EARLY LIFE AND EXPERIENCES OF DR. COOK 87 



It was not only in his love for geographical study that the 

 career of the man was outlined in the boy. A quiet, reticent, studi- 

 ous lad, he loved to get apart by himself and to explore alone solitary 

 places. Adventure seemed to be the spice of his young life. At 

 every opportunity he would go into the woods, or up the mountain 

 sides sometimes alone, sometimes is company with his brothers 

 always seeking some new and unknown place. Here, after losing 

 himself in the wildwood as completely as possible, he would en- 

 deavor, and usually with success, to find his way back by observing 

 the direction of the sun, and perhaps by studying other natural 

 indications, such as the moss on trees and the various methods he 

 had become familiar with by reading books of travel. 



We are told that Daniel Boone, the greatest of American 

 pioneer explorers, had similar habits when a boy, leaving home and 

 living the life of an Indian in the deep forest, subsisting on game 

 shot by himself and cooked by his camp-fire. While not up to this 

 standard, young Frederick Cook is said to have manifested some of 

 the same inclinations, those native to the born hunter and adven- 

 turer. What dreams came to him while thus tracing his way in 

 Indian fashion through the forest, we are unable to say. Apparently 

 he was giving way involuntarily to instincts native to him. An 

 explorer in grain, the coming career of the man was prefigured in 

 the favorite enjoyments of the boy, and while wandering thus alone 

 far from human habitation, making his way homeward as the bird 

 makes its way to its nest, or the bee to its hive, he may in fancy have 

 been journeying in uninhabited wilds, over polar ice-fields, or up 

 the slopes of great mountains, doing in waking vision what he was 

 destined to do in reality in his later life. 



Much the same as any other boy and in the same manner as his 

 brothers, "Freddie" Cook, as he was then familiarly termed by all 

 who knew him, worked about the small fifteen-acre farm that had 

 been left to his family by the boy's father. Until he was fourteen 

 years old vnung Cook lived the same kind of life day after day. He 



