But--I was failing. Bill unpacked and cooked and packed up again and
rode on the chuck-wagon. But there was something wrong. Perhaps it was
the fall out of the wagon. Perhaps we were too hungry. We were that, I
know. Perhaps he looked ahead through the vista of days and saw that
formidable equipment of fishing-tackle, and mentally he was counting the
fish to clean and cook and clean and cook and clean and--
The center of a camping-trip is the cook. If, in the spring, men's
hearts turn to love, in the woods they turn to food. And cooking is a
temperamental art. No unhappy cook can make a souffle. Not, of course,
that we had souffle.
A camp cook should be of a calm and placid disposition. He has the
hardest job that I know of. He cooks with inadequate equipment on a
tiny stove in the open, where the air blows smoke into his face and
cinders into his food. He must cook either on his knees or bending over
to within a foot or so of the ground. And he must cook moving, as it
were. Worse than that, he must cook not only for the party but for a
hungry crowd of guides and packers that sits around in a circle and
watches him, and urges him, and gets under his feet, and, if he is
unpleasant, takes his food fairly out of the frying-pan under his eyes
if he is not on guard.
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