ds and knees--my camera slung about my neck--and proceeded to crawl
into the bush. My friend stood watching me.

"Why don't you stand up and walk?" I heard him call.

I turned half round and growled at him. Then I plunged deeper into the
bush, growling as I went.

After ten minutes' active crawling I found myself in the heart of the
forest. It reached all about me on every side for hundreds of miles. All
around me was the unbroken stillness of the woods. Not a sound reached
my ear save the twittering of a squirrel, or squirl, in the branches
high above my head or the far-distant call of a loon hovering over some
woodland lake.

I judged that I had reached a spot suitable for my habitation.

My first care was to make a fire. Difficult though it might appear to
the degenerate dweller of the city to do this, to the trained woodsman,
such as I had now become, it is nothing. I selected a dry stick, rubbed
it vigorously against my hind leg, and in a few moments it broke into a
generous blaze. Half an hour later I was sitting beside a glowing fire
of twigs discussing with great gusto an appetizing mess of boiled grass
and fungi cooked in a hollow stone.

I ate my fill, not pausing till I was full, careless, as the natural man
ever is, of the morrow. Then, stretched out upon the pine-needles at the
foot of a great tree, I lay in drowsy contentment listening to the song
of the birds, the hum of the myriad insects and the strident note of
the squirrel high above me. At times I would give utterance to the soft
answering call, known to every woodsman, that is part of the freemasonry
of animal speech. As I lay thus, I would not have exchanged places with
the pale dweller in the city for all the wealth in the world. Here I lay
remote from the world, happy, full of grass, listening to the crooning
of the birds.

But the mood of inaction and reflection cannot last, even with the lover
of Nature. It was time to be up and doing. Much lay before me to be done
before the setting of the sun should bring with it, as I fully expected
it would, darkness. Before night fell I must build a house, make myself
a suit of clothes, lay in a store of nuts, and in short prepare myself
for the oncoming of winter, which, in the bush, may come on at any time
in the summer.

I rose briskly from the ground to my hands and knees and set myself to
the building of my house. The method that I intended to follow here was
merely that which Nature has long