Scoutcraft

Knots

Why it is the first chapter in every scouting handbook.

In Scouting for Boys Baden-Powell tells how he commanded a thousand native scouts on the West Coast of Africa who had nearly two hundred wooden bridges to build. The problem was not courage, it was this: “out of the thousand men, very many did not know how to use an axe to cut down trees, and, except for one company of about sixty, not one of them could tie a knot — not even a bad knot. So they were quite useless for bridge-building.”

A bad knot — the one he calls a granny — is one that either slips when you pull hard on it or jams so tight that you can never get it undone. A good knot holds under any load and comes apart easily when you want it to.

The six that are enough

Add two more for the tent: two half hitches (fastening the rope to a tree or a ring) and the taut-line hitch, the adjustable one, which you slide to tension the guy lines and which then stays where you put it.

Lashings and pioneering

Pioneering: how you raise things you can stand on out of spars and rope.

A lashing is not a knot — it is the way you wind the rope round two spars so that neither can move against the other. They all work the same way, in three movements: wrapping turns (round the spars), then tightening turns — frappings, that is, turns round the rope itself, the ones that actually squeeze the joint together — and then the finishing knot. The rhythm everyone repeats: two wraps, one frapping.

Everything is built from three pieces

You do not have to learn fifty structures. Almost everything a patrol puts up is assembled from three modules: the A-frame (the base of towers; its horizontal bar carries a floor), the trestle (bridges and towers — and, turned upside down, the cart in the races between patrols) and the tripod.

The small ones, the immediately satisfying ones, are called camp gadgets: the tripod for the cauldron, the mess-tin rack, the wash-stand, the boot rack, the kitchen table, the water-bucket stand. They are made from whatever is “lying about”, so that camp is as comfortable as conditions allow.

And at the other end of the scale stand the camp gateway, the monkey bridge, the signal tower and the kitchen raised on two trestles. The patrol gateway is the thing they sign their camp with — and there is a lesson in it: it is built lying down, in two sides, by two teams at once, then joined and raised by everybody together. Nobody raises a gateway alone.

Fire

Safety first, lighting second. That is the order Baden-Powell puts it in too.

Then the method, again in his own words: you start with very small chips of dry, dead wood, gathered loosely into a little heap; on top go small sticks leaning against each other in a pyramid; over those, thicker sticks, also standing up. In other words: tinder, kindling, wood — in that order, never the other way round.

How to lay the fire, according to what you want from it

The wood matters. The hardwoods — beech and oak — burn slowly and evenly and make embers; they are the wood for the cauldron. The conifers — spruce, fir, pine — catch quickly, crack and throw sparks and are gone in no time. (And B-P adds a trade superstition: never poplar for the cooking tripod, “because old-fashioned scouts believe it brings bad luck to the cooking”.)

The rules that are not up for discussion

• Hair tied back, neckerchief tucked in, no loose sleeves, no flapping clothes. Closed shoes.
• Clear everything that burns for at least a metre and a half in every direction.
• Water or a spade within reach, the whole time. One bucket is the minimum.
• A fire is never left unattended. Not for a minute.
• It is put out with water, not soil: spread the embers, sprinkle, turn them over with a branch, sprinkle again. The final test: you must be able to hold your palm over the ashes.

The camp rule that leaves no trace: do not fell living trees and leave the big logs alone (they are homes for animals) — gather only wood you can break with your hands, over a wide area, well away from camp. And never a fire against rocks: the black mark stays on them for years.

Cooking at the cauldron

You adjust the heat by raising the pot, not by building up the flame.

The rig is simple: a tripod of three green spars lashed at the top, with the cauldron hung from a chain or a wire. You raise or lower the pot, you rake the embers under it or pull them away — that is the throttle. Big flames do not cook, they only smoke the food.

Bread without an oven: you make a dough, cut a strip two fingers wide, wind it in a spiral round a thick stick that you have barked and warmed in the fire, then plant the stick beside the embers and turn it now and then. It is called a răsucită, a twist, and it is the first thing any child asks for on the second day.

And one small, perfect trick from the same page: to find out whether the water is boiling without lifting the lid, hold the end of a stick against the pot — if it is boiling, you feel it tremble.

Here, the cast-iron cauldron on its tripod, over beech or oak, means goulash, bograci, tocăniță, beans with smoked hock, ciorbă, pilaf and mămăligă (polenta) alongside. It is stirred and watched in shifts, with a long-handled wooden spoon. The cauldron is washed with warm water and a soft sponge, no harsh detergent, dried at once and wiped over with a film of oil.

But the point of the exercise is not the food, it is the organisation: the patrol cook, the rota for washing up, the hygiene rules, and the fact that the patrol eats exactly what the patrol cooked. Baden-Powell tells how, as a beginner, he served pea flour and water as “soup” and was made to eat it himself. It is a lesson about responsibility, not about cooking.

Map and compass

Three steps, in this order, every time.

A scout’s compass has a transparent baseplate with a ruler edge, a rotating housing marked 0–360°, the magnetic needle with its red end pointing north, an orienting arrow drawn on the floor of the housing — the one they call the shed — and a direction-of-travel arrow on the baseplate.

1. Put the compass on the map The ruler edge should make a straight line between where you are and where you want to get to. Check twice that the direction-of-travel arrow points towards your destination, not the other way round — this is every beginner’s number one mistake.
2. Turn the housing Until the lines inside it are parallel with the north–south lines of the map, with the north of the housing towards the north of the map. The needle is ignored completely at this step — for now the compass is only a protractor.
3. Lift the compass off the map Hold it flat in front of you and turn yourself, your whole body, until the red end of the needle sits in the shed. Red in the shed. Now walk where the direction-of-travel arrow points.

On the ground, the rule that counts: do not walk with your eyes in the compass. Sight a tree or a rock on your line, walk to it, then take the bearing again. Otherwise you drift off without noticing.

Declination — and why the rule in the English books is back to front here

Compass north is not map north. In Romania the difference is about 6° East in the west of the country (5.9° at Timișoara), rising to 7° in the north-east. Because declination here is easterly, the conversion runs the opposite way to the rule every British manual teaches:

compass bearing = map bearing − 6°  ·  map bearing = compass bearing + 6°

How much does it matter? One degree is about 17 metres off course for every kilometre. Ignore the 6° and you come out some hundred metres wide of your target after a kilometre. On a path, nothing. On a mountainside in fog, everything.

The techniques that make the difference

Pacing

When there is no landmark, you measure the way with your own legs.

A “pace”, in orienteering, means a double pace: you count one foot only, each time it touches the ground. An adult walking on flat ground takes about 60–64 double paces to 100 metres. Running on a good path, about 40; the same person, through forest, nearly 50 — a quarter more, from the ground alone.

How to find your own number: measure out 100 metres on flat ground, walk it counting one foot only, repeat three to five times until the figure settles, round to the nearest 5. Then measure again going up, going down and through thick undergrowth — those are three different numbers. Over long distances, move a pebble from one pocket to the other every hundred metres, so that you do not lose count.

And the honest part: there is no table anywhere that tells you how many paces a twelve-year-old takes. Nobody can give you your number. You measure it yourself — and you measure it again as you grow.

North without a compass

Three methods that work, and one that does not work at all.

The stick and the shadow

Push a stick about a metre long into the ground and mark the tip of its shadow. Wait a quarter of an hour and mark it again. The line from the first mark to the second runs roughly west→east. Put the first mark at your left foot and the second at your right, and you are facing north. Accuracy: 10–15°, best in the middle of the day.

The watch with hands

B-P: “hold your watch flat, face upwards, so that the sun shines on it. Turn it round until the hour hand points at the sun. Then lay the edge of a piece of paper across the face, through the centre, halfway between the figure XII and the hour hand. That line gives you true north and south.” It works because the hour hand goes round twice a day and the sun only once — by halving the angle you cancel the factor of two.

In summer here, halve the angle from 1 o’clock, not from 12 — because of daylight saving. And treat the method as a fine demonstration, not as navigation: the error can pass 80° in unlucky cases.

The stars

The two stars at the end of the “bowl” of the Plough (the Big Dipper) point at the Pole Star: carry the distance between them on about five times. If the forest hides the Plough, look for Cassiopeia — the W on the other side of the pole, at roughly the same distance.

Two things you can check for yourself, from Oradea: at our latitude the Plough never sets, and the Pole Star stands at a height equal to the latitude — that is, around 47°, about halfway between the horizon and straight overhead, some four and a half fists held out at arm’s length.

Trail signs

In 1908 there were four. Just four.

Most of the lists on the internet inflate them. Baden-Powell’s originals are these:

1. Road to be followed — an arrow.
2. Letter hidden three paces in the direction of the arrow — the arrow, plus the number of paces.
3. This way is not to be followed — a bar laid across the path.
4. I have gone home — a circle with a dot in the middle.

Three details from the original that nobody quotes any more, and they are the best of it. The first: you sign your work — the scout draws the head of his patrol animal beside the sign, with his own number to the left of it, so that the sign says who left it. The second: the night version — “sticks with a wisp of grass tied round them, laid on the road in the same shapes, so that they can be felt with the hand”. A trail you read with your fingers, in the dark. The third: you practise it with chalk on the floor, or with a stick in sand.

The set used today adds: turn left, turn right, this way over the obstacle, the group has split (an arrow that forks, with the number who went each way), message in this direction, water, danger. They are made from twigs, sticks and pebbles — never cut into living trees — and they are collected on the way back. “I have gone home” is always the last sign left.

Kim’s Game

The oldest scouting game there is — and it has been in Romanian since 1915.

It comes from Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim (1901), where the boy is trained by Mr Lurgan with what the book calls “the Jewel Game”: fifteen precious stones thrown down on a tray, then objects, then photographs. Lurgan’s line is the one to say to children: “Do it many times over till it is done perfectly — for it is worth doing.” Baden-Powell took it over in 1908 and named it after the character.

The original rule: you put twenty to thirty small objects on a tray and cover them. You uncover them for exactly one minute. You cover them again. Then you take each scout aside and have them whisper to you what they remember, ticking it off on a list prepared beforehand. Whoever remembers the most wins.

Two details the modern versions lose and should not: the whispering (so that nobody copies) and the score sheet made in advance (the game is measured, not judged by eye).

Animal tracks

Do not learn a hundred pictures. Learn the architecture of the foot.

Fox or dog? The answer is not in the print, it is in the trail

The fox walks “in direct register”: the hind feet fall exactly on the prints of the front ones, and all of them on a single line, never stepping out to the side — the trail looks like a string of beads. A straight line, as if along a wire: an animal that is going somewhere. A dog’s trail wanders and steps out sideways, because a dog on a walk is investigating.

The fox walks the wire; the dog goes for a stroll.

Signs when there is no mud

Roe deer droppings are small and cylindrical, with one pointed end and one dimpled — black and glossy when fresh, brown and dull when old, which also gives you a rough age. Gnawed cones: a squirrel leaves a ragged core with a tuft at the tip; a woodpecker wedges the cone into an “anvil” in the bark and leaves a pile under the same tree. Stripped bark: deer pull with their lower incisors upwards, vertically; sheep browse across — and the height tells you how big the animal is. Badger hair left on the bottom wire of a fence is coarse, banded black-white-black, and rolls between your fingers. A feather with a chewed quill means a mammal caught the bird; plucked clean, it was a bird of prey.

Trees and birds

Fifteen plus fifteen. That is all it takes to stop walking through the forest like a stranger.

Our forests are stacked in belts: the oak belt in the lowlands and hills, the beech belt from about 400–500 m up to around 1,300–1,400 m, then the spruce belt. Climbing towards Stâna de Vale, you pass through all three in one morning.

Birds — and their sound

Reading the weather

Three sayings that work — and all three are, in fact, the same saying.

And now the important thing: all three are the same rule. All three detect the high ice clouds that run ahead of a front. A child who understands that has understood the weather at our latitudes — they have not memorised three proverbs.

The sign that matters most is the cumulonimbus: the tower of cloud with its top spread out like an anvil. It brings hard showers, thunder, hail and squalls. The anvil is the signal to get off the ridge, not to take one more photo.

What you never do

The short part of the handbook, and the only part with no exceptions.

Dangerous plants that grow here too: hemlock (a tall stem with purple blotches, the crushed leaves smell foul — it is easily confused with parsley and wild dill) and deadly nightshade, whose glossy black berries look sweet, and a few of which can kill a child. There are also thorn apple (laur), yew, monkshood and autumn crocus.

What you can have instead, and it is a pleasure: blackberries — the only wild European fruit that is impossible to confuse with anything dangerous, and for that reason the first one a child learns. Then rosehips, bilberries, raspberries, nettle (it stings raw, it is mild boiled — and the burdock that cures it usually grows right beside it) and sorrel, sharp as lemon, but a nibble, not a salad.