The men said that we had meat in plenty now and that we would not watch the licks any more that time, so they put in their time jerking the venison and also some of the bear meat. They built a large fire of hemlock bark, and when it was burned down to a bed of coals so that there was no longer any smoke, they made a rack or grate of small poles, laid in crotches driven in the ground, so as to have the grate over the coals, and then laid the slices of venison on this grate and stood green bark about the grate to form a sort of an oven. The strips of meat were first sprinkled with salt and wrapped up in the skin from the deer and allowed to remain wrapped in the skin for a few hours until the salt would strike through the meat so as to make it about right as to salt. The men remained in camp about a week. They would shoot at a mark, pitch quoits and have jumping contests and other amusements, including fishing, eating trout, venison and bear meat along with toasted bread and coffee and potatoes roasted in the ashes. * * * The time had arrived when I thought that I must take to the taller timber to trap and hunt. I searched among the boys of my age, in the neighborhood, for a partner who would go with me to the Big Woods, as the section where I wished to go, was called. I finally found a pard who said he would go with me and stay as long as I cared to. The middle of October came. We packed our knapsacks with a grub stake, a blanket or two, and taking our guns started for the Big Woods, with a feeling that is not known to those who are not lovers of the wild. As we only had a limited number of steel traps it was our intention to spend the first week in camp, building deadfalls for coon and mink and use the steel traps for fox. Our intention was to build as many deadfalls as we would be able to attend to before we baited and set any of them. We had built our traps on many of the small brooks and streams to the south and east of the camp, and had built traps on the stream on which the camp was located nearly a mile below camp. About a mile and a half below camp there was another branch coming in from the north. Pard and I started early one morning to finish the line of traps on the camp stream and then go up the stream that came from the north and build as many traps as we could during the balance of the day. We had finished the line of traps on the camp stream, and had built a trap or two on the other branch, when pard complained of having a bad headache, but refused to go to camp. We built another trap or two, when pard consented to go to camp, if I would build another trap on a little spring run where coon signs were plentiful, which I readily consented to do. When I got the trap done it was nearly sundown.