It must not be supposed that the camping season is past because the summer vacation is over. The real camping season begins in the Wild Rice Moon, that is, September. Even if school or business takes all our time during the week, we still have week-ends in which to camp. Saturday has always been a boys' day. Camping is an American institution, because America affords the greatest camping ground in the world.
The author is seated in his own log house, built by himself, on the shores of Big Tink Pond. Back of him there is pitched a camp of six rows of tents, which are filled with a joyful, noisy crowd of youngsters.
It is here in the mountains of Pike County, Pennsylvania, where the bluestone is stratified in horizontal layers, that one may study the camp from its very birth to the latest and finished product of this century.
Everywhere in these mountains there are outcroppings of the bluestone, and wherever the face of a ridge of this stone is exposed to the elements, the rains or melting snows cause the water to drip from the earth on top of the stone and trickle down over the face of the cliff. Then, when a cold snap turns the moisture into ice in every little crack in the rock, the expansion of the ice forces the sides of the cracks apart at the seams in the rock until loose pieces from the undersides slide off, leaving small spaces over which the rock projects. The little caves thus made make retreats for white-footed mice and other small mammals, chipmunks and cave rats. When these become deeper they may become dens in which snakes sleep through the winter.
The openings never grow smaller, and in course of time are large enough for the coon, then the fox, and in olden times they made dens for wolves and panthers, or a place where the bear would "hole" up for the winter.
Time is not considered by Dame Nature; she has no trains to catch, and as years and centuries roll by the little openings in the bluestone become big enough to form a shelter for a crouching man, and the crouching man used them as a place in which to camp when the Norsemen in their dragon ships were braving the unknown ocean. When Columbus, with his toy boats, was blundering around the West Indies, the crouching man was camping under the bluestone ledges of old Pike County, Pennsylvania. There he built his campfires and cooked his beaver and bear and deer and elk, using dishes of pottery of his own make and ornamented with crude designs traced in the clay before the dishes were baked.