62 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Jan. 27, igoo. 
On Being Lost in the Woods. 
Sportsmen^ who have never been beyond the call of a 
guide's whistle, and some, too, who have, may smile 
superciliously at this caption and asservate that nobody 
except a doddering imbecile ever does get lost in the 
woods. Granted, gentlemen; freely granted. The writer, 
during his comparatively lucid intervals, invariably takes 
that view of the subject himself, while reading about the 
other fellow subsisting on boot legs and following his 
tracks in a circle. But when the spasm seizes him aud 
he himself gets lost, how bitterly does he resent the 
vaguest suggestion that his own peculiar brand of lunacy 
is more inherent and powerful than that of his neighbor, 
and with what effusive glibness does he seek to prove 
that if King Solomon and the Seven Sages, accompanied 
by the entire host of the Hebrew prophets and guided by 
a brace of archangels and a Philadelphia lawyer, had 
attempted to traverse that particular neck of woods as 
he did, they would not have got out of it the sooner 
by a single jiffy. 
Seated in a comfortable arm-chair after a sufficiently 
good dinner, beside a capacious hearth, and in the glow 
of the oaken logs piled high on the andirons, with the 
tobacco jar and decanter at your elbow and your old red 
setter drowsing on the bear skin before the fire, you lay 
aside the ncAvspaper containing the thrilling tale of poor 
Smith's vicissitudes and exclaim: 
"What a stupendous jackass that fellow Smith was, to 
be sure! Where was his compass? Why didn't he look 
at the moss on the tree trunks? How was it that he 
didn't familiarize himself with the natural objects about 
the camp before starting, and then steer for them? If 
he had no compass, wh.v did he not use his watch instead, 
as Henry M. Stanley once did? What was the matter 
with climbing a tree? Five minutes' study of a good map 
before leaving camp would have taught him all about the 
watershed of the district, and no man can stay lost if he 
knows the direction in which the streams flow! He had 
his dog along. Well, then, since an allwise Providence 
in furtherance of a well-ordained plan of creation had 
seen fit to be so chary in doling out brains to Smitla, why 
didn't Smith trust to the greater intelligence of the 
animal to help him out of his muddle?" 
It is child's play to be resourcefttl and sarcastic when 
you are warm, replete, well-housed and generally at ease; 
but if poor Smith were allowed to say a few words in 
his own behalf while hungry, footsore, wet and dis- 
gruntled, he flounders about in bogs and canons, he 
would tell you quite possibly that he had twenty years' 
experience in woodcraft, was a subscriber to Forest and 
Stream, had read "In Darkest Africa" and had that 
compass-watch joker pasted in his deerstalker at that 
-very moment, knew as much as you did about moss on 
trees, had noted a dozen objects before leaving camp, 
but never saw any of them afterwards; had tried that dog 
suggestion, but the well-trained brute had declined to 
take the lead, notwithstanding frequent objurgations and 
lapidations; had an intimate knowledge of the watershed, 
but the mischief of it was that all the brooks encountered 
during his wanderings seemed to flow in every conceivable 
direction, excepting only the way laid down on the map. 
Smith, my heart goes out to you! I know — few better — 
with what haughty tolerance your erstwhile comrades 
(who didn't get lost) listen to your woeful tale of why 
and wherefore; with what self-complacent smirks and de- 
precatory shrugs they seek to demolish carefully con- 
structed verbal earthwork behind which you have en- 
trenched yourself; with what ill-concealed, not to say 
ribald, incredulity, they receive your half-hearted state- 
ment that really it Avas a novel experience, and that you 
rather enjoyed it! I Icnow, or think I do, how on your 
return to your "ain fireside" the wife of your bosom greets 
you with, "Thomas Bozarris Smith! If I pretended to 
know as much about guns and camping out and things 
as you do, and was always laying down the law to people 
about them as you are, and then couldn't walk two blocks 
from camp without getting lost, I'd do my hunting from 
a perambulator and hire a nurseo^irl to look after me!" 
Yes, Smith, you have my sympathy, for, with a due ap- 
preciation of my own unworthiness, nay, with a blithe 
and pervasive eagerness to resign my unsought "diamond 
belt" to the first claimant, I must here confess that as 
far as I know I hold the record for getting lost at all 
distances, times and places, at all odds, under all cir- 
cumstances, catch-on-as-catch-can't, bar none. I get lost 
aboutonceayear, and when I can arrange my aflfairssoasto 
allow me to take two vacations in the year I invariably 
get lost twice. I have been doing this ever since I can 
remember. Usually I have been divorced from any 
known environment for a few hours only; but occasion- 
ally for a day or two. I have been lost in swamps, in 
forests and on naked hillsides. For manifold discomforts 
I recommend some other fellow to try a swamp, and for 
utter hopelessness a redwood forest, where the fog broods 
eternally and every tree looks alike. 
One of my first experiences of being lost in a swamp 
occurred when I was a lad of sixteen, and was spilled with 
a companion out of a canoe in the third rapid of the 
St. Croix River, below Grand Lake. He landed on the 
north bank, and I on the south, a fact for which I felt 
deeply grateful at the time, as I knew the highway was 
on my side of the river. He motioned to me that he 
would proceed up stream on his side, and I signaled that 
I would return by the road — but I didn't. I ^struck out 
for it, and for eight interminable hours T floundered about 
in a swamp, and finally came out on the river bank a 
few hundreds yards above my starting point. Thence I 
traveled over boulders upstream, following the meanders 
of tlie river, arriving in Vanceboro just in time to head 
off the relief expedition. But I learned something that 
day in my lacustrine wandering, viz. : That moss will grow 
on trees in a swamp on every side of the trunk, with an 
impartiality that may by a layman fittingly be termed 
•devilish. On each occasion, when I have unwittingly 
exercised my fatal faculty of withdrawing myself tem- 
porarily from association with familiar things. I have 
returned saddened with the reflection that I have suc- 
ceeded in "knocking spots" (so to speak) out of some 
ancient and honored canon of woodcraft. 
Thus, the intelligent dog myth, dear to the heart of 
every student of sport-lore, was demolished by me one 
afternoon five years ago, when shooting quail on the 
slopes of Mt. Tamalpais. An ocean fog swept landward, 
and in five minutes one could not see the hands of one's 
watch at arm's length. After making several ineffectual 
attempts to get off the ridge and into the cafion, and 
being stopped each time by impenetrable brush, I leashed 
myself to my Llewellyn setter (so styled) and turned him 
loose, fully expecting that he would tow me to some shel- 
tered haven, preferably the farmhouse from which we had 
set forth at daybreak, but I was not particular. And did 
he? Not a bit of it. That recreant to all the traditions 
of dogdom (as tlie same are set forth by bipeds in their 
books) doubtless thought that I was trying to teach him 
some new-fangled method of ranging, and he waltzed his 
poor befogged master over rocks and under brush heaps 
and through jungles of wild thyme, blackberry vines and 
mountain mahogany, till he finally rounded me up in a 
cup-shaped caiion, miles from anywhere, that it took me 
three hours to get out of. It was 11 before we struck 
the highway and midnight when we reached the ranch. 
Two summers ago I broke my own best record as a 
long-distance lost man by disappearing for forty-two 
hours. During my absence 1 blew the watershed tlaeory 
full of holes, lost forever all confidence in the power of the 
human mind to estimate distance, learned to mistrust (un- 
justly perhaps) the nickle-plated compass of the sports- 
man's emporium, and incidentally took sufficient exercise 
on an empty stomach to extirpate the aggregated dys- 
pepsia of a fashionable boarding-house. 
Rowe's Station in central Mendocino county, just on 
the border of the great redwood forest, is known to every 
hunter of bear and deer in northern California, and thence 
at 3 A. M. one Thursday in July after a cup of coffee 
and a single slice of bread and bacon — for who can eat a 
hearty breakfast at 3 in the morning — I sallied forth. 
Many-tongued rumor had babbled among the settlers in 
Little Lake Valley that Hatch's Mountain was fairly alive 
with panthers, and that a dear old Quakeress, who lived 
all alone on a forty-acre homestead on its summit, had lost 
several shoats and most of her chickens. It was a five- 
mile climb to her house, and I reached it at sunrise — a 
grand and impressive sight! The east was all aflame, 
and for thirty miles toward the west the primeval forest, 
midti-colored like a sea of molten emeralds and sap- 
phires, rolled in swelling undulations till it merged itself 
with the lesser billows of the Pacific, while here and there 
a fleecy mist above the many-forked Noyo, boring its 
tortuous Avay oceanward through the somnolent depths 
of riven moimtains, lapped the drab tree tops on some 
caiion's crest and seemed in the dawn's glow like spray 
from a giant roller, breaking on an islet. 
Talk about your Alpine sunrise! I have seen it. It. 
is pretty good. We furnish something very similar in our 
higher convolutions and pyrotechnics, box-plaited, cut- 
on-the-bias and trimmed with real lace and hand-made 
embroidery, give me sunrise among the redwoods every 
time. Besides, there is nothing to shoot in Switzerland 
nowadays, except inn-keepers, and they are protected 
through an oversight of the legislators. 
In the soft ooze surrounding the spring behind the 
house were several fresh tracks, so fresh indeed as to 
suggest to me that the panther had drunk there within 
the hour, and I hunted hard for him all the morning. 
At 10 o'clock, while lunching at the spring on a fowl's 
drumstick and a slice of bread, the Quakeress, in her 
quaint coif, came for water, and as usual we fell to chat- 
tering. Hers was a most interesting personality, and her 
choice of language bespoke an unusually complete edu- 
cation, particularly when it is taken into account that 
her school days must have been some fifty or sixty years 
ago — several decades, in fact, before our girls began to 
learn the 'ologies and take degrees as bachelors of arts 
and doctors of science. She told me of her wanderings 
among the Andes in the early Sos with her father, who 
was a missionary and a botanist, and who had taught her 
the medicinal value of plants; of their escapes from savage 
natives, who were prone to answer theological arguments 
with knife thrusts, and of a missionary expedition of her 
own, undertaken in early womanhood to South Africa. 
Her account of an extraordinary competitive dance by 
thirty Kaffir maidens for the honor of being queen-con- 
sort to the elder Lobenguile for the ensuing year, which 
she witnessed at his Kraal, will long live in my memory; 
but she never told me how it had come to pass that the 
billows of life's ocean had cast her, such a curiously 
wrought piece of human jetsam, on the summit of that 
Mendocino mountain. On this particular morning she 
happened to mention that there was a blazed trail start- 
ing at a deserted house at the bottom of the cafion and 
running into Willets, and that the distance there was 
"about six miles." 
"Is it a good trail?" I inquired, grasping at the idea of 
returning home over new hunting grounds. 
"I myself have never traveled it," she answered; "but 
I surmise that thee can follow it readily." 
Now, this dear old lady did not know me very well 
or she would not have hazarded any such rash con- 
jecture; but, quite apart from this, and as a matter of fact, 
there were two trails, the distance to Willets by the one 
to which she referred being nearer sixteen than six miles 
and the other fresher trail leading considerably elsewhere. 
Down the mountain I strolled leisurely, hunting all the 
little glades along the way for deer and keeping a sharp 
lookout for that panther, until I reached the deserted 
house and crossed the clearing behind it. Without a 
moment's check, I found the trail. From the appearance 
of the blazes it had been made about two years before, 
and the men who made it were apparently taking no 
chances on getting lost, for every other tree had a gash 
on it. It led directly into the redwoods, and it was such 
a good trail, that I never bothered to look at mv compass, 
but sauntered along, keeping a watchful eye "for game. 
It may be a.sked by some Eastern reader, why I did not 
notice the position of the sim? For his benefit, let it be 
known, that in the redwood forests proper there are few 
openings; that the trunks of the trees are from 10 to 20 
feet in diameter, and considering their enormous girth 
they stand close together; that they tower 200 or even 
<!00 feet into the air; that their first branches are 70 or 
80 feet above the ground: that their foliage forms an in- 
terwoven canopy overhead, and that the sun in the after- 
noon is nearly always obscured by fog', which .drifts in 
from the ocean. 
I followed my blazed trail with pertinacity, leaving it 
only twice, once to examine some fresh bear sign be- 
side a rivulet, and once to get a good look at a deer, 
which proved to be a doe, and just as I began to wonder 
if it was not about time that I struck tanbark oaks, which 
would be a sign that I was through the redwood belt 
and near my destination, the trail ended abruptly in a 
little glade. I read the whole story at a glance. There 
stood the rough framework for a shelter tent; here was 
where they had their fire; over on that side they kept 
their two horses, and deer shanks scattered about bespoke 
it a hunters' camp — market-hunters, at that, and the 
camp deserted for at least two seasons. What was I to 
do? I could of course readily retrace my steps; but then 
it was a long, hard climb of fully ten miles to the summit 
of Hatch's Mountain, to say nothing of five additional 
miles (down hill, to be sure) to Rowe's. Bosh! thought I; 
Willets must be much nearer than that! It should be in 
a southerly direction, and it cannot be more than a few 
miles, four at the outside. So, steadying my compass on 
an empty coal oil can, I laid a course a point or two east 
of south and struck out briskly. This was entirely wrong, 
for the trail which I had followed had taken me due 
westward, although I didn't know it, and my proper 
course would have been nearly due east. There is no 
underbrush in the redwoods, save in the bottom of the 
canons, and sometimes on very steep hillsides, so travel- 
ing on foot in any direction is comparatively easy. After 
an hour's steady walking, I came to a water course, and 
much to my satisfaction it flowed toward the east. "I 
am out of the Noyo bottoms, anyhow, and am on the 
right side of the divide," I said to myself. I followed this 
water course for half an hour, but with great difficulty 
because of the undergrowth; then climbed a steep ridge 
and struck down through a long, deep gulch lull of wind- 
falls — the sort of place which Davy Crockett in his auto- 
biography quaintly terms a "harricane." 
Night swooped down upon me, and a fall from one of 
these prostrate giants, in which I wrenched my ankle, ap- 
prised me that I had better go into camp. I had no time 
in which to choose a suitable spot either, but just sat 
down where I had fallen, with my back against the dead 
redwood, scratched away the fronds from the ground, 
reached out on either side till I had collected enough 
dry stuff for kindling, lit a fire, took an extra reef in my 
belt in lieu of both dinner and supper, a whiff at my 
pipe, and removed my shoes to give my feet a chance to 
recuperate. Before I knew it, I was fast asleep. How 
long I slept, I do not know; but a fit of coughing awoke 
me, and I found the whole place ablaze. The spot 
which I had pitched upon (so to speak), for my camp 
was carpeted 2 feet deep with dry redwood fronds and 
my fire had burned downward through these and had then 
broken out in a dozen miniature volcanoes. Now, in a 
country where the inhabitants draw the greater part of 
their subsistence from industries dependent upon the 
redwoods, a man who starts a forest fire is, to phrase 
it mildly, distinctly unpopular, and unpopularity in the 
mountains is sometimes synonymous with sudden death. 
Needless to add, that I fought that fire literally, tooth 
and toe nail, for of water I had none. A dozen times I 
thought I had it out, only to see it blaze up again in sonic 
new quarter. I never worked harder in my life, and 
when the last spark expired I even hesitated before T lit 
a match to see what time it was. It was 10, and when I 
tried to compose myself to sleep, I soon discovered that 
it had turned bitterly cold, and that sleep was out of the 
question. There was nothing for it but to kindle a very 
small fire, keep awake and watch for dawn. It was a 
dolorous vigil. My thin hunting coat and scant clothing 
were soaked with the fog; my very bones ached. I 
was hungry and sleepy, and as I huddled over my miser- 
able fire, pulling at my sole consolation — ray pipe— the 
unbidden thought kept obtruding itself that if any wild 
thing of tke woods took a notion to tackle me now, 
hemmed in as I was between two great fallen redwoods^ 
with but an insecure and slippery foothold, and in utter 
darkness, I might not be able to put up that quality of 
fight which unduly admiring friends might reasonably 
expect. 
SISTE, VIATOR! 
Beneatli this small but recherche slab, repose 
the left shinbone, a fragment of the Femur and 
three miscellaneous vertebra; of the late Damocles 
Marin. 
In the 38tli year of their age. 
N. B.— A Panther got the rest of him. 
Wow! The thought was gruesome! 
I pooh-poohed all this of course, and told myself that 
the grizzly bear had been wiped out in this part of the 
Coast Range years ago; that the cinnamon was "an un- 
weddy, but lazy, brute, without enterprise enough to at- 
tempt anything so novel as an attack on man; that the 
black bear was a harmless clown, and as for the pan- 
ther—why, had not I myself seen him flee in abject fear 
from a bob-tailed terrier, which would have been but a 
mouthful for him? And while I was pulling my nerves 
together for the fourth time, behind me, higher up the 
caiion, and not a quarter of a mile away, there arose a 
prolonged whining yowl. I had heard that noise before 
and knew it well. It was a panther! 
I was on my feet in an instant, with rifle cocked and 
every muscle tense. A wait of perhaps ten minutes, and 
then a second snarl; about the same distance away, but 
more to the left; he was promenading along the ridge. 
Another breathless wait; unbroken silence. I gathered 
together a few handfuls of twigs in order to be prepared 
for an illumination if it became necessar}^, and laid them 
beside my knife where I could reach both instantly- 
then crouchmg over the fire with rifle across my knees 
waited. Not a sound for five minutes. Then, of a sud- 
den, I became conscious of a faint scratch, scratch 
scratching— claws on bark and no mistake— and an icy 
wave ran up my spine to my brain! The noise was in 
front of me, and to my left. Tomblike silence— there it 
was again! _ Nearer and more in front. Into the fire 
Avent the twigs, and up to my shoulder flew my rifle and 
as the blaze lighted up the V-shaped nook where T had 
cast my camp, a fat. old coon whistled in startled pro 
test at such carryings-on, and sliding off the log scur- 
