
FOREST AND STREAM. 





AN ANID TRIVTBIN HETSIOUIN 



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The Black. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
Two flat bottom boats were lying at the water’s 
edge. A few yards away a man lay stretched be- 
neath some willows, his elbow resting on a boat 
cushion, a gunny sack filled with straw. He had 
been sent there with the boats from the Judge’s 
place to meet us half way down the Black. As 
we drove up to the boats to unload, I said to 
my companion, speaking of the river: 
“What do you think of it?” 
“Tt looks all right.” 
I believe that every out-of-doors man comes to 
have one stream that is more beloved than any 
of the others. There is something about it that 
makes the days spent on that particular stream 
just a little nicer than on any other, and which 
makes it linger in the memory until, sooner or 
later, one goes to all of the trouble of packing 
up and traveling over mountain roads to get 
back to it. It is the spirit of the water. When 
I say spirit, I mean the appeal of the intellectual 
pose of one entity to’ another. The Judge, who 
has lived on its bank all his life, is also pos- 
sessed by it. This year he and his wife took a 
rather extensive water trip, embracing the Great 
Lakes, the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Atlantic 
and Chesapeake Bay. The Judge’s wife told me 
that he would stand on the upper deck of one 
of the streams, look at the expanse of water, and 
exclaim, “Give me the Black.’ So, as I say, 
every man to his river, and here was mine. 
Now, my companion had never run the rapids 
of a mountain stream nor cast a fly. He and 
the river were total strangers, but it was interest- 
ing to see their advances toward each other. 
First came the exhilaration of “running down 
| hill’ over water, and the fascinating study of 
how to run such places without having the boat 
hit the inevitable obstruction at the outside of 
the curve, the stump, or the log, or the rock, or 
the driftwood with the current speeding beneath 
it. . After a day or so he learned that he could 
not steer a boat in a rapid, but that he has to 
| simply pick it up on his paddle and throw it; 
| then he quit hitting the stump in the curve and 

I was able to fish without a paddle in one hand 
to fend the bow from The Place. His closer 
intimacy with the water began by going in swim- 
ming, but that does not count for much. The 
real advance was when he stepped over the side 
of the boat and waded in the shallows with his 
shoes on. Finally, after swimming a place where 
the river darted through a narrow place, he de- 
liberately put on his clothes and plunged in head 
first. 
“T wanted to see if I could swim straight across 
with my clothes on,” he said. 
Then I knew that the river had enticed him 
|}away from his lJares and his penates; that he 
|; would journey thither with me again. 
We loaded our camping impedimenta into the 
commissary, which Charlton was to take charge 
of, put the fly-rod together, and after wetting the 
leader and attaching a gray hackle and a Lord 
Baltimore, with N. at the paddle, pushed off 
into the first rapid, where he hit the stump head 
on; and it was a likely looking spot to cast a fly 
into, too. Then there came a long pool, with a 
bluff on one side, big rocks in the bottom, with 
here and there a log near the shore, and now 
and again’a fringe of spatterdocks—the ideal 
pool for fly-fishing for small-mouth black bass. 
There were several rises of the kind that do not 
count, where the fish runs out after the fly, looks 
at it as you pick it up for the back cast, and 
goes on into deep water. - Still, it was interest- 
ing. Then there came a riffle with no obstruc- 
tions, and a fish took» the hackle that gave N. 
and myself a taste of fish for dinner. After that 
we came to the camping place, a high bluff, or 
mountain, as Ozark mountains go, on one side; 


a gravel beach at the edge of the timber on the 
other side, where a spring creek came into the 
river. The spring, which supplied this creek, was 
evidently some distance away, as its water was 
not very cold, but back from the river a hun- 
dred yards there was a smaller spring gushing 
up out of the gravel that was very ¢éold. A- 
good drink all around and we scattered to our 
work. 
There are two times when camping out is real 
work: The first is when you make your first 
camp and have to open the grocery boxes and 
hunt the things you want to cook with and stow 
them all in their proper receptacles; the second 
is when you pack up to go home. 
I had brought along an extra box, of a suit- 
able boat size, having handles and containing two 
rows of large cans with wide screw-off tops. In 
these we put the most of the provisions. Hav- 
ing in mind the extra labor of this first meal, N. 
had provided three loaves of raisin bread. It 
is graham bread with raisins scattered through 
it. The raisins.do not taste bad, and serve to 
keep the bread fresh. Such bread lasts, even in 
summer, much longer than the other kind. We 
ate the last of this on the third day, and it was 
still fresh and free from mould. Made in larger 
sized loaves, such as the twenty-five cent loaves 
the bakers made in New Mexico and Arizona, 
such bread will keep tor a week. 
After dinner we put up the tent, unlimbered 
the folding cots, and made the beds. I am not 
a sybarite, but when I go down a river with a 
commissary boat to carry things for me I make 
my bed to lie in. First, I put down a double 
blanket folded lengthwise, four thicknesses; then 
a sheet folded in the same way so as to do for 
top and bottom; then a rubber pillow in a pillow 
case, then a blanket on top, and I fold the covers 
down at the top, and it looks so inviting that 
I can hardly wait for it to get dark; I want to 
lie in it and listen to the water gurgling out at 
the rapid, and gaze at the bright star just above 
the trees, and laugh at the mosquitoes. Oh yes, 
I laugh at them. I have a mosquito bar, made 
of cheese cloth, the size of the tent, which is 
hung inside by hooks and eyes to the ridge pole 
and corners; and when we go to bed we crawl 
under it—there are no openings—and there is no 
other adjunct of camping out which so adds to 
one’s comfort. We played in the river around 
camp that afternoon, and for supper had corn 
cakes, maple syrup, Scotch jam, bacon and Ger- 
man fried potatoes, tea and two cigars. When 
I had reached the placid end of the second one, 
N. having*done likewise, I turned over and fell 
asleep trying to stay awake to listen to the gurgle 
of the water. 
The next day we stayed at that camp and 
fished up and down the river, not getting many 
fish, but having fun with the rapids, both up 
and down. For a while it is fun shooting them; 
it is also fun to climb them with the boat, pad- 
dling as far as you can and then wading and 
pulling and pushing up into the next pool. In 
the evening we played chess by the light of two 
coach candles. These candles are six inches in 
length and an inch and a half in diameter, and 
are the best for camping, since they can be made 
to stand on their own bottoms any place they are 
put. The next day we ran to the spring at the 
Mann settlement, where we camped two nights. 
I found my hand had lost its cunning with the 
Dutch oven and that the oven itself had been 
warped and the lid did not fit tight, so we sent 
the flour across the river to a farm house and 
the boy fetched us hot biscuits as needed. 
On the way down we caught fish enough to 
eat and had a fine time with the river. There is 
one place where it runs around an island a mile 
or more in length, where the divided stream is 
narrow and swift and full of all kinds of ob- 
structions, and where we had to jump into the 


water several times to keep from being swept 
into fallen trees, etc. J had camped at the Mann 
settlement two years before, and when it cam¢ 
to putting up the tent we found and used the 
tent pegs that had been left there then. It mac 
me think of the time I left my drinking cup on 
a log beside the trail in the Rockies and found 
it there three weeks later. The first night at 
this camp was warm, and we slept under sheets 
only, although the blanket came into play toward 
morning. The second night was cold, and we 
had to put some of the bottom blankets on to 
We broke camp early on Wednesday morning 
and started down the river for our last two days, 
intending to fish all the time, as we could take 
the fish home with us. We called at the Judge’s 
place, a mile below the settlement, and paid our 
hauling bill, while Charlton ran the commissary 
on down the river to his place to wait for us 
there. At dinner time we came to a spring 
against a rock wall half way up the bluff, the 
wall jutting out over it for a f, making a 


root, 
fine natural spring house, which was inclosed by 
a paling fence, having a plank seat within, from 
which steps led down to the milk pans and the 
water. I took the tea pot up to the house for 
boiling water for tea, and ate our lunch on the 
bench, beginning with a concoction of lemons, 
sugar and spring water, together with just a little 
whiskey, and ending with biscuits, butter, jam 
and tea, with sliced tomatoes. It was all right. 
We caught sixteen fish that day and camped at 
a fie spring at the edge of a high bluff, pitch- 
ing the tent on the sandbar on the other side, 
however. The next day we stopped at a farm 
house and telephoned to the railroad for teams 
to come for us the next morning in time for 
the train. Dinner that day was at the Big Spring, 
up which we paddled the boats until we came 

to where it came gushing down from the moss- 
covered rocks above. Here we had a fire and a 
pot of tea and corned beef hash. N. cut his 
finger opening the can, and my famous medicine 
chest came into usefulness for the first and only 
time. I also made flapjacks, and one of us ate 
sixteen. Modesty forbids me to say how many 
the other fellow ate, but we always tried to tote 
fair. On this day we caught thirteen fish, the 
largest measuring seventeen inches. When we 
arrived at the journey’s end, so far as the river 
was concerned, late that afternoon, we made a 
live box out of one of the gre cery boxes, where 
the fish kept alive all night. 
The next morning, after the wusual hearty 
breakfast, we packed up, the teams rattling down 
out of the hills just as the last ropes were tied, 
and in a couple of hours we were on the train 
homeward bound. clad in the garments of civili- 
zation, looking like other folks, but still having 
stored up somewhere within us a fund of 
memories of rushing water, gushing springs, 
darting fish, camp-fires, night sounds and all the 
of the Black. 
These Ozark streams, eight or ten in number, 
offer the only nearby summer resorts ‘for people 
witchery, whatever it is, 
living adjacent to St. Louis. All other resorts 
are upward of a thousand miles distant, and 
therefore impractical to all but those who can 
take a week to go and come, and who can afford 
the expense of such a trip. The climate of the 
Ozarks is ideal in the summer time. There are 
hot days, as there are in other mountain regions, 
but the nights are cool,.and it is always cool in 
the shade in:the daytime. A day spent on one 
of these streams, gliding down over clear water, 
beneath shaded hills on one the other 
ulmost all the time, is as invigorating as a day 
in the park region of northern Minnesota or the 
mountains of Colorado, or the Atlantic coast 
side or 
region. It is not, however, a good place to he 
in afoot. The woods are infested by ticks and 
chiggers, which get on one and burrow wnder 
the skin, causing extreme discomfort to most 

