Boys' Life/Volume 1/Number 1/How Not To Get Lost
PEOPLE get lost for the very simple reason that they either don't or won't realize how easy it is to do so, unless they are all the time mentally noting the characteristic features of their surroundings and committing them to memory.
It is one thing to follow along certain streets of which we know the names in a town or city, and quite another to pursue either a straight or circuitous course in trackless bush or forest country where there is an appalling sameness about the trees and the undergrowth, in fact, everything, and where landmarks—eminences of any kind—are consequently shut out from view. This applies equally well, though in a different way, to the ocean-like prairie, or to the veldt, where there is not a tree, a stick, and hardly a stone to break "the level waste and rounding gray" of the featureless landscape.
But we know for a certainty that it is just as easy to find one's way from one given point to another in apparently featureless country as in that which is well marked and distinctive, if only one will cultivate and exercise the powers of observation. That is the kernel of the whole business—to systematically observe and not to allow one's wits to go wool-gathering. Certainly some people are more capable of exercising their powers of observation than others; but it is in us all—this inheritance from primitive man—in a greater or less degree, though, of course, we, whose ancestors have built for us roads and church steeples—the origin and use of which are easily understandable in country places—can hardly be expected to interpret the face of Nature like the savage, with whom the necessity of exercising his perceptive faculties in regard to physical surroundings has been a necessity from all time.
The savage could not exist a week unless this were so. Put an inexperienced white man into a trackless wilderness, and the chances are he will be dead in less than three days. The conclusion we come to is that the savage, having been accustomed to exercise his powers of observation from his earliest youth, and for countless generations, has developed that faculty which we call somewhat vaguely "the bump of locality," while the civilized man, having in this country comparatively little use for it, has neglected the same, and, therefore, allowed it to become dulled. Another proof of Darwin's Law of Disuse.
But inherited qualities die hard, just as surely as the changes in human nature are almost imperceptible; therefore, we can all take heart in the thought that, so far as the bump of locality is concerned, there is a good deal of the savage in us still. Let me exemplify my point by my own case. At the same time, I will impart the result of my own experience as I go along. If he chose, any fellow can become an experienced bush man. At least, he need never lose his way unless he is wilfully neglectful.
While yet in my teens, I went out to a newly opened up cattle station in the wild Never Never Country of tropical Australia. For hundreds and hundreds of miles there was only a bush track which led from a place called Burktown to Port Darwin, a distance of considerably over a thousand miles. The newly-erected buildings of the station I have referred to lay some miles to the north of it.
The morning after I arrived there, Macintosh, the squatter, pointing to some horses that I could just catch a glimpse of through the trees in what he called the horse-paddock, told me to take a bridle with me and fetch up a certain roan horse. It was a good, quiet-going stock horse, and he would set it apart for my use.
"Now, remember always to keep your eyes about you, and take note of the direction in which you are going," he said, "if you don't you'll get lost. And as there are no roads in this part of the world, you may wander about, until you perish of thirst and hunger. I'm going a few miles south to see about a new branding-yard. I'll see you when I come back."
And then he briefly gave me a few hints which, he said, if I did not neglect, would enable me to find my way about.
I almost resented his telling me such obvious things. His "tips" to me sounded so childish and unnecessary. The people in Australia were surely very dense if they could not go exactly where they wanted to without having to exercise extraordinary precautions. Now, I know that I had all the assurance of the ignorant.
I put my bridle over my arm and started out. For half a mile the timber had been ring-barked and felled, and one could see a couple of hundred yards or so ahead. Then there was a clump of wattle, and a number of ti-trees that somewhat resembled apple-trees in an orchard.
A magnificent parrot, crimson and green and gold, the like of which I had never seen before, rose from a bush hard by, flew about a hundred yards, and settled again. It was such a gorgeous and wonderful bird that I went after it, just to catch a glimpse of its prismatic coloring again. An iguana emerged from a fallen hollow log at my feet, and scuttled towards a blood-wood tree, some fifty yards distant. I picked up a stick and balked it going up that tree, and chased it to another instead. It managed to get up that one, then I turned aside to admire some hybiscus blossom, and take stock of a huge spider's web spread right across my path. I turned aside so as not to break it.
When I thought about the horses I had seen when starting out, I was not a little surprised that now I could not see them. But they were somewhere right ahead of me—right over there, I was sure of it. I walked straight on, but somehow the bushes and trees had become more plentiful, preventing me seeing more than fifty yards ahead, and this annoyed me. It should not have been so, for when I started out, I had seen the horses nearly half a mile away, and though by now I should have been nearly up to them, I could not see them at all.
Moreover, it struck me I had got into scrubby and bare-looking country with a plethora of ant-heaps, and that which I had seen when looking at the horses was open and well-grassed with tall and isolated trees. I felt angry and perplexed.
I saw some open ground to the right. I went toward it, hut there wore no horses to be seen. I had surely come too far to the right. I went to the left, and found myself faced by a thick clump of golden wattle. I would go straight through it, and I did, but when I emerged again I stood on a long flat which I thought I recognized. But I did not realize as yet that one part of the Australian Bush is much like any other part, and that unless one takes some marked individual object as a landmark, one will get badly left. Crossing over the flat, I came face to face with a thick bolt of scrub. I tried to follow it round, then other glades opened out, and I took one of them. It struck me now that I was not too positive about the direction which I originally intended to take. In less than half an hour, grown man that I was, I was ready to sit down and cry from sheer vexation, for I realized that I had not only lost all idea as to the whereabouts of the horses, but I was hopelessly bushed.
In my ignorance and conceit I had neglected the most ordinary precautions. I had allowed my attention to be distracted by parrots, plants, and iguanas, to the exclusion of the simplest observations. And now where the station lay, and which was north, south, east, or west, I could no more guess at than what gems (if any) lay hid beneath the surface of the ground under my feet. But I surely could not be lost when it was a dead certainty there were station buildings and a group of horses within half a mile of me! My anger at the thought was fatal to the line of action I should have taken just then, so, I suppose, I lost my head.
To cut a long story short, I wandered about all that day, and I knew hunger and thirst for the first time in my life.
I was still walking when the brief tropical twilight fell. That night I lay on the bare ground shivering, and, weary and footsore, I fell asleep.
When I awoke, chilled to the bone, the gray dawn-light was struggling into the eastern sky. I was as wretched a specimen of humanity as there could well be. But a saner frame of mind had been born within me while I slept, and I recalled and no longer despised what I had considered the childish instructions of Macintosh on the previous day. I told myself that it was not too late to put them into practice now.
I began by climbing a tree, but that did not help me. I could see nothing around but an unbroken forest of tree-tops. I descended and noted that the sun was rising; that, at least, was the east. I drew a chart on the ground with a stick, and, a few minutes later, as the sun rose higher into the heavens, I located the west. Then I remembered something else, and examined the bark of the trees. On one side it was undoubtedly browner and bore evidence of the greater power of the sun. There was the north. I had now all the points of the compass, and knew that I must travel in a certain direction. I observed that all the birds were flying toward a certain point.
I was right. Within a quarter of an hour I was drinking at a large water-hole as I had never drunk before in my life. It struck me as strange, however, that there was no stock drinking there also.
Then it struck me that I was actually in a large paddock, and it was a very odd thing that I had not struck a fence. I took my bearings again, determined to strike the fence to the south, and follow it round till I came to the station. Why had I not done this before? In two minutes more I actually found a small bough that I had cut some twenty-four hours previously, in order to flick off the flies. I kept to my "boned" line, and within a quarter of an hour I cut my own tracks three times! I had been travelling in a circle with a vengeance. One travels in a circle because one generally takes a longer step with one leg than the other.
Within five minutes I struck the fence, and, looking along it, saw the station house and buildings. I recollected something, and a horrible truth came home to me. The paddock I had been wandering in for nearly fourteen weary hours was only a few square miles in extent. If only I had glanced back now and again to see what the country looked like, so that I would have been able to recognize it from another point of view—in short, if only I had paid proper attention to the physical features of the ground and country I was passing over, familiarizing myself with, my fresh environment—I would not have had to spend a miserable night on the bare earth, supperless and tortured by thirst.
It had been a salutary lesson to me, and I think I have profited by it, for since then I have acted successfully as scout in various parts of the world.
And any fellow can cultivate the faculty of observation as I have done; for, as I have shown, I was at the outset as careless and stupid a young fellow as one could find.