“Barefoot through the Elysian fields!”
she said.
I am not trying to defend myself. I never had
the enthusiasm of the other two, but I rather liked
the idea. And I did restrain them. It was
my suggestion, for instance, that we wear sandals without
stockings, instead of going in our bare feet, which
was a good thing, for the first day out Aggie stepped
into a hornet’s nest. And I made out the
lists.
The idea, of course, is not how much one can carry,
but how little. The “Young Woodsman”
told exactly how to manage in the woods if one were
lost there and had nothing in the world but a bootlace
and a wire hairpin.
With the hairpin one could easily make a fair fish-hook—and
with a bootlace or a good hemp cord one could make
a rabbit snare.
“So you see,” Tish explained, “there’s
fish and meat with no trouble at all. And there
will be berries and nuts. That’s a diet
for a king.”
I was making a list of the necessaries at the time
and under bootlaces and hairpins I put down “spade.”
“What in Heaven’s name is the spade for?”
Tish demanded.
“You’ve got to dig bait, haven’t
you?”
Tish eyed me with disgust.
“Grasshoppers!” she said tersely.
There was really nothing Tish was not prepared for.
I should never have thought of grasshoppers.
“The idea is simply this,” observed Tish:
“We have surrounded ourselves with a thousand
and one things we do not need and would be better
without—houses, foolish clothing, electric
light, idiotic servants—Hannah, get away
from that door!—rich foods, furniture and
crowds of people. We’ve developed and cared
for our bodies instead of our souls. What we
want is to get out into the woods and think; to forget
those pampered bodies of ours and to let our souls
grow and assert themselves.”
We decided finally to take a blanket apiece, rolled
on our shoulders, and Tish and I each took a strong
knife. Aggie, instead of the knife, took a pair
of scissors. We took a small bottle of blackberry
cordial for emergencies, a cake of soap, a salt-cellar
for seasoning the fish and rabbits, two towels, a
package of court-plaster, Aggie’s hay-fever
remedy, a bottle of oil of pennyroyal to use against
mosquitoes, and a large piece of canvas, light but
strong, cut like the diagram.
[Illustration]
Tish said it was the regulation Indian tepee, and
that a squaw could set one up in an hour and have
dinner cooked inside it in thirty minutes after.
She said she guessed we could do it if an Indian squaw
could, and that after we’d cut the poles once,
we could carry them with us if we wished to move.
She said the tent ought to be ornamented, but she had
had no time, and we could paint designs on it with
colored clay in the woods when we had nothing more
important to do!
It made a largish bundle, but we did not intend to
travel much. We thought we could find a good
place by a lake somewhere and put up the tent, and
set a few snares, and locate the nearest berry-bushes
and mushroom-patches, and then, while the rabbits
were catching themselves, we should have time to get
acquainted with our souls again.
