ke to create a
smudge, flames break from the wettest timber, and green moss blazes with
a furious heat. You hastily gather handfuls of seemingly incombustible
material and throw it on the fire, but the conflagration increases.
Grass and green leaves hesitate for an instant and then flash up like
tinder. The more you put on, the more your smudge rebels against its
proper task of smudging. It makes a pleasant warmth, to encourage the
black-flies; and bright light to attract and cheer the mosquitoes. Your
effort is a brilliant failure.

The proper way to make a smudge is this. Begin with a very little, lowly
fire. Let it be bright, but not ambitious. Don't try to make a smoke
yet.

Then gather a good supply of stuff which seems likely to suppress fire
without smothering it. Moss of a certain kind will do, but not the soft,
feathery moss that grows so deep among the spruce-trees. Half-decayed
wood is good; spongy, moist, unpleasant stuff, a vegetable wet blanket.
The bark of dead evergreen trees, hemlock, spruce, or balsam, is better
still. Gather a plentiful store of it. But don't try to make a smoke
yet.

Let your fire burn a while longer; cheer it up a little. Get some clear,
resolute, unquenchable coals aglow in the heart of it. Don't try to make
a smoke yet.

Now pile on your smouldering fuel. Fan it with your hat. Kneel down and
blow it, and in ten minutes you will have a smoke that will make you
wish you had never been born.

That is the proper way to make a smudge. But the easiest way is to ask
your guide to make it for you.

If he makes it in an old iron pot, so much the better, for then you can
move it around to the windward when the breeze veers, and carry it into
your tent without risk of setting everything on fire, and even take it
with you in the canoe while you are fishing.

Some of the pleasantest pictures in the angler's gallery of remembrance
are framed in the smoke that rises from a smudge.

With my eyes shut, I can call up a vision of eight birch-bark canoes
floating side by side on Moosehead Lake, on a fair June morning, fifteen
years ago. They are anchored off Green Island, riding easily on the
long, gentle waves. In the stern of each canoe there is a guide with
a long-handled net; in the bow, an angler with a light fly-rod; in the
middle, a smudge-kettle, smoking steadily. In the air to the windward
of the little fleet hovers a swarm of flies drifting down on the
shore breeze, with bloody p