The chief requisite of a winter camp-fire is volume. The feeble flame
and meagre bed of embers that are a hot discomfort to the summer camper,
while he hovers over coffee-pot and frying-pan, would be no more than
the glow of a candle toward tempering this nipping air. This fire must
be no dainty nibbler of chips and twigs that a boy's hatchet may
furnish, but a roaring devourer of logs, for whose carving the axe must
be long and stoutly wielded--a very glutton of solid fuel, continually
demanding more and licking with its broad red tongues at the branches
that sway and toss high above in its hot breath.
So fierce is it that you approach cautiously to feed it and the snow
shrinks away from it and can quench of it only the tiny sparks that are
spit out upon it. You must not be too familiar with it, yet it is your
friend after its own manner, fighting away for you the creeping demon of
cold, and holding at bay, on the rim of its glare, the wolf and the
panther.
With its friendly offices are mingled many elfish tricks. It boils your
pot just to the point you wish, then boils it over and licks up the
fragrant brew of celestial leaf or Javanese berry. It roasts or broils
your meat to a turn, then battles with you for it and sears your fingers
when you strive to snatch the morsel from its jaws, and perhaps burns it
to a crisp before your very eyes, vouchsafing but the tantalizing
fragrance of the feast.
Then it may fall into the friendliest and most companionable of moods,
lazily burning its great billets of ancient wood while you burn the
Virginian weed, singing to you songs of summer, its tongues of flame
murmuring like the south wind among green leaves, and mimicking the
chirp of the crickets and the cicada's cry in the simmer of exuding sap
and vent of gas, and out of its smoke blossom sparks, that drift away
in its own currents like red petals of spent flowers.
It paints pictures, some weird or grotesque, some beautiful, now of
ghosts and goblins, now of old men, now of fair women, now of lakes
crinkled with golden waves and towers on pine-crowned crags ruddy with
the glow of sunset, sunny meadows and pasture lands, with farmsteads and
flocks and herds.
The ancient trees that rear themselves aloft like strong pillars set to
hold up the narrow arch of darkness, exhale an atmosphere of the past,
in which your thoughts, waking or sleeping, drift backward to the old
days when men whose dust was long since mingled with the forest mould
moved here in the rage of war and the ardor of the chase. Shadowy forms
of dusky warriors, horribly marked in war paint, gather about the
camp-fire and sit in its glare in voiceless council, or encircle it in
the grotesquely terrible movement of the war dance.
Magically the warlike scene changes to one of peace. The red hunters
steal silently in with burdens of game. The squaws sit in the ruddy
light plying their various labors, while their impish children play
around them in mimicry of battle and the chase.
All then vanish, and white-clad soldiers of France bivouac in their
place--or red-coated Britons, or Provincial rangers, unsoldierly to look
upon, in home-spun garb, but keen-eyed, alert, and the bravest of the
brave.
These dissolve like wreaths of smoke, and a solitary white hunter,
clothed all in buckskin, sits over against you. His long flint-lock
rifle lying across his lap, he is looking with rapt gaze into the fire,
dreaming as you are.
So, growing brighter as the daylight grows dim and the gloaming thickens
to the mirk, and paling again as daylight creeps slowly back upon the
world, but always bright in the diurnal twilight of the woods, the
camp-fire weaves and breaks its magic spells, now leaping, now lapsing,
as its own freaks move it. Then, perhaps, when it has charmed you far
across the border of dreamland and locked your eyes in the blindness of
sleep, it will startle you back to the cold reality of the wintry woods
with a crash and roar of sudden revival.