amanitas. Others may purge and nauseate or cause vomiting, but it is believed that every recorded death from toadstool poisoning was caused by an Amanita, and unfortunately they are not only widespread and abundant, but they are much like the ordinary table mushrooms. They have, however, one or two strong marks: their stalk always grows out of a "_poison cup_" which shows either as a cup or as a _bulb_; they have _white_ or _yellow_ gills, a ring around the stalk, and _white spores_.