a man learns on the trail is to hang
up everything to dry as soon as he takes it off. Why should it be hung
up to dry unless it has got wet? the writer was once asked, in detailing
these operations. Because there is no other way to remove the ice with
which everything becomes incrusted in very cold weather.

[Sidenote: CAMP COOKING]

As his snow melts the cook throws into the pot a few handfuls of
evaporated potatoes, a handful of evaporated onions, and smaller
quantities of evaporated "soup vegetables," and leaves them to soak and
simmer and resume their original size and flavour. By and by he will cut
up the moose meat or the rabbits or birds, or whatever game he may have,
and throw it in, and in an hour or an hour and a half there will be a
savoury stew that, with a pan of biscuits cooked in an aluminum
reflector beside the stove and a big pot of tea, constitutes the
principal meal of the day. Or if the day has been long and sleep seems
more attractive even than grub, he will turn some frozen beans, already
boiled, into a frying-pan with a big lump of butter, and when his meat
is done supper is ready. Beans thus prepared eaten red hot with grated
cheese are delicious to a hungry man. With the stove for a sideboard,
food may always be eaten hot, and that is one advantage of camp fare.

The men satisfied, the dogs remain, and while two of the party wash
dishes and clean up, the third feeds the dogs. Their pot of food has
been cooling for an hour or more. They will not eat it until it is cold
and a mess of rice will hold heat a long time even in the coldest
weather. When it is nearly cold it is dished out with a paddle into the
individual pans and the dogs make short work of it. There are some who
feed straight fish, and, if the fish be king salmon of the best quality,
the dogs do well enough on it. But on any long run it is decidedly
economical to cook for the dogs--not so much from the standpoint of
direct cost as from that of weight and ease of hauling. An hundred
pounds of fish plus an hundred pounds of rice plus fifty pounds of
tallow will go a great deal farther than two hundred and fifty pounds of
fish alone. There is little doubt, too, that in the long run the dogs do
better on cooked food. It is easier of digestion and easier to apportion
in uniform rations. Rice and fish make excellent food. The Japs took
Port Arthur on rice and fish. The tallow answers a demand of the climate
and is increased as the weathe