“Here comes Bob,” said Bill Bruce as they walked toward the campfire. “I wonder if he had any more luck than I did.”

“How many did you get, Finch?” asked Cecil when Bob joined them.

“I managed to catch seven, but you should have seen the big fellow which broke away just as I was about to land him,” replied Bob.

“That’s the usual fisherman’s story,” said Cecil. “You already have acquired one of the prime requisites of a regular fisherman. The largest fish always gets away. Let’s see what you caught.”

“That’s a fine rainbow,” he continued, as Bob pulled the fish, one at a time, from his creel. “That one is a salmon trout. When we eat it for lunch you will see that it is different from the others in that it has salmon-colored meat. You caught a variety: rainbow, salmon, brook and locklaven. Where were you fishing?”

“I must have walked five miles down the river,” said Bob. “I followed up several streams for short distances, but I never seemed to catch more than one fish in any one place.”

“That’s natural,” said Cecil. “I imagine that you were not very careful about showing yourself over the edge of the bank. You probably were seen by the fish before or as soon as they saw your fly.”

“Mr.Cecil is going to show us how to build a safe and sane campfire,” said Bill.

“That’s a good idea,” said Bob. “If we are going to be in the woods as long as we have planned, we ought to know how to build a fire that will not start a forest fire.”

“I am glad to see that you have brought a shovel and axe with you,” remarked Cecil. “You can never tell when you will need one or both in the woods. Some Forest Supervisors require all campers to be equipped with shovels and axes before they are allowed to enter a National Forest.”

“Campfires are mighty easy things to start, but unless they are built properly, you can never tell when they are completely extinguished. The bed of pine needles, dried leaves and partially decayed wood in all forests burn very easily, and it is extremely hard to be certain that the fire has not worked its way under the surface. Many times people have left their campfires believing that they were completely extinguished when the entire area was honeycombed with sparks beneath the surface. The campers left their fire thinking that they had done their duty in regard to the rules and regulations concerning forest fires. Shortly after they had gone, the sparks would burn through to the surface and trouble would start for the fire-fighters. Such occurrences are not confined to tenderfeet alone, for some men with years of hunting and camping experience have been guilty of the same neglect.

“In building a campfire, the first thing that should be done is to dig up and clear away all the inflammable material in the vicinity of the bed of the fire. If possible, the fire should be laid on hard soil or rocks. Then a narrow trench toward the wind will furnish a draft. If you notice, I have not much wood on that fire. A lot of wood is not necessary for a hot flame. A small amount placed properly and renewed as required will give a concentrated heat. Never allow the flame to blaze higher than is needed for the cooking. When you have finished and are leaving the vicinity, if only for a couple of hours, be sure that the fire is out. You cannot put a fire out in the woods by throwing dirt on it. Go to the nearest stream and get enough water to thoroughly quench all signs of fire. The water must sink down below the surface in soil like this and extinguish any sparks which may have worked under the surface.”

“I see that you have your trout all ready for the pan,” said Bill. “I think that I will clean mine.”

“Do you know how to do it as a woodsman does?” asked Cecil.

“I never cleaned one in my life,” replied Bill.

“I’ll show you how,” said Cecil. “It is the easiest way and also takes much less time. Bring your fish down to the river.”

“There are lots of ways to clean a trout,” remarked Cecil when they reached the water’s edge. “From the forester’s point of view, there is only one right way. Take the fish in your hand with its belly up. Cut a slit across just in back of its gills. Then all that you have to do is to put your finger into the slit, grab a hold of the center of the belly with the finger and your thumb and give a slight pull toward the tail. The trout is cleaned. Three movements are all that are necessary.”

“It looks quite easy the way that you do it,” said Bill. “Now I’ll try it.”

Neither Bill nor Bob could do it anywhere as smoothly as Cecil when they first tried it, but they became more expert as they practiced. Soon they lost their awkwardness and took but a few seconds for each fish.

“Now you have the idea,” said Cecil. “It’s a good thing to remember, for it takes but a couple of seconds for each trout. However, don’t try it on fish of a coarser type, for it will not work.”

“We have a steak that we brought with us,” said Bill when they returned to the fire. “It probably will not keep much longer. We will have to cook it, too. Bob, you had better get another pan ready.”

“Why not swing the steak?” asked Cecil.

“What do you mean, ‘swing a steak’?” asked Bill. “Is that a way to fix it so that it will keep?”

“No, that’s a way to cook it,” said Cecil. “It always seems to taste better after being cooked that way. I don’t know whether it is imagination or whether the fragrance of the burning wood really does permeate into the meat. Have you a griddle? If you have, we will try it.”

“I’ll get the griddle,” said Bill.

Cecil took the griddle and suspended it by three wires so that it hung in a horizontal position. He then attached the wires to a tripod made from some saplings. By the time that he had finished, the trout had been fried and were placed along side the fire to keep warm. Cecil took the tripod and placed it over the fire. The steak was placed in the griddle and gently swung back and forth just above the tops of the flames.

“Get a stick, Bruce,” said Cecil. “You can swing this while I do something else. As soon as the bottom starts to get brown, turn the steak. That will keep the juice in the meat. It begins to look as if we are going to have a real meal. I am sorry that some of my Oregon friends did not happen along with a venison mince pie. If we had one of them, we would be sitting on the top of the world.”

“It is nothing more than mince pie made out of venison instead of regular meat,” he continued when he saw the surprised expression written on the faces of the young aviators. “These Oregon people make them during the Fall and Winter. If you ever get a chance, be sure and taste one.”

In the meantime, Cecil was busy arranging the plates, knives, forks and spoons on an improvised table on the top of an old tree trunk. Smaller logs were brought up for chairs. So it was that Bill and Bob ate their first meal in the woods. Trout, baked potatoes, bread, butter, jam, coffee and, best of all, the steak. It was as Cecil had said, “Better than when cooked in the ordinary manner.” It seemed to have absorbed some of the pungent aroma of the burning wood.

Overhead the sun was masked by a roof formed by the thickly matted trees. The smell of the timber land permeated the air, a smell which one can only find in the forest. It seemed as if they were in the wilderness, where they were the pioneers blazing the trail for others to follow. To Cecil it may have been an old story, but to Bill and Bob it was the thrill that only comes with a new and enjoyable experience.

“It seems a shame that civilized people should be responsible for the destruction of such a place as this,” said Bill after a while. “It’s all so beautiful, so entirely different from what we are accustomed to. I’ll bet that the Indians never burned the forests intentionally.”

“I am not so sure about that,” commented Cecil. “According to the best advices which we have, the Indians in some instances used to burn out the woods so that they would not be bothered by the underbrush when they were hunting. Once they started a fire, they never tried to put it out. It always burned until it reached a natural barrier and then burned itself out. However, ordinarily the Indians were very much afraid of a forest fire, as it destroyed their villages. So it seems that they liked to have the fires under certain conditions, but they wanted to apply the torch themselves.”

“There must have been some mighty bad fires in those days,” said Bob.

“The lightning has always been responsible for many bad fires as far back as we have any records,” said Cecil. “Then, again, the early pioneers were not as careful as they might have been. There is one case on record where a young fellow was returning home after calling on a young lady who lived several miles away on another clearing. It was almost dark when he started home. He was either afraid to go home in the dark or was uncertain as to the proper trail to take. In any event, he set a match to a long burr of a sugar pine. That made a very good torch and served its purpose exceptionally well. However, when the first one burned so low that it was about to scorch his fingers, he lighted another one and threw the partly consumed one down alongside the trail. He continued this all the way home, and as a result there were many small fires, about equally spaced, burning through the forest.

“That young fellow was quite proud of his achievement. He had found a new means of illuminating the trail at night, but the early settlers were not so pleased with his accomplishment. There were not many of these pioneers in the locality and they had a mighty hard time in putting out those fires. The pine needles along the trail burned fast and furious for quite a while.”

“How can you tell the age of a tree?” asked Bill.

“That can’t be done until the tree is cut down,” said Cecil. “Each year during the life of a tree a complete coating of fibre is formed around the trunk of a tree underneath the bark. These coatings take the form of rings and are called ‘Annual Rings.’ They are formed in regular sequence around the center. By counting the rings the age of the tree is determined.”

“Why go to all that trouble?” asked Bob. “If there is one ring for each year and the rings are all the same size, why not measure the diameter of the tree and divide by the distance between the rings?”

“It would be much simpler if we could do it that way, but unfortunately the distance is not the same in any two different kinds of trees, or even in the same tree,” replied Cecil. “There are many things that affect the growth of trees. For instance, if a young tree is crowded for light and room, the rings will be very close together. Then if the surrounding trees dies or are cut down and the crowded condition relieved, the young tree will grow much faster and the distance between two rings may be the same as that between seven or eight rings during the period of slow growth. Two trees growing side by side, although they may be of the same species, may have entirely differently spaced annual rings.”

“How large do trees get?” asked Bill.

“That depends upon the species,” replied Cecil. “One of the giant trees in the Sequoia National Park was undermined by a creek a short time ago and fell. That, as you know, was a Redwood. They made a cross section of that tree seventy feet above the base and it measured eleven feet in diameter. The tree was 280 feet tall and had a base diameter of twenty-one feet. The annual rings showed it to be 1,932 years old. Of course those trees are the oldest living things in the world.

“Other species do not get so large in the trunk but grow higher. You yourself remarked about that flagpole at San Francisco. That tree must have been over five hundred feet tall when it was standing here in these woods, and yet its trunk probably did not measure over fifteen feet in diameter. You can see some of the large Douglas fir and pines over there. They have not such large trunks but their tops are well up in the air. The average is well over three hundred feet. Take the Juniper, for instance; it is rare that we find one over ten feet in diameter. The foresters in Nevada made quite a news item out of one they found up in the mountains at the head of Broncho Creek. It was located at an altitude of about eight thousand feet and was a monster of its kind. For its diameter near the base was fifteen feet. It is rarely ever that we find a black walnut over fifty inches in diameter when fifty years old. An inch a year is a rapid growth for that tree.

“Well, boys, this is all very pleasant, but I must be moving along,” he continued. “It looks as if this is going to be a bad summer for fires. The woods, as you can see, are well dried out, for we have not had any rain for several weeks. If fires start, they will be mighty hard to put out. As you may judge, I am a regular bug on this forest fire business. I like the woods and am always working to protect it. Nothing would suit me better than to be able to continue with you on your fishing trip, where I could really enjoy the woods, but I have to get up to the Supervisor’s headquarters in the Cascade Forest. They had a bad fire there yesterday and it may be burning now. I may see you on the way back. Much obliged for the lunch. Don’t forget to put out your fire.”

“We are much obliged to you for starting us out right,” said Bill as Cecil walked over to his car. “I hope that you can stop over with us. Good-bye.”

The boys cleaned up after their meal and sat for a while loafing under the trees.

“Where will we spend the night?” asked Bob.

“Let’s go up the river a little farther,” said Bill.

They poured water on their fire and were packing their equipment in the car when Bill stopped working. He had caught the smell of burning wood. There was no smoke coming from his campfire, but the odor was unmistakable.

“Bob, there’s a fire somewhere around here. I can smell it.”