your
hatchet--for the bushiest and most promising young hemlocks within reach.
Drop them and draw them to camp rapidly. Next, you need a fire. There are
fifty hard, resinous limbs sticking up from the prone hemlock; lop off
a few of these and split the largest into match timber; reduce the
splinters to shavings, scrape the wet leaves from your prospective
fireplace and strike a match on the balloon part of your trousers. If
you are a woodsman you will strike but one. Feed the fire slowly at
first; it will gain fast. When you have a blaze ten feet high, look at
your watch. It is 6 P.M. You don't want to turn in before 10 o'clock
and you have four hours to kill before bedtime. Now, tackle the old
hemlock; take off every dry limb and then peel the bark and bring it to
camp. You will find this takes an hour or more.

Next, strip every limb from your young hemlocks and shingle them onto
your ridge pole. This will make a sort of bear den, very well
calculated to give you a comfortable night's rest. The bright fire will
soon dry the ground that is to be your bed and you will have plenty of
time to drop another small hemlock and make a bed of browse a foot
thick. You do it. Then you make your pillow. Now, this pillow is
essential to comfort and very simple. It is half a yard of muslin,
sewed up as a bag and filled with moss or hemlock browse. You can empty
it and put it in your pocket, where it takes up about as much room as a
handkerchief. You have other little muslin bags--an' you be wise. One
holds a couple of ounces of good tea; another, sugar; another is kept
to put your loose duffle in: money, match safe, pocket-knife. You have
a pat of butter and a bit of pork, with a liberal slice of brown bread;
and before turning in you make a cup of tea, broil a slice of pork and
indulge in a lunch.

Ten o'clock comes. The time has not passed tediously. You are warm,
dry and well-fed. Your old friends, the owls, come near the fire-light
and salute you with their strange wild notes; a distant fox sets up for
himself with his odd, barking cry and you turn in. Not ready to sleep
just yet.

But you drop off; and it is two bells in the morning watch when you
waken with a sense of chill and darkness. The fire has burned low and
snow is falling. The owls have left and a deep silence broods over the
cold, still forest. You rouse the fire and, as the bright light shines
to the furthest recesses of your forest den, get out the little pipe