Get ready for some lessons in outdoor live’n.  We gonna build us a fire and ketched us a turkey.  Go grab some twine and come along.

THE WAY

“Yes, sir,” I said, and kept the proud out of my voice.” –great! 

“The sun hit the top like an explosion, sending showers of glitter and sparkle into the air.  The sparkling of the icy trees hurt the eyes to look, and it moved down the mountain like a wave as the sun backed the night shadow down and down.”–If you have ever seen a winter sunrise, it is an explosion of light.

“It is so with people who store and fat themselves with more than their share.  They will have it taken from them.  And there will be wars over it. . .and they will make long talks, trying to hold more than their share.  The will say a flag stands for their right to do this. . .and men will die because of the words and the flag. . .but they will not change the rules of The Way.”–worth considering

p. 6:  “pine knots spluttered in the fireplace” – from this source  http://www.inquiry.net/outdoor/skills/beard/light_fire.htm

By Dan Beard 

Fig. 312
The Fire Won’t Burn

Lafe, I can’t make a fire; we have no paper and the wood’s all wet.”

Lafe is a Pike County backwoodsman. He only smiled; then shouldering his axe he walked over to a moss-covered log that lay on the ground as soggy and wet as a sponge in the water. With a few blows from the butt end of his axe he knocked out of the rotten wood the remnants of what were once the noble limbs of a giant pine tree. These remnants were now nothing more than spike-shaped clubs, the largest not over two feet long.

Fig. 313.
A “Fat” Pine Knot.

“Here’s what we use in the woods for paper,” said Lafe. Upon examination, we discovered that the spike-shaped clubs were almost as heavy as lead, but it was not water that gave them the weight; it was the sap of the tree, the pitch, that colored them a rich red and made them hard and impervious to rain. Lafe pulled out his one-bladed jackknife and began to whittle the pine stick, but he allowed no shavings to become detached (Fig. 313).  

Fig. 314.
Starting the Fire.

When he had three cut in the manner shown in the accompanying drawing (Fig. 314), he set them up on the ground, with the small ends down and the big ends resting against each other, placed as the sticks are that form the frame of an Indian wigwam. He touched a lighted match to the shavings, and immediately a flame burst forth with a black smoke. Selecting some sticks he had previously split in halves, he piled them around the blazing pine-knots in a conical wigwam fashion, and soon we had a fire that was hot enough to ignite the wet, unsplit wood we gathered.

Here are some more photos from this source.  http://www.woodcraftwanderings.org/fire.html

Figure 1.1.2.1 : “Fat” Pine knot fire starter

p. 6:  the high trail –

p. 7:  the hollow – a small valley between mountains

p. 7:  turkey run – a “run” is usually a walk animals use.  However, I did find this interesting fact on Indiana’s Turkey Run State Park site.

There are many legends about how Turkey Run got its name. One story says that wild turkeys, finding it warmer in the canyon bottoms, or “runs”, would often huddle in these runs to avoid the cold. Pioneer hunters would herd the turkeys through these natural funnels into a central location for an easy harvest. Since historic accounts suggest that large numbers of turkeys lived here, it follows that turkeys in the runs prompted the area’s name, Turkey Run.

Here is a little information on turkey traps.  It is not the trap described in the book, but interesting.  The information is from this site.   http://turkeytraps.com/

Turkey traps are man made on site mostly. Although you can purchase some forms of turkey traps from outdoor and hunting type stores, the man made ditch, logs and corn method has been working just fine for trappers, and hunters for hundreds of years. Building a turkey trap is fairly easy and cheap to construct. The actual structure that holds the birds is made of logs, sticks, large branches, pretty much what ever you can find on the floor of the woods or laying around the yard.

The turkey trap should look something like a box made of logs. The most laboring part is the actual ditch digging. The cage structure is built somewhere in the center and on top of the ditch. It must be covered and the logs should be tight enough together that the birds can not escape but they can still get air and light in the box. After all the construction is complete corn gets thrown around and in the ditch leading into the cage or pen that will hold the birds.

No bottom should be necessary for the turkey trap and it will not drop down and catch the bird once inside because the fact is turkeys are just not smart enough to duck down and escape the same way they came. As long as the ditch is not so long that they can see the light well from the bottom of the trap coming in the pen they will just walk in circles until they get pulled out by the trappers hands. Adding a pile of corn in the trap will keep the birds calm and stop them from panicking after all that is what they were after when they walked down into the ditch and up into the pen and got trapped.

A method similar to the one used in the book was found at Yahoo Answers.  http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090320145621AAlWSuX 

It sounds really dumb but this works. Take a 50 gallon barrel or something like that and turn it bottom side up. Put corn on top of it. Leave it there for a few weeks and keep supplying the corn. The turkeys will jump/fly up and stand on the barrel and eat the corn. After a week or two, turn the barrel upright again. The turkey will not be able to see that and it only knows that it got corn when it jumped up on the barrel. It will jump up and fall in the barrel and it won’t get out because there’s no room to expand it’s wings. Make sense? Why do you want to trap a turkey anyway?