ice will penetrate to the water below and allow a little jet to bubble
up. Melting snow is a tedious business at best; but, since three times
out of four when camping it must be done, the aluminum pots are a
treasure. There is still work for every one as well as the cook. Snow
must be banked all round the tent to keep out the wind. Little heaps of
spruce boughs must be cut for the dogs' beds; it is all we can do for
them whatever the weather, and they appreciate it highly. It may be that
dog moccasins must be taken off and strung around the stove to dry, and
before supper is ready the inside ridge-rope of the tent is heavy with
all sorts of drying man-wear: socks, moccasins, scarfs, toques,
mittens. One of the earliest habits a man learns on the trail is to hang
up everything to dry as soon as he takes it off. Why should it be hung
up to dry unless it has got wet? the writer was once asked, in detailing
these operations. Because there is no other way to remove the ice with
which everything becomes incrusted in very cold weather.
[Sidenote: CAMP COOKING]
As his snow melts the cook throws into the pot a few handfuls of
evaporated potatoes, a handful of evaporated onions, and smaller
quantities of evaporated "soup vegetables," and leaves them to soak and
simmer and resume their original size and flavour. By and by he will cut
up the moose meat or the rabbits or birds, or whatever game he may have,
and throw it in, and in an hour or an hour and a half there will be a
savoury stew that, with a pan of biscuits cooked in an aluminum
reflector beside the stove and a big pot of tea, constitutes the
principal meal of the day. Or if the day has been long and sleep seems
more attractive even than grub, he will turn some frozen beans, already
boiled, into a frying-pan with a big lump of butter, and when his meat
is done supper is ready. Beans thus prepared eaten red hot with grated
cheese are delicious to a hungry man. With the stove for a sideboard,
food may always be eaten hot, and that is one advantage of camp fare.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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