Any of you who have ever seen a lumber camp will remember something of how it is constructed. Separate from the main building is the superintendent’s office, a little cabin built usually of tar paper and light timber; then there is the hovel, as it is called, in which the horses and cows are stabled, and finally there is the big main building where the crew sleep and eat. But separated from the men’s dormitory by a passageway that leads into the outdoors, is the big room used as kitchen and dining room. Just beyond this and opening into the kitchen, is the room in which the cook and his assistant sleep.

In these two rooms in the wilderness, cook and cookee reign supreme. They are the most important persons in the camp. They are the best paid. Their word is law. They have a room by themselves, partly for cleanliness’ sake, and also because the success of the whole camp depends more or less upon them. But it is not alone the lumber cook and cookee who make or mar the success of camp life. It is also the cook in the hotel camp, and even more, the cook in the hundreds of thousands of home camps which make glad our holiday season. The king pin of life, physically—and I might say morally, too, for wherever the health is excellent the morals are likely to be so—is good, pure, abundant food, properly cooked.

Nowhere is the art of cooking put so to the test as in camp. You have less to do with; you have bigger appetites to do for and more need physically for the food you eat. There is one article which, if you are planning to do more cooking out of doors than can be done in a pot of water over a fire and a frying pan, you must have, and that is a tin reflector baker. One year I was caught in the steadiest downpour which I have ever known while camping. We were on the West Branch of the Penobscot, in an isolated region at the foot of Mount Katahdin, the highest mountain in the state of Maine. We had nothing to sleep under except a tent fly, and the rain drove in night and day, keeping us thoroughly wet. Our Indian guides managed to make the fire go in front of the leaky tar paper shack which we used as a kitchen. There was nothing we could do profitably but cook, so I amused myself cooking. I managed to bake, in the rain, before an open fire, within that little tin reflector baker, some tarts which were very successful. Many other articles, too, were cooked and came out thoroughly edible. That was indeed a test of the little tin baker which I shall never forget.

There is one sort of kindling fuel unfailingly useful in the woods. Even the rain cannot dampen its blaze. The fuel to which I refer is birch-bark. It will light when nothing else will light, I suppose because of the large amount of oil in it. Even when you take it wet from the ground, instead of stripping it from a tree—and you can always get an inner layer of dry birch-bark from a tree—it will burn and kindle a good fire. A box of matches is a natural possession for a boy, but I am not so sure that this is true with a girl. Every camper should have a hard rubber box of matches in his possession, should know where it is—always in an inside pocket if possible—and should take good care of it. But to go back to that wet day and the shining little tin baker on the West Branch at the foot of Katahdin. There are some woods which are good for rapid, quiet burning and some that are poor, as every experienced woodsman will tell you. You must keep, until you know it by heart, a check list of different kinds of wood, just as you must keep a food check list and other check lists. If it is a big camp fire, which for jollity’s sake or the sake of warmth you wish to start, and do not care to keep going for a long time, almost any sort of wood will serve. Brush tops or slashings will do quite well to start such a blaze. Hickory is the best wood for use when you want a deep, quiet hot fire for cooking. There is scarcely any better wood for the camp cook to use than apple, but that most campers are not likely to be able to get. The green woods which burn most readily and are best to start a quick fire with are birch, white and black, hard maple, ash, oak, and hickory. The older the tree the more pitch there will be in it, and the pitch is an effective and noisy kindler of fires. Hemlock, spruce, cedar, and the larch, all snap badly. I have been obliged to use a good deal of cedar in an open Franklin in my camp study this last summer. It has never been safe to leave one of these cedar fires without shutting the doors of the Franklin stove. I have known the burning cedar to hurl sparks the entire length of the cabin. As the chinking is excelsior, you can imagine what one of those cedar sparks would do if it snapped onto a bit of the excelsior. Cabins not chinked with excelsior are usually chinked with moss, which is almost as inflammable. With woods that snap, the camper can never be too careful, and no fire made of snappy wood should ever be built near a cabin or a tent. One spark, and it might be too late to check the quickly spreading fire.

There is another thing about which the camp cook and all girls camping need to be very careful, and that is the drinking water. One cannot be too exacting in this matter, too scrupulous, too clean. Provided there is spring or lake water about whose purity there can be no doubt, the question is settled. In this connection it may be said of drinking: when in doubt, don’t. A quarter of a mile, a half a mile, a mile, is none too far to go to get the right sort of water. This can be done in squads, one set of girls going one day and another the next. This water must be used for the cooking, too. If there is any doubt about the water supply, it should be filtered or boiled or both. Go into camp ready to make pure water one of your chief considerations, and never, under any circumstances, drink water or eat anything, even fish, which may have been contaminated by sewage. How vigilant one has to be about this an experience of my own, some months ago, will show you. The pond to which we were going was indeed in the wilderness, inaccessible except by canoe. I had walked one long “carry,” paddled across a good-sized pond—two miles wide, I think—and had been poling up some quick-water. The “rips” were low, and scratching would better describe the efforts to which we were put than poling does. My hands became so dry from the incessant work with the pole that I had to wet them to get any purchase on it at all. A greased pig could not have been harder to hold than that pole. When finally we reached the little mountain-surrounded pond for which we were making up the quickwater, I was hot, breathless, exhausted. I could think of only one thing, and that was a drink of water. There were a few camps about the lake, but it did not enter my mind that they would empty their sewage into it and take their fish and their water out of it. Yet after I had drunk, the first thing I noticed, in passing one camp, was that they unmistakably did empty their sewage into the pond. No evidence was lacking that it all went into the water not far from where I had taken a drink. It is not a pleasant subject, but it is one about which it is necessary to speak.

It is well to take in your kit some place, unless you are an accomplished cook and have it all in your head, a small, good cook book. The first thing which you should recollect about the rougher sort of camping is that you will have no fresh eggs or milk with which to do your cooking. You should have recipes for making your biscuits, johnnycake, bread, corn-pone, cakes, flapjacks, cookies, potato soup, bean soup, pea soup, chowder, rice pudding, and for cooking game and fish. In that veteran book for campers, “The Way of the Woods,” some good recipes for the necessary dishes are given. Whatever dishes you plan to make in the wilderness should be simple and few. Anything beyond the simplest dietary is not in the spirit of camp life, and will only detract from rather than add to the general pleasure. Those recipes which seem to me absolutely necessary I will give to you in the next chapter.