56 | RECREATION 
exercise is being overdone or that the food 
is not sufficient in quantity nor of the right 
quality. I do not think that vegetables and 
such things are a necessity to a man in 
active exercise. The great warrior tribe of 
East Africa, the Masai, live almost entirely, 
up to middle life, upon meat and milk, and 
they are famous as athletes and fighting 
men. ‘The Northern Indians had few, if 
any, vegetables when discovered by the 
white men, and they seem to have lived upon 
unboiled meat and fish. A Micmac Indian 
—a young fellow of eighty or so—told me 
that the reason his tribe was now so short- 
lived was that they ate too many potatoes. 
It is possible that the buctawitch, 1.e., the 
rum of the palefaces, may also have had 
something to do with the early taking off of 
his kinsmen, but I did not suggest this, as I 
knew that the old gentleman was not an 
ardent teetotaler himself. ‘There may, how- 
ever, be something in it. The doctors tell 
us that a man is as old as his arteries, and 
that the arteries fail on account of earthy 
salts that are deposited little by little upon 
their inner coats. Now, most of the things 
we eat contain these salts in appreciable 
quantities, and when meat is roasted they 
remain in it, whereas when it is boiled they 
are removed. The Indian’s food was al- 
ways boiled unless he was pressed for time, 
when he roasted his meat or ate it raw. His 
method of boiling was to make a vessel out 
of birch-bark,. which he filled with water 
and heated to the boiling point by placing 
therein red-hot stones. It is quite possible 
that living almost altogether upon this boiled 
meat, he escaped the heavy doses of salts to 
which civilized man subjects himself. 
Emergency rations have attracted a good 
deal of attention of late. My own experi- 
ence with them has been limited, but from 
what I have seen I am inclined to think that 
the occasions on which they are really useful 
are very few. Of course, if a man carried 
an emergency ration always about his 
person it might some day come in handy, 
but as a rule a couple of captain’s biscuit 
would be at least equally serviceable. 
Once in northern British Columbia I met 
a young English doctor who was as green 
as they make them. This gentleman had 
provided himself with innumerable. small, 
patent pellets, that he assured me would 
sustain life almost indefinitely under the 
most trying conditions. ‘‘Here,” said he, 
holding aloft a tiny white globule, ‘‘is the 
equivalent to a beefsteak! This,” hold- 
ing forth a brown lozenge, ‘“‘is equal to two 
fried eggs! Each of these,” pointing to a 
box of minute pills, “‘is as stimulating as a 
glass of the best Burton ale!” This sounded 
very pretty, and had it not been for subse- 
quent events I should have taken some 
stock in his confident statements. Unfor- 
tunately for his assertions, a stampede 
occurred a few days later, in which he par- 
ticipated. He left on his journey in the 
mysterious gloaming of a summer’s night in 
the North—happy, chubby and amply pro- 
vided with pills, pellets and lozenges. He 
returned a week later a living skeleton, 
scarcely able to drag one foot after the other, 
and he probably owed his life to the gen- 
erosity of a prospector who had shared his 
last meal of ‘‘beans straight” with him. 
My own experience with emergency 
rations was not so harrowing. At the solici- 
tation of a friend I consented to take a few 
tins on a rather hard trip. One day, when 
all was going well and grub was yet plenti- 
ful, I said, ‘‘ To-day we will live upon emer- 
gency rations.” The idea was not hailed 
with any enthusiasm. Nevertheless, like 
goad, faithful fellows, the men agreed to the 
proposal. For breakfast one tin per man 
was opened and a gray, gritty substance 
was fried with some grease. After besprink- 
ling it plentifully with salt and pepper and 
Worcestershire sauce, we managed to eat it, 
but at the close of the meal every one 
seemed downcast. The morning was 
passed in gentle slumber, yet at luncheon- 
time our belts were fully two holes shorter 
than usual, and we were quite ready to pitch 
into the emergency rations or anything else 
that came handy. This time the rations 
were dissolved in hot water and taken in the 
form of soup. No thanksgiving was said— 
it being deemed inappropriate to the occa- 
sion—and a deep gloom settled o’er the 
camp. About half an hour before supper- 
time one of the men sidled up to me and 
intimated that as we were not short of grub 
there was no particular reason why we. 
should suffer a third infliction of emergency 
rations, and it did not take long to convince 
me that there was considerable justice in the 

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