Camping and woodcraft - Scoutmastercg.com

24 CAMPING AND WOODCRAFTleads him back into the woods. Not long afterwardhe reaches the river again at Z, and, after hallooingand firing a shot or two, but getting no answer, hehurries on down-stream, thinking that the boat gotahead of him while he was making his detour. Theboat, meanwhile, has been rounding a great ox-bowcurve, and may be a couple of miles behind the manashore.In each of these examples the country isassumedto be fairly easy to traverse, and in each case themisadventure might have been avoided by a littleforethought. A bush bent over, here and there, ablaze on a tree where the underbrush was dense,would have saved all that. Without such precautions,there are places where a man can get badlymuddled in a forty-acre tract. This is no exaggeration.One of my companions once was lost fromearly morning until after nightfall in a thirty-acrepatch of blue cane. He struggled until almost completelyexhausted, and when we found him he lookedlike a scarecrow. At no time had he been half amile from the cabin.Thickets.—A canebrake is bad enough, but it isnot so bad as those great tracts of rhododendronwhich, in the region between Thunderhead andthe Balsam Mountains (Tennessee and North Caro*lina) cover mile after mile of steep mountainsidewhere few men have ever been. The natives call suchwastes "laurel slicks," "woolly heads," "lettuce beds,""yaller patches," and "hells." The rhododendron isworse than laurel, because it is more stunted andgrows much more densely, so that it is quite impossibleto make a way through it without cutting, foot byfoot ; and the wood is very tough. Two powerfulmountaineers starting from the Tennessee side tocross the Smokies were misdirected and proceeded upthe slope of the Devil's Court House, just east ofThunderhead. They were two days in making the ascent,a matter of three or four miles, notwithstandingthat they could see out all the time and pursued the