Camp Venture: A Story of the Virginia Mountains

It was on Saturday that the boys removed to their new quarters, and the next day, being Sunday, was to be spent in resting. But Little Tom, as he lay there in his broom straw bed about midday on Saturday became troubled in his mind about the provisioning of the garrison.

"We've eaten up the last of the venison to-day," he said, "and there isn't an ounce of fresh meat in the camp. If I didn't hurt so badly, and if the Doctor wasn't such a tyrant, with his arbitrary orders for me to lie still, I'd go out this afternoon and get something better than salt meat for all of us to eat to-morrow. Why don't some of you other fellows go? If you can't get a deer, you can at any rate kill a turkey or a pheasant or two, or some partridges or squirrels, or, as a last resort, some rabbits. Oh, how my head aches! Go, some of you, and get what you can."

With that the poor bed-ridden boy turned over in his bunk and sought sleep. But Ed Parmly and Jim Chenowith acted upon his wise suggestion. A few hours later they returned to Camp Venture bearing three hares and seven squirrels on their shoulders, and dragging a half-grown hog by withes.

"I don't know but what we've made a mistake," said Ed to Jack; "the hog may belong to the moonshiners, and if so, they'll present their bill in a fashion that we sha'n't want to have it presented."

"Never mind about that," called out Tom, from inside the house. "We're at war with those people, you know, and in war you capture all you can of the enemy's supplies. But why can't you let a fellow see your game?"

The boys dragged the shoat into the hut, and Tom, expert huntsman that he was, had only to glance at it in order to pronounce it one of the wild hogs of the mountains, and anybody's property.

"Don't you see," he said, "that although it is only a half-grown shoat, it has tusks already. No domesticated hog ever developed in that way. And besides, the moonshiners haven't any hogs or anything else, for that matter. They are the poorest and most starved human beings I ever saw or heard of. I passed a week as a prisoner in one of their huts once, and I never dreamed of such poverty or such indolence. So long as they have corn pones or anything else to distend their stomachs with, they simply will not exert themselves to get anything better. They won't even go out and shoot a rabbit if they've got anything else to eat. You simply can't conceive of their poverty or of the indolence that produces it. If one of them owned a hog he'd kill it without taking the trouble to fatten it, and he'd eat it to the picking of the last bone before he would exert himself to procure another morsel of food."

"When was it, Tom, that you learned all this?" asked Harry.

"A year ago. You remember the time I went hunting and didn't get back for two weeks?"

"Yes, but tell us – "

"Well, that time I was captured by the moonshiners and held for a week as a spy. I didn't say anything about it at home except confidentially to Jack, for fear mother would worry when I went hunting again. But I tell you fellows you never dreamed of the sort of poverty that those men and their families live in. I don't know whether they are poor because they lead criminal lives, or whether they lead criminal lives because they are poor. But I do know that that fellow told the truth the other night when he said that they do not usually have enough to eat. You saw how starved he was. That's the chronic condition of all of them; and yet these mountains are full of game and any man of even half ordinary industry can feed himself well by killing it.

"The trouble is they are hopeless people. They have no ambition, no energy, no 'go' in them. They drink too much of their illicit whiskey for one thing, I suppose, but I don't think that's the bottom trouble. They seem to be people born without energy. They like to sit still in the sunshine, unless there is a revenue officer to hunt down and shoot. I suppose they are what somebody in the newspapers calls 'degenerates' – people that are run down even before they are born."

"But tell us, Tom," broke in Harry, "how did you get away from them?"

"Why, I watched my chance," answered Tom, "till one day I 'got the drap' on my jailer, to employ their own language. With a cocked gun at his breast, I made him promise not to follow me, and then I retreated 'in good order' as the soldiers say, down the mountain, with both barrels cocked. But really, fellows, you can have no idea of the abject poverty or the inconceivable indolence of these people. The little energy they have is expended in making illicit whiskey and sneaking it down the mountain without getting caught. Many of them have already served long terms in prison, but they regard that merely as a manifestation of the law's injustice, just as they do the hanging of one of their number now and then, when he is caught shooting an agent of the revenue. They don't understand. They are as ignorant as they are poor, and their poverty exceeds anything that it is possible for us to conceive."

By this time Tom's scant strength was exhausted, and after muttering: "That's anybody's wild hog," he turned himself over in bed and went to sleep.

CHAPTER IX

A Sunday Discussion

"I say, Tom," said the Doctor, on Sunday morning, after the breakfast things had been cleared away, and the first fire had been lighted in the new fireplace, "I want to ask you something about your experience on your hunting trips."

"Go on, Doctor. No boy of sixteen – and we've voted you to be of that age – can ask me anything that I'll hesitate to answer."

"Thank you," said the Doctor, with a laugh. "Now, think of me as exactly sixteen and tell me all about it. As I understand, you have frequently spent from a week to ten days in the mountains, living exclusively upon what you could kill."

"So far, Doctor, you are absolutely right," answered the boy, who, having laid aside his headache, was disposed to be facetious.

"Well, that must have been animal food exclusively," said the Doctor.

"Absolutely," answered Tom. "I had always a little of the mineral food salt to season it with, but as for bread or potatoes, or anything else of a vegetable character, why I simply couldn't get them."

"All right. Now, the theory is that a man must have starchy foods in order to keep in good health. You had no starchy food for from a week to two weeks at a time on each of these occasions, but lived exclusively on meat. Now, what effects of this diet did you observe?"

"None whatever, except that little Tom Ridsdale had a mighty keen relish for bread when he got home again."

The Doctor then asked detailed questions as to particular symptoms, to all of which the substance of Tom's replies was that in his case no symptoms whatever had manifested themselves. "I think, Doctor," he added, "as the result of my own experience that a healthy young human animal like me, when living night and day in the open air and taking a great deal of exercise, can eat pretty much anything he pleases that we commonly recognize as food, or rather anything of that kind that he can get – without much danger of injuring himself. No, I don't know so well about that. Once, I got hurt in the mountains, and lived for a week in a barn, eating nothing but corn. I was all right in a general way, but I suffered a good deal with cold. When I got out and killed a 'coon and roasted and ate it, the weather seemed suddenly to warm up."

"Precisely," answered the Doctor. "The fat of the coon furnished you with fuel, and you needed it. The more I study the subject, the more firmly convinced I become of two things – first, that man is essentially a carnivorous, or meat-eating animal, and second, that while starchy foods are desirable as a part of his diet, they are not absolutely necessary to him, except at comparatively long intervals. You know a baby simply cannot digest starchy foods at all. It would starve to death with a stomach full of them. Every baby lives exclusively upon the animal food milk."

"Yes," answered Jack, "but so does every colt and every calf. Yet, neither horses nor cows eat any animal food whatever after they cease to be colts and calves."

"That is true," said the Doctor, meditatively. "I hadn't thought of that." Then, after a minute's thought, he added – "but neither cows nor horses have any carnivorous teeth whatever, any teeth fit for the chewing of meat, while man has. Besides that, physicians have observed that behind almost every case of obstinate, low fevers and that sort of debilitated disease, there is a history of underfeeding, and particularly of an insufficient use of meat, whether as a matter of necessity, or merely as a matter of choice. Persons who eat no meat, or very little meat, may seem very robust so long as positive disease does not attack them, but when they contract maladies of a serious sort, they are very likely to show a lack of stamina, a deficiency of recuperative power."

"Then you don't believe at all, any more than we meat-eating Virginians do – in the doctrines of the vegetarians?" asked Jack, as he finished the hind legs of a broiled squirrel.

"It will be time enough," answered the Doctor, "to consider the doctrines of the vegetarians when they agree among themselves as to what those doctrines are."

"Why, how do you mean?" asked Tom.

"Well, some vegetarians held a congress, or a convention, or something of that sort in New York a little while ago. There were only fifty-seven of them present, I believe, and yet they managed to split their congress up into four groups, each antagonizing the views of all the others with something approaching violence of temper."

"What were their differences?" asked Tom.

"Well first of all there was a group who advocated the eating of vegetable matters only, except that they saw no harm in the use of milk, eggs, cheese and butter. Next there was a group who bitterly condemned milk, eggs, cheese and butter as animal foods, tending to inflame evil passions and utterly to be rejected, though they ate milk biscuit and butter crackers. This second group looked with favor upon all fruits and vegetables, but here a third group took issue with them, contending that only those vegetables should be eaten which grow above ground, and utterly rejecting the thought of eating potatoes, parsnips, beets, turnips, onions, carrots, radishes and other things that develop beneath the surface of the earth. Finally there was a fourth group that agreed with the third except that they made a plea in behalf of celery, on the ground that it is naturally a plant growing above ground and is artificially imbedded in earth only by way of making it tender and palatable."

"But how about circuses then?" asked Tom.

"I don't understand," the Doctor answered.

"Why how can anybody go to a circus without eating peanuts? And about three-fourths of all the peanuts are developed under ground by burying the blossoms."

"It's all very funny," said Jack. "But the funniest thing about it is the fetish worship of that word 'vegetable.' Patent medicines are often advertised as 'purely vegetable,' as if that settled the question of their harmlessness. Yet I know at least a dozen 'purely vegetable' plants that grow in these woods which are poisonous."

"Of course," answered the Doctor, "and for that matter the most virulent poisons known to man are 'purely vegetable.' There's strychnia for example, as purely vegetable in its origin as apple-butter itself is. And there are others, such as morphine, stramonium, and nux vomica and worst of all hydrocyanic acid, commonly called prussic acid. That is so deadly that it is almost never made or kept in its pure state, because a single whiff of its fumes in the nostrils would kill almost instantly. Yet it is an extract of peach pits or bitter almonds."

"Well now I say," broke in Tom, "let's return to the subject of foods, for I am hungry, and I'm going to declare war on the Doctor if he doesn't let me have some light thing to eat like a chop from that wild boar or something of an equally digestible sort."

"Well, we'll see about that," said the Doctor, going to Tom's bed and examining and redressing his wounds. After the inspection he said:

"You were entirely right, Tom, when you called yourself a perfectly healthy human animal a little while ago. I never yet saw wounds heal in the way they are doing on you. So you may sit up for dinner to-day, and you may have whatever you want to eat."

"All right!" cried Tom, hastily scrambling out of bed. "My clamor is for pork. How are you going to cook the pig boys?"

After a little consultation, it was decided to hang the shoat before the great fire in the new fire place, and roast it whole.

"After all, it doesn't weigh more than forty pounds, and that isn't much to divide between six of us," said Harry, laughingly.

"And besides," added Ed, "roast wild shoat is as good cold as hot, or rather better. So we'll roast the gentleman whole, and I for one volunteer to sit down before him and baste him so that all the juices that belong to him shall be found succulently pervading his muscular structure."

"I'll help in that," called Jim Chenowith from outside the cabin, where he was just finishing a turn of guard duty.

Thus the little company rested and grew strong during the Sunday, and by bed time they were eager for the morning and the hard, outdoor work of tree felling that it would bring with it. With a great glowing blaze in the fireplace, which each sentinel replenished with wood before summoning his successor to take his place, the log hut seemed a delightful place to sleep in.

CHAPTER X