Camping and woodcraft - Scoutmastercg.com

-NATURE'S GUIDE-POSTS 55I have known a mountaineer, on a pitch-dark night,to identify the ridge he was on by feeling the trees;and there were no blazes on those trees, either.Our mountaineers know the peculiarities andvariations of their home hunting-grounds mostthoroughly, so far as they relate to the hunter's andherdsm?.n's arts, and from this intimate local knowledgethey have gained certain general signs of directionthat are fairly reliable throughout all the mainranges of the Southern Appalachians (mountainsdensely covered with more varied forest growththan any others in the world). So they have notthe least hesitation about traveling into unknownparts for a week at a stretch, and without a compass,even though they may get into fog so thick that, asthey quaintly say, **You could nigh stick your butcher-knifeinto It and hang up your shot-pouch.'*But there Is no dog-like or pigeon-like instinctabout this. I can take one of these same men tothe city of Boston and get him thoroughly lost withinhalf a mile of his hotel. If he had the hominginstinct he could findBtreets ; but he has not the ghost of such endowment.bewildered by the maze of things new to him,He Ishis own way back on the cityas a city man Is In the forest. His attention isattracted to other things than signs of direction: sahe goes astray.Nature's Guide-Posts.—^There are tw^o questionsthat woodsmen will argue, I suppose, untildoomsday. Having given my views on one of them^I may as well tackle the other, and then have donewith controversy. Are there any natural signs ofdirection that will give a man his bearings when thesky is obscured ? Every one has heard, for example,that **moss growls thickest on the north side of atree," and nearlv every one has heard this as flatlycontradicted. The general opinion seems to be thatsuch sl^ns are ''Important If true." The Indianrand white frontiersmen of fiction never have anydifficulty in finding their way by noting where moss