fortable, leave a record of your
travels, and help your friends to find you."

EDIBLE WILD PLANTS

No one truly knows the woods until he can find with certainty a number
of wild plants that furnish good food for man in the season when food
is scarce; that is, in the winter or early spring.

During summer and autumn there is always an abundance of familiar nuts
and berries, so that we may rule them out, and seek only for edible
plants and roots that are available when nuts and berries are not.

_Rock Tripe._ The most wonderful of all is probably the greenish-black
rock tripe, found on the bleakest, highest rocks in the northern parts
of this continent. There is a wonderful display of it on the cliffs
about Mohonk Lake, in the Catskills. Richardson and Franklin, the great
northern explorers, lived on it for months. It must be very carefully
cooked or it produces cramps. First gather and wash it as clear as
possible of sand and grit, washing it again and again, snipping off the
gritty parts of the roots where it held onto the mother rock. Then roast
it slowly in a pan till dry and crisp. Next boil it for one hour and
serve it either hot or cold. It looks like thick gumbo soup with short,
thick pieces of black and green leaves in it. It tastes a little like
tapioca with a slight flavoring of licorice. On some it acts as a purge.

_Basswood Browse or Buds._ As a child I ate these raw in quantities, as
did also most of my young friends, but they will be found the better for
cooking. They are particularly good and large in the early spring. The
inmost bark also has food value, but one must disfigure the tree to get
that, so we leave it out.

_Slippery Elm._ The same remarks apply to the buds and inner bark of the
slippery elm. They are nutritious, acceptable food, especially when
cooked with scraps of meat or fruit for flavoring. Furthermore, its
flowers come out in the spring before the leaves, and produce very early
in the season great quantities of seed which are like little nuts in the
middle of a nearly circular wing. These ripen by the time the leaves are
half grown and have always been an important article of food among the
wild things.

[Illustration: Wild Food--Plants

Rock tripe

Crinkle-root

Basswood

Slippery Elm

Wapato

Hog Peanut

Calopogon or Grass pink

Prairie Turnip

Indian Cucumber

Bog Potato

Jack-in-a-Pulpit

Solomons Seal

False Solomons Seal]

Many Indian tribes used