Camping and woodcraft - Scoutmastercg.com

40 CAMPING AND WOODCR.\FTWell, you are either above or below camp. Butwhich? Maybe old Leatherstocking could tell; butyou can't, to save your life. You might as wellpitch a penny for it. At random you turn downstream.Very soon you come to an abrupt bendgoing westward. There was no indication of sucha bend close to camp. Probably the tents are upstream,you say. So you turn about-face and gonorth. Still an utterly strange river.By one o'clock you realize that you are goingwrong. Camp couldrit be so far off from whereyou struck the river. So you turn wearily backdownstream, and, late in the afternoon you reachcamp, feeling like a fool, and silently swearing neverto tell a soul the true story of your misadventure.This is one of the simplest cases of "bumfuzzlement"that I can think of. It might have beencomplicated by any of a hundred difficulties or mis'haps that are common in the wilderness. Yet,simple as it was, it gave you no little anxiety anditended in humiliation.The trouble was that you started out in theYou should have explored a few mileswrong way.of the river first. This would have given you aknown base-line, to which you could return withperfect confidence from any direction. You couldhave marked that base-line with blazes every halfmileor thereabouts, on which were penciled thenumber of minutes' travel each location was fromcamp, the arrangement of blazes showing which waycamp lay.Where there is no river, road, or range of hills,running in a long continuous line to serve as base—nothing, say, but trackless forest—the first thing todo is to run such a line by compass, spotting thetrees, as will be described hereafter. I am assuming,here, that camp is to remain in one place for sometime.Trail Making.—Various kinds of blazedtrailswill be described in the next chapter. There is z