Part III: Fire

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Also, try to collect your standing wood from trees in open sunny areas rather than those near stream bottoms or lowland regions where fog and moist air likely collect. You can easily determine whether the wood you're gathering is dead and dry by breaking off a piece: If the stick snaps cleanly and audibly, you've got good firewood. In most weather conditions, you can also find reasonably dry wood by touch. When your hands are too cold to be sensitive, you can press the fuel against your lower lip or cheek to feel for dampness.

You'll need four types, or grades, of fuel. The first is tinder . . . the light, airy, and fast-burning material that's used to catch a spark. The dried inner bark of elm, cottonwood, willow, sage, cedar, aspen, walnut, or cherry trees makes excellent tinder. Dry vegetation such as reeds and grasses, dogbane, velvet leaf, yucca, primrose, fireweed, bulrush, milkweed, cattail, and thistle (especially, in the last three instances, the plant's down) will work well, too. In fact, with a little bit of effort, you can use just about any dried fibrous plant.

To prepare your tinder, remove all hard, crumbly bark or inner pith from the gathered fuel and rub the remaining fibers back and forth in your hands until you've created a fluffy bundle made up of filaments as small as thread. You can soften any particularly stubborn fibers by pounding them between two rocks.

The next type of fuel you'll need is kindling . . . tiny twigs or slivers that range from the thickness of a pencil lead to that of a pencil itself. You can either break kindling material off sheltered, dry branches or carve the fuel from larger pieces of wood. Always be sure to keep both this and your tinder absolutely dry.

Squaw wood, the next biggest fuel, gets its name from the fact that native American women collected this pencil- to wrist-width wood as part of their daily routine. Rather than waste time and energy cutting huge trees for firewood, Indians burned the small and easy-to-gather sticks as often as possible.

Last comes large firewood . . . too-big-to-break fuel that's added to a fire only after the blaze is going strong, when you can use damp wood. (Dry wood, of course, will burn more easily and give off less smoke and steam.) But don't waste your energy trying to cut up these sections. Instead, shove the butt end of a large log into your fire . . . and then feed the rest of the piece in as it burns down.

And remember: Don't try to take shortcuts when gathering any of the four types of fuel. Take the time to obtain the best materials, and your fire will be easy to start and to keep burning no matter what the weather conditions. In addition, be sure you gather enough firewood to last through the night. There are few worse wilderness tasks than having to leave a snug shelter and stumble around in the dark to replace your supply.

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