2 I Get Started on This Venture

In Which I Get Started on This Venture I left New York in May. I had a penknife, a ball of string, an axe, and $40, which I had saved from selling magazine subscriptions. I also had some flint and steel which I had bought at a Chinese store in the city. The man in the store had showed me how to use it. He had also given me a little purse to put it in, and some tinder to catch the sparks. He had told me that if I ran out of tinder, I should burn cloth, and use the charred ashes. I thanked him and said, "This is the kind of thing I am not going to forget." On the train north to the Catskills I unwrapped my flint and steel and practised hitting them together to make sparks. On the wrapping paper I made these notes:

A hard brisk strike is best. Remember to hold the steel in the left hand and the flint in the right, and hit the steel with the flint. The trouble is the sparks go every which way. And that was the trouble. I did not get a fire going that night, and as I mentioned, this was a scary experience. I hitched rides into the Catskill Mountains. At about four o'clock a truck driver and I passed through a beautiful dark hemlock forest, and I said to him, "This is as far as I am going." He looked all around and said, "You live here?" "No" I said, "but I am running away from home, and this is just the kind of forest I have always dreamed I would run to. I think I'll camp here tonight." I hopped out of the cab.

"Hey, boy," the driver shouted. "Are you serious?" "Sure," I said. "Well, now, ain't that sumpin'? You know, when I was your age, I did the same thing. Only thing was, I was a farm boy and ran to the city, and you're a city boy running to the woods. I was scared of the city– do you think you'll he scared of the woods?" "Heck, no!" I shouted loudly. As I marched into the cool shadowy woods, I heard the driver call to me, "I'll be back in the morning, if you want to ride home." He laughed. Everybody laughed at me. Even Dad. I told Dad that I was going to run away to Great-grandfather Gribley's land. He had roared with laughter and told me about the time he had run away from home. He got on a boat headed for Singapore, but when the

whistle blew for departure, he was down the gangplank and home in bed before anyone knew he was gone. Then he told me, "Sure, go try it. Every boy should try it." I must have walked a mile into the woods until I found a stream. It was a clear athletic stream that rushed and ran and jumped and splashed. Ferns grew along its bank, and its rocks were upholstered with moss. I sat down, smelled the piney air, and took out my penknife. I cut off a green twig and began to whittle. I have always been good at whittling. I carved a ship once that my teacher exhibited for parents' night at school. First I whittled an angle on one end of the twig. Then I cut a smaller twig and sharpened it to a point. I whittled an angle on that twig, and bound the two angles face to face with a strip of green bark It was supposed to be a fishhook.

According to a book on how to survive on the land that I read in the New York Public Library, this was the way to make your own hooks. I then dug for worms. I had hardly chopped the moss away with my axe before I hit frost. It had not occurred to me that there would be frost in the ground in May, but then, I had not been on a mountain before. This did worry me, because I was depending on fish to keep me alive until I got to my Great-grandfather's mountain where I was going to make traps and catch game.

I looked into the stream to see what else I could eat, and as I did, my hand knocked a rotten log apart. I remembered about old logs and all the sleeping stages of insects that are in it. I chopped away until I found a cold white grub. I swiftly tied a string to my hook, put the grub on, and walked up the stream looking for a good place to fish. All the manuals I had read were very emphatic about where fish lived, and so I had memorized this: "In streams fish usually congregate in pools and deep calm water. The heads of small rapids, the tail of a pool, eddies below rocks or logs, deep undercut banks, in the shade of overhanging bushes– all are very likely places to fish." This stream did not seem to have any calm water, and I must have walked a thousand miles before I found a pool by a deep undercut bank in the shade of overhanging hushes. Actually, it wasn't that far, it just