the house. Oliver Herford told me of 
a great scheme for making one’s bed. 
You make it before you get up! The 
sheets you smooth out nicely with your 
feet and then as you quietly withdraw 
yourself from under the coverlets 
gently lay back the upper strata of 
bed clothes for airing, all smooth, 
ready to be rolled into place with a 
single movement. Washing dishes also 
may be greatly simplified if one is only 
lazy enough to be forced into taking 
the short cuts. I have heard house¬ 
wives deplore the job of washing a 
greasy frying-pan. My scheme is to 
wipe out all the grease before washing 
with pieces of newspaper, and prompt¬ 
ly incinerate the paper in the kitchen 
stove—after which the washing is 
easy enough. 
My building job was greatly sim¬ 
plified by the fact that my architect, 
Bob Dickerson, who should be a country 
building specialist, lives within half a 
mile of the little cabin. He became as 
enthusiastic over achieving compact¬ 
ness and simplicity as I was. And this 
leads me to remark that a good archi¬ 
tect is nearly always helpful and keen 
over the problem in proportion to how 
much it is out of the ordinary. A rou¬ 
tine building project seems to inspire 
only routine zest. 
If a person feels the need of a house 
big enough to impress the neighbors, 
he might not like my cabin. But for 
anybody living in quiet surroundings— 
say, in a summer home—where there 
is no necessity for making people be¬ 
lieve you’re making more than you’re 
making, such a house might do first 
rate. It’s just a question of whether 
one is willing to sacrifice grandeur for 
a plan so simple that servants would 
be in the way. 
George the Trapper 
Continued from October 
By ROBERT WATSON 
A LL day long we kept climbing, at 
times it seemed as if we were 
going straight up, and no matter 
how high we climbed, the way lay still 
farther up. We were sheer on the 
breast-bone of a mountain and the 
foothold was precarious. Every half 
hour we had to drop our packs and 
take a breather. The snow came down 
heavily, and the moisture kept working 
in between our packs and our shoul¬ 
ders, adding to the general discomfort. 
George was trying hard to make an 
old camping ground of his, for 
he had a frail kind of a tent 
there, with a small stove made 
out of a four-gallon coal-oil can, 
with stove pipes of bent tin. 
But the prospect was not very 
bright for we had made only 
one and a quarter miles in four 
hours of climbing and were 
sinking from twelve to eighteen 
inches in our snow-shoes at 
every step. We stopped for the 
inevitable hot “something” and 
pork and beans, and, after a 
consultation, knowing what a miserable 
night we would have to spend on the 
face of this bluff otherwise, we decided 
that we would make that tent or die 
in the attempt. We were discussing 
the staying powers of pork and beans 
as against any other food. 
“Staying power!” said George, “there 
is nothing else on earth like it. I tell 
you, it is the pig and the little white 
bean that are Canada’s greatest pion¬ 
eers, for without them no other kind 
of pioneer could ever have got any¬ 
where.” 
“Gee!” he continued with a grin, 
when we got ready to go on again, “but 
that pound of beans feels a whole lot 
lighter in my stomach now than it did 
on my back a while ago!” 
Finally it became impossible to go 
sheer up, so we had to take our climb¬ 
ing in benches, and one was almost 
afraid to look below, for there seemed 
no foothold at all and the danger of 
starting a snow-slide was very con¬ 
siderable. 
“See that charred tree up there,” 
said George at last. “We branch off 
there and the worst is over for the 
night.” 
I struggled on. We reached the 
charred tree, but George kept going 
higher. 
“Hullo!” I shouted, “thought you 
said we branched off at the charred 
tree.” 
He turned to me and grinned. 
“Sure!—that charred one up there 
ahead of us.” 
I looked up and as far as I could 
see there were occasional charred trees, 
so I knew that this was just one more 
way of George’s to cheer me on and 
make the journey seem short. How he 
managed with his sixty pounds against 
my twenty-five was beyond me to make 
out. He seemed equal to any occasion. 
“George,” I cried, “there are charred 
trees right up to the timber line!” 
“Sure,” he answered, “and one of 
them is ours. Come on!” he encour¬ 
aged. “Heaven, you know, is always 
just round the corner.” 
I was beginning to understand him. 
His miles were the longest miles I ever 
encountered; his hour’s hikes were the 
longest hour’s journeys I ever tackled. 
Big himself, with a big vision, his 
hours and his miles were big in unison. 
At six o’clock that night we made 
the little tent, six feet by four 
when we got it up, but a com¬ 
fortable little home it proved 
once the coal-oil can stove was 
alight with cedar chips and the 
funnel was belching its smoke 
away up there, between heaven 
and earth, five thousand feet 
above the level of the sea, in an 
eggcup-shaped snow gulch be¬ 
tween the mountains, amid the 
eternal snows, every branch of 
every tree laden to breaking 
strain with the same ghostly 
pall that has proved the burial ground 
of so many valiant-hearted pioneers. 
In the morning, we were loath to look 
out, so comfortable had we been under 
this little canvas. We were in no 
hurry that morning and took our time 
over a hearty meal of the usual pork 
and beans. It was our intention to 
make the summit in the afternoon, and 
anything else to travel on save pork 
and beans was to George what he 
termed “patent - leather grub,” for 
which he had little use. “A man’s 
grub for a man’s work,” he would 
say. 
Our snow-shoes were beginning to 
warp and go slack with the hard trav- 
l!!lllllllllllllllllll!ll!!llllll!llllllllllll!ll!lllllllll|l||y 
“Marten likes the snowy heights where men 
seldom travel,” said George. “It makes a 
kind of tramp’s livin’; it gives about twenty 
times the trouble for what you get out of it, 
but you like it all the same.” . . . Such is 
the philosophy of the North Woods trapper. 
llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllillllllllllllllM 
Page 685 
