Chapter I: Front Matter

The Boy Scouts
of
Woodcraft Camp

By
Thornton W. Burgess

Author of
The Boy Scouts on Swift River
The Boy Scouts on Lost Trail
The Boy Scouts in a Trapper's Camp

Illustrated by C. S. Corson

The Penn Publishing
Company Philadelphia
1922

COPYRIGHT
1912 BY
THE PENN
PUBLISHING
COMPANY

_To my Wife_

_whose faith and encouragement
have placed me in her debt
beyond my power to pay_

Introduction

The Boy Scout movement has appealed to me from the very first as a long step in the right direction. It stands for an organized boyhood on a world-wide plan. It has in it the essentials for a stronger and better manhood, based on character building and physical development. Clear and clean thinking and self-reliance are its fundamental principles. Its weakness has been and is the difficulty in securing leaders, men with an understanding of and sympathy with boys, who can give the necessary time to active work in the field with the patrols, and who are themselves sufficiently versed in the lore of the woods and fields.

For years, before ever the Boy Scouts were organized, I had dreamed of a woodcraft camp for boys, a camp which in its appointments and surroundings should make constant appeal to the imagination of red-blooded, adventure-loving boys, and which should at the same time be a true "school of the woods" wherein woodcraft and the ways of nature should be taught along much the same lines as those on which the Boy Scout movement is founded.

In this and succeeding volumes, "The Boy Scouts on Swift River," "The Boy Scouts on Lost Trail," "The Boy Scouts in a Trapper's Camp," I have sought to portray the life of such a school camp under Boy Scout rules. "The Boy Scouts of Woodcraft Camp" has been written with a twofold purpose: To stimulate on the part of every one of my boy readers a desire to master for himself the mysteries of nature's great out-of-doors, the secrets of field and wood and stream, and to show by example what the Boy Scout's oath means in the development of character. Many of the incidents in the succeeding pages are drawn from my own experiences. And if, because of reading this story, one more boy is led to the Shrine of the Hemlock, there to inhale the pungent incense from a camp-fire and to master the art of tossing a flapjack, I shall feel that I have not written in vain.

THE AUTHOR.

Contents

I. THE TENDERFOOT 11

II. WOODCRAFT CAMP 26

III. FIRST IMPRESSIONS 39

IV. THE INITIATION 56

V. THE RECALL 71

VI. THE SPECTER IN CAMP 86

VII. FIRST LESSONS 100

VIII. LONESOME POND 116

IX. A SHOT IN THE DUSK 136

X. A BATTLE FOR HONOR 161

XI. BUXBY'S BUNCOMBE 184

XII. LOST 199

XIII. THE HONEY SEEKERS 220

XIV. THE SUPREME TEST 237

XV. CRAFTY MIKE 254

XVI. THE POACHER OF LONESOME POND 273

XVII. THE HAUNTED CABIN 288

XVIII. ON GUARD 304

XIX. FOR THE HONOR OF THE TRIBE 319

XX. THE HOME TRAIL 337

Illustrations

THE CHIEF GREETED HIM PLEASANTLY _Frontispiece_

DIAGRAM OF WOODCRAFT CAMP 41

"TELL HIM YOU ARE TO BE A DELAWARE" 51

HE HAD BUILT A FIRE 118

BILLY'S APPARATUS FOR MAKING FIRE 207

"RUN!" HE YELLED 233

THE BOYS WERE DRILLED IN WIG-WAG SIGNALING 308

The Boy Scouts of Woodcraft Camp