[3] A brother camper says that he thinks even the fish would feel neglected without pork. On the contrary, trout are very sensitive to good bacon--in short, prefer it to salt pork. If you do not believe this true fish story, then catch two dozen half pound trout, slice your bacon thin and draw off the bacon fat. Take out the bacon, put the fat back into the frying pan--don’t burn yourself--and pop in one-half dozen trout. After the first mouthful you will find that my contention that trout are most sensitive to bacon entirely true. Be sure to put a little piece of bacon on that first bite. Following that, all you have to do is to keep on biting until your share of the two dozen trout is consumed. Remarkable how those two dozen will fly--almost as if the little fellows had turned into birds! The reason I am opposed to pork and lard camping is that we all know nowadays how diseased such meat may be. To go into the woods for health and run any avoidable risks is folly. Get a flitch of the best bacon and the best bacon is Ferris bacon. From this you will get enough fat for all frying purposes; also, in case you use fat as a substitute for butter, there will be enough bacon fat for cakes, etc.
[4] I cannot emphasize too often the absolute importance of keeping a _clean camp_. Mr. Rutger Jewett, to whom this camping manual and its author are indebted for many wise suggestions, thinks that it is not always feasible to burn up everything. “Every camp,” he writes, “has some empty tin cans. It seems to me that the best plan in this case is to have a small trench dug, far enough from the camp to avoid all disagreeable results and yet not so far away that it is inaccessible. Here cans and unburnable refuse from the kitchen can be thrown and kept covered with earth or sand to avoid flies and odors. Everything that can be burned, should be.” The only difficulty in my mind is, in case the region is hedgehog-infested, that those charming creatures will form their usual “bread-line”--this time to the trench--and add digging to their accomplishments in gnawing. However! Better rinse out your tin cans; Sis Hedgehog is less likely to mistake the can for the original delicacy.
All food refuse should be burned up, anyway, never thrown out into the brush, and it is difficult to burn meat bones. The girl or woman who keeps a dirty camp is beneath contempt. There is likely to be one neighbor, if not more, in the vicinity of every camp, who will make things uncomfortable for the campers. He should be called the camp pig, and he is the hedgehog. Also his cousin, the skunk, will hang around to see what is carelessly thrown out or left for him to eat. The hedgehog is the greediest, most unwelcome fellow in the woods, and even the fact that the poet Robert Browning had one as a pet will not redeem him in the eyes of the practical camper. He hangs around any camp that is not kept clean, gnaws axe handles which the salty human hand has touched, licks out tin cans which have not been rinsed as they should be before they are thrown away--in short, he follows up every bit of camp slackness. There is only one way to keep off hedgehogs and that is to have an absolutely tidy camp.