but these are self-helpful things to know if you intend to consort much with Nature.
And can you, for instance, light ten successive camp fires with exactly ten matches, using only wildwood materials? And do you know twenty forest trees, the fruit, the leaf, the trunk and the qualities of the woods, so that the tree becomes to you not merely a tree of some sort or another, but a fellow creature with a name, a personality and a life struggle of its own? Do you know or do you know anyone who knows five edible wild plants? Or take the fourteenth test — have you slept out of doors thirty nights, or, what is far more difficult, have you cooked nine digestible meals by a camp fire for not less than five comrades? Have you taught anyone to swim, or would you know how to take care of anyone suddenly ill or hurt in the woods? Well, if you know any fifteen of these things, and want to be a Pathfinder and are young enough to know the value of real life and real education and real comradeship, you could pass and take rank in the Council of the Woodcraft League.
If you are a true Woodcraft Girl it is not enough to remain a Pathfinder; there are many more things to be accomplished, many more honors to be won. You are bound to want to become a Winyan, "a woman tried and prowen". The tests to become a Winyan are twenty-six and twenty of these must be taken. If you can take twenty of them you have a general education of which any girl or young woman would be proud, and which in some phase of life as long as you live you are going to find most useful, not counting the character development you have received in having learned how to do the practical, reasonable things involved in passing the tests. You will have to know twenty wild flowers and five medicinal herbs: you will have to know how to make a comfortable rain-proof shelter of wildwood material. This, of course, will never be needed of Fifth Avenue but the power to master your surroundings that it gives you will be needed at every turn throughout your life. Such power is also fostered by your knowing how to set up your tepee single-handed; by being able to swim one hundred yards in three minutes; the last a not to be despised accomplishment in these days of the undisciplined U-boat — and a hundred other specified activities in the Birch Bark Roll or Manual.
Think of knowing that you have planted ten desirable trees and ten wild flower roots that you have cleaned up at least one block in your own town, that you have successfully managed an outdoor camp for at least a week; and here is an extraordinary test that you must pass before you are really a "woman tried and proven" ..text pokračuje
