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Tip o' the Day

One of the better outdoor cooking tips we've learned is to soap the outside of our pans prior to cooking over an open fire. Why? Because the pans will clean up better after you're through cooking, even trimming down the campfire black. Either dish soap or hand soap works fine.

Sometimes Jane prepares a surprise snack that's always a hit with the kids (me, too): She will core an apple and fill it with peanut butter mixed with raisins. Then she'll wrap the snack in foil and hand 'em out to be tucked into saddlebags or daypacks. Then a guy or gal can sneak it out and eat it when there's nobody else around to horn in.

I've heard bee stings and mosquito bites will ease right away if sprinkled with meat tenderizer. I've never tried it myself because our meat is always tender, and old Montana ex-outfitters are too tough to be bothered by mere insects.

To learn more of Roland's & Jane's exciting life as outfitters and guides in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, read Dance On the Wild Side

No, Roland Cheek hasn't been in a gunfight at the O.K. Corral or punched dogies down the streets of Abilene. But he has straddled rawboned ponies over 35 thousand miles of the toughest trails in all the Northern Rockies and spent five decades wandering the wild country throughout the West. Now, after crafting six prior nonfiction books, hundreds of magazine articles, and thousands of newspaper columns and radio scripts about his adventures, the guy has at last turned his talent to Western novels, tales from the heart, dripping with realism, and based in part on a plethora of his own experiences.

COMPARING INDIAN BURIALS TO PHARAOHS TOMBS

If I had my druthers, I'd druther not be possessed by a morbid muse. Instead, I'd druther create something happy and uplifting. Right now, however, one must work with what one has. In this case, like Indiana Jones, I've been researching various burial tombs. In China, I'm told, there's a cave-tomb with hundreds of life-size terracotta warriors to protect one Emperor's burial place. But ancient Egyptians were entombing their Pharaohs even more elaborately centuries prior.

Classical Greece also has its impressive tombs: beehive-shapped stone chambers called tholoi. The largest and best preserved example, the so-called Treasury of Atreus, is located at Mycenae.

Burials for the hunted fugitives called Christians sometimes took place surreptitiously in the catacombs beneath Rome, perhaps giving rise to the tradition of beneath-ground burials in church cemetery plots.

Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance period, an important persons was often entombed in a sarcophagus, crypt, or shrine within a chuch. Mortals of lesser status, but equal riches began constructing their own graveyard crypts until our recent age when some cemeteries, overrun with the dead, began mandating no more above-ground edifices or markers.

Various pagan groups developed differing burial practices, sometimes adapting those practices to fit their varying environment. Eskimos had what may be the most simple method, simply hauling their dead (and sometimes dying) out on an ocean ice floe and abandoning them there. By spring breakup, their scenic beach front property was clean and tidy.

It is said some African tribes simply drag their dead into the jungle and let the hyenas, jackals, vultures, and ants accomplish their disposal. In a way, that kind of tidyness resembles present-day rancher's "boneyards" during calving or lambing seasons, where those domestic animals that didn't make it are hauled to a distant place that soon becomes regular forage grounds for grizzlies, coyotes, magpies, and ravens.

To me, though, a burial method I find most appealing was one utilized by the Plains Indians. With them, when a tribesman died, his body was wrapped in a buffalo robe secured with rawhide thongs. Then the bundle was lashed to a travois and dragged by horse over rocks and ice to a hill overlooking craggy mountains to the west and limitless prairies to the east. There, a post and pole scaffold was erected and the body (still wrapped in buffalo hide) was placed upon it. Then, after first piling the deceased's most prized possessions about him, they would strike their lodges and disappear over distant horizons.

During ensuing days, a brilliant sun would shine upon the buffalo robe-wrapped body, followed by full moons and brilliant stars. Stunning snowcapped mountains pulled sentry duty, and an array of wildlife like found no place on earth would traipse the land at his feet. Over the years, deer and antelope, eyed his resting place distrustfully. Coyotes and wolves and bull elk serenaded his dreams. And bluebirds would pause to rest on his scaffold on their way south in the fall and north in the spring. Wild geese winged overhead, and gophers scolded at the scaffold's feet. The snows of the north seasonally shrouded his remains and whitened the surrounding lands. Rains sweeping in from beyond the mountains would pelt him as westerly winds whistled around him. Eventually shaggy beasts would rub their itches on his scaffold and knock it about, scattering both remains and treasures until nothing remained.

Finally (a hundred years? a thousand?) another travois would be pulled to the hilltop and another worthy tribesman laid to rest in what just might have been the most pleasurably envisioned burial ceremony imaginable -- at least to this grizzled old mountain stomper.

An open scaffold on a hilltop where, after I'm dead, I can ogle my beloved mountains and all their creatures has a nice ring to it -- far better than hearing clods thump onto my coffin and worms spitting and clearing their throats after taking a bite of me. But burial scaffolds are out of the question in today's world (as eventually graveyards will become if we keep making babies as fast as we do).

As a consequance, I told Jane that I'd druther have my ashes scattered over the Bob Marshall from an airplane. Then, musing, I told her after I'm gone, it makes no difference to me. "In fact," I said, "it'd be okay with me if you utilize the African method and drag me into the forest to offer hors d'oeuvres for grizzly bears and wolverines.

She laughed and said my first idea (ashes) was the best. "But why," said she, "should we bother to turn you into ashes? Why don't we just simply roll you out of the plane?"

"Just be sure I'm all the way gone," I muttered. "I don't want to be clinging to the sill of the cargo door, kicking and screaming."

She giggled. "Nor do I wish to have to step on your fingers."

Roland Cheek wrote a syndicated outdoors column (Wild Trails and Tall Tales) for 21 years. The column was carried in 17 daily and weekly newspapers in two states. In addition, he scripted and broadcast a daily radio show (Trails to Outdoor Adventure) that aired on 75 stations from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. He's also written upwards of 200 magazine articles and 12 fiction and nonfiction books. For more on Roland, visit:

www.rolandcheek.com

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