There are several reasons why the camp food is almost more important than any other consideration. To begin with, most girls are leading a more active life than they are accustomed to living at home. This makes them hungry, and, add to the exercise the natural tonic of invigorating air, the camper becomes fairly ravenous at meal time. There are other reasons, too, why food is an all-important question. If one is in the real wilderness, it will be difficult to get. One is obliged, therefore, to consider carefully beforehand the kinds of food necessary for a well-provided table and a well-balanced diet. Another reason for taking thought about this whole subject is the portage. All the foods must be toted in, and not all kinds will prove suitable or economical in the long run for this sort of portage. Finally, there is the question of the ways and means for keeping the food, after it is once safely in camp, in good condition.

As a rule, when we go on our expeditions we leave regions where it is easy to get a great variety of foods. The city or its suburb or a comfortable country town, is the place we call home. Our tables are filled the year long with fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, fresh meats, and all kinds of bread. This dietary in all its variety, to which we have been accustomed at home, is quite impossible of realization in the camp. We might just as well make up our minds to that at once. Yet accustomed to vegetables and fruits as we are, we need them both in wholesome quantities. How shall we get them? Potatoes of course, if the camping expedition is for any length of time, that is ten days or more, must be lugged. And lugging potatoes is heavy work over a trail. As for the other vegetables and fruits, and even meats, most people buy large quantities of tinned articles and so get rid of the whole question. Personally I think that this is a great mistake. It was a delight to me to find in Doctor Breck’s “Way of the Woods” that he, if obliged to choose between bacon and dried apples and chocolate, would always choose the chocolate and dried apples. And when the question of portage as well as health enters in, it may be said right here that it is quite impossible to carry a pack full of tins. But aside from the comfort of the guides, a tin-can camp is not likely to be a wholesome one. I am convinced that tin-can camping is responsible for whatever ills people experience when they go into the woods.

It is quite simple to get different kinds of dried vegetables and different kinds of dried fruits—and the best are none too good—in bulk. At present there are even evaporated potatoes on the market for campers. Such dried foods pack and carry best and are most wholesome. Both white and yellow eye beans, dried lima beans, peas, whole and split, onions, evaporated apples, dried prunes, dried peaches and apricots, rice, raisins, nuts of all kinds, lemons, oranges, and even bananas, if they are sufficiently green, can be quite easily taken into camp. Various sorts of flour and meal, too, will be needed. Find out how much it takes to bake the bread at home and add that to the length of your stay plus the number of the campers and plus a little more than you actually need, and you will be able to work out the flour problem for yourselves. There should be then white and graham flour, or entire wheat, corn meal, pilot bread (memories of toasted pilot bread in camp can make one smile from recollected joy), some rolled oats, cereals like cream of wheat which carries well, cooks easily, and is hearty, and various sorts of crackers.

Now the writer does not think meat necessary in camp. Except for the fish caught and the birds shot, none need be eaten. All the meat element or proteid necessary is provided for in the beans, peas, and nuts. But it is well to take a flitch of bacon or a few jars of it to use in broiling or frying the fish or game. Pork and lard are entirely uncalled-for in a properly thought out dietary.[3] Sufficient good fresh butter is very much needed. If campers feel that they must have other tinned meats, the best kinds to take are the most expensive, ox tongue, and that sort of thing. Several months ago four of us started off on a ten days’ camping expedition into a very northern wilderness unknown to us. One of the party, needlessly ambitious, took a preserved chicken in a glass jar bought from the finest provision house in Boston. By the time we reached our destination, the chicken was anything but preserved. Indeed, unless all signs failed, it had already embarked upon a new incarnation. No arm in the party was long enough to carry it out and set it on a distant rock for the skunks to visit. Nor shall I soon forget a certain meat ragout which we concocted in a Canadian wilderness. We had the ragout, but alas, we had a good deal else, too, including a doctor who had to cover half a county to reach us! Aside from the fact that people who live in cities and towns eat altogether too much meat, in camp there is not only the question of its uselessness, but also the fact that there are no ways to care for it properly. Meat makes a dirty camp.[4]

All food refuse should be burned up, anyway, never thrown out into the brush, and it is difficult to burn meat bones. The girl or woman who keeps a dirty camp is beneath contempt. There is likely to be one neighbor, if not more, in the vicinity of every camp, who will make things uncomfortable for the campers. He should be called the camp pig, and he is the hedgehog. Also his cousin, the skunk, will hang around to see what is carelessly thrown out or left for him to eat. The hedgehog is the greediest, most unwelcome fellow in the woods, and even the fact that the poet Robert Browning had one as a pet will not redeem him in the eyes of the practical camper. He hangs around any camp that is not kept clean, gnaws axe handles which the salty human hand has touched, licks out tin cans which have not been rinsed as they should be before they are thrown away—in short, he follows up every bit of camp slackness. There is only one way to keep off hedgehogs and that is to have an absolutely tidy camp.

In addition to the food stuffs already mentioned, there are several others which should be taken in the necessary quantities. Salt and pepper—better leave tea and coffee at home and take cocoa—soda, sugar, a few candles (helpful in lighting a fire in wet weather, as well as for illumination), matches, in a rubber box if possible, kerosene if your camp outfit will permit such a luxury, olive oil, maple syrup for flapjacks, molasses, condensed and evaporated milk or milk powder.

The articles which need to be cooled can be kept fresh in a nearby brook. Dead fish, however, should never be allowed to lie in water, but should be wrapped up in ferns or large leaves. If you are camping for any length of time, by making a little runway out of a trough you can have freshly flowing water, cooling butter and other food stuffs, all the time. Or a receptacle constructed something like a wire bait box will prove as good as the flowing water. This sunk into a cool pond or lake, makes an admirable ice chest, into which the finny creatures cannot get. In some rotation which you have decided upon, the care of the food should receive the especial attention from one girl every day. In this way hedgehogs, skunks, mice, rats, ants, will all be kept at a distance.

There are in addition to these various food stuffs and their care, as I said in the first chapter, many articles necessary for camp life about which we must think. If you are going off for a few days with a guide, he will attend to these things for you. But if you are setting up a camp for yourself, you will need to have them in mind. They are, two or three tin pails of convenient sizes nesting or fitting into one another so that they can be easily carried, a tin reflector baker for outdoor cooking, a coffee pot if you are foolish enough to take coffee, enameled ware plates and cups, basins, pans, dishpans, a dishmop, a chain pot-cleaner, a double boiler, a broiler, knives and forks, spoons big and little, pepper and salt shakers, flour sifter, a rotary can opener, a frypan, long-handled and short-handled, a carving knife and a fish knife if you intend to do a great deal of fishing. There are many kinds of cooking kits. There is a good one for four persons which may be obtained at about six dollars from any large hardware dealer. Add to these things which have been mentioned fish hooks, a lantern, lantern wicks, nails of different sizes, a hammer—don’t forget the hammer!—toilet paper, woolen blankets, mosquito netting (if it is a mosquito-infested district), fly dope to rub on hands and face, oilcloth for camp table, some twine and some tacks.

Equipped with these articles and what you carry in your knapsacks and what you wear, there is almost no wilderness in which a girl cannot have a good time, improve her health, and be the wiser for having entered the wilderness.