MY FIRST CAMPING TRIP. 



REV. J. H. FULLER. 



My impressions of the necessities for a 

 camping outfit were obtained from books 

 on camping written by people who, I fear, 

 had never camped. I learned that all a 

 true woodsman needed was a large stock 

 of matches, kept in a dry place, a quantity 

 of salt pork for frying fish, and plenty of 

 salt. Accordingly I laid in an enormous 

 supply of matches, of the 7-day variety, 

 made a corner on the hog market, and took 

 salt enough to preserve all the 6-inch trout 

 in New England. After carrying them 

 many miles over logs and through under- 

 brush, I added them to the offerings which 

 others had already made to the god of 

 folly. 



My first night in camp was passed under 

 the canopy of heaven. The day had been 

 long, the road hot and dusty. Night found 

 us far from our intended camp, on the edge 

 of the woods. This was not in our sched- 

 ule. On their first trip all campers have a 

 schedule. The darkness increasing so we 

 could go no farther, we sought a shelter, 

 reluctantly abandoning our schedule, which 

 would have landed us in an abandoned 

 house 2 miles farther on. Beside the road 

 grew a thicket of evergreens. My camping 

 book had told me that in an emergency 

 such a place was excellent. It failed to 

 state wherein the excellence consisted. 

 Relying on that book, whose author I 

 should like to meet, we halted for the 

 night. Beneath the young hemlocks grew 

 a luxuriant moss, and spreading our blan- 

 kets on it. we prepared to sleep. After 

 Yz hour we perceived that we were founded 

 on a rock. We should have preferred 

 sand. 



Another fact began to make itself felt. 

 The rock on which we lay sloped toward 

 the road ; a gentle slope, indeed, but suffi- 

 cient for our discomfort, since at its foot 

 was a puddle. When we felt the cold 

 water percolating among our toes, we 

 moved up. That operation we repeated 31 

 times before morning. As our time period 

 was 15 minutes, I was able to tell the hour 

 without consulting my watch. Time wore 

 heavily on my soul, and the rock wore 

 sorely on the nether portion of my 

 trousers. Had I known the names of the 

 stars, doubtless I should have passed 

 the night addressing them personally, for 

 they were many and beautiful. The aes- 

 thetic side of the situation did not, how- 

 ever, appeal strongly 'to me at the time. 

 But as the Psalmist says. "Weeping may 

 endure for a night, but joy cometh in the 

 morning." After a substantial breakfast of 



cake, which we ate in order to save it, we 

 shouldered our packs, brushed all the dew 

 from the hemlocks down our backs, and, 

 with appropriate remarks, pushed on. 



After a few hours of tramping through 

 the morning air, so refreshing after our 

 night of torture, we came to a dilapidated 

 sawmill village. There we hired a team 

 and were jolted for 2 hours more, when we 

 were deposited with our luggage close by 

 an abandoned sugar house, where the trail 

 entered the woods. "The jumping off 

 place," our teamster, Jack Tinker, called 

 it, and as he rattled homeward he turned 

 for one last look at us, as though he feared 

 we would really jump off. Late afternoon 

 found us 5 miles in the woods, with a wind- 

 fall covering over 100 acres before us. We 

 could neither follow the trail nor pick it up 

 again on the other side. Fortunately for 

 us, we found a clearing at the ^left, and 

 there we passed a comfortable night- in the 

 best preserved log shanty of a deserted 

 lumber camp. Most of the buildings were 

 wholly or partially in ruins. 



Bears were the topic of conversation the 

 next morning at breakfast, for during the 

 night we had occasionally heard on the 

 mountain side strange crashings and weird 

 howls. 



"Don't vou fellows get scared of bears," 

 said Tobias ; "if we run across one, I'll 

 take the gun and bore him plumb through." 

 Fritz, my other companion, winked slyly 

 but said nothing. To 'this day I fear he 

 was the author of the weird howls. 



At breakfast we enjoyed for the first 

 ■and I trust the last time a new dish, 

 which was the child of necessity. Our 

 bread had been knocked to bits by the hard 

 journey, and the only available way to use 

 it was to fry it with pork in our new fry- 

 pan. To our boyish eyes it almost seemed 

 sacrilege to degrade our frypan, bought for 

 frying sweet, toothsome trout, to this hum- 

 bler duty, but we swallowed our pride and 

 our breakfast. "Porcucere," we called the 

 product, dignifying it with an aristocratic 

 name, in which Latin scholars will perceive 

 our attempt to combine the name of Ceres 

 with porcus. 



Armed with fishing rods and rifle my 

 father had 1 reluctantly allowed me to take, 

 we started gaily down the brook which 

 flowed past our camp and would lead us to 

 Paul stream, the goal of our endeavors 

 and the theme of many a merry liar. All 

 day we followed the winding brook, angled 

 the dark speckled trout from deep, shady 

 pools, and put them in the basket by our 



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