tion]

A sense of direction, therefore, I should name as the prime requisite
for him who would become a true woodsman, depending on himself rather
than on guides. The faculty is largely developed, of course, by much
practice; but it must be inborn. Some men possess it; others do
not--just as some men have a mathematical bent while to others figures
are always a despair. It is a sort of extra, having nothing to do with
criterions of intelligence or mental development, like the repeater
movement in a watch. A highly educated or cultured man may lack it; the
roughest possess it. Some who have never been in the woods or mountains
acquire in the space of a vacation a fair facility at picking a way; and
I have met a few who have spent their lives on the prospect trail, and
who were still, and always would be, as helpless as the newest city
dweller. It is a gift, a talent. If you have its germ, you can become a
traveler of the wide and lonely places. If you have it not, you may as
well resign yourself to guides.

[Sidenote: The Sense of Direction]

The sense of direction in its simplest and most elementary phase, of
course, leads a man back to camp, or over a half-forgotten trail. The
tenderfoot finds his way by little landmarks, and an attempt to remember
details. A woodsman adds to this the general "lay" of the country, the
direction its streams ought to flow, the course the hills must take,
the dip of strata, the growth of trees. So if the tenderfoot forgets
whether he turns to right or left at a certain half-remembered burnt
stub, he is lost. But if at the same point the woodsman's memory fails
him, he turns unhesitatingly to the left, because he knows by all the
logic of nature's signboards that the way must be to the left. A good
mountaineer follows the half-obliterated trails as much by his knowledge
of where a trail _must_ go, as by the sparse indications that men have
passed that way. I have traveled all day in the Sierras over apparently
virgin country. Yet every few hours we would come on the traces of an
old trail. We were running in and out of it all day; and at night we
camped by it.

That is, as I have said, elementary. It has to do with a country over
which your woodsman has already traveled, or about which he knows
something. In the last analysis, however, it means something more.

The sense of direction will take a man through a country of which he
knows nothing whatever. He travels by the _feel_ of it,