“I wish I could go West and join the Indians so that I
should have no lessons to learn,” said an unhappy small boy who could discover
no atom of sense or purpose in any one of the three R’s.
“You never made a greater mistake,” said the scribe, “for
the young Indians have many hard lessons from their earliest days – hard
lessons and hard punishments. With them
the dread penalty of failure is ‘go hungry till you win,’ and no harder task
have they than their reading lesson. Not
twenty-six characters are to be learned in this exercise, but one thousand; not
clear straight print are they, but dim, washed-out, crooked traces; not
in-doors on comfortable chairs, with a patient teacher always near, but out in
the forest, often alone and in every kind of weather, they slowly decipher
their letters and read sentences of the oldest writing on earth – a style so
old that the hieroglyphics of Egypt, the cylinders of Nippur, and the drawings
of the cave men are as a thing of today in comparison – the one universal
script – the tracks in the dust, mud, or snow.
“These are the inscriptions that every hunter must learn to
read infallibly, and be they strong or faint, straight or crooked, simple or
overwritten with many a puzzling, diverse phrase, he must decipher and follow
them swiftly, unerringly if there is to be a successful ending to the hunt,
which provides his daily food.
“This is the reading lesson of the young Indian, and it is a
style that will never become out of date.
The naturalist must also acquire some measure of proficiency in the
ancient art. Its usefulness is unending
to the student of wild life; without it he would know little of the people of
the wood.”
By Ernest Thompson
Seton, Chief Scout, in the first edition of Handbook for Boys, 1911.
In November we will be focusing on tracking in the Boy Scout
Roundtable. We’ll learn the basics of
tracking wild animals, and a little about trail signs. We’ll have a Roundtable discussion and share
successes about tracking Scouts along the trail from Tenderfoot to Eagle. In addition, we’ll consider how to read (and
respond to) some of the warning signs along the trail. Come join us!
Please visit the District website (www.bsa18.com) for a list
of the program features we will cover in Roundtable each month. They then could be used for your troop
meetings the next month.
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