The book Learning To Talk Bear is the best book I have ever read and prepared me for my first grizzly sighting / email from Susan Bearer

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Tip o' the Day

Ever out in the big lonesome and discovered your watch quit God knows how many hours ago and you need to know how much time left until sundown? Line one hand between sun and horizon (arm outstretched, fingers together at right angle to the arm); each finger is approximately 15 minutes.

How about direction when you're without a compass and it's a dank, overcast day? Forget that old wives' tale about moss growing heavier on the north side of trees. Moss grows slowly in the high country at our latitude and you don't have time to wait for it to grow. Try this instead:

Spread a white cloth (handkerchief, T-shirt, longhandle underwear (if it's still white) flat upon the ground. Hold a slender stick vertically, moving it around the perimeter of the cloth. A suggestion of a shadow can be determined when the stick is between sun and cloth, even when the sun cannot be otherwise located. Now point the hour-hand of your watch at the sun. Halway betweeen the hour hand and 12 0'clock is due south. (Note: use standard time. Note: those with digital watches will have to fake it.)

What happens when you've discovered south and how much time until sundown, but still don't know which direction to camp, nor how long it'll take to get there?

Survival books say, "Stop early enough to gather firewood for the night," It's good advice. Most of 'em don't tell you how much to gather, however. So lay in more than you'll need . . . then double the supply. Having slept out many nights using chaps for pajamas, backed against a rock wall or boulder to reflect heat, drowsily fighting sparks from my new wool coat, I qualify as an expert. And I say night is always darkest just before dawn, not to mention that's the same time it's coldest. Ironically, if you shorted the wood supply the evening before, that's also when you'll run out of fire.

Of course if a man straddles a good horse there's no logical reason to gather a big supply of firewood and spend the night in the fearsome lonesome unless he wishes to do so. Give a veteran horse his head and you'll eat supper in camp. Confuse him and you might wind up as hungry as an Ethopian famine survivor.

I once followed my pony down a perilous trail in an inky night. I did so by tying the halter rope to his bridle reins, then walking behind with one hand loose-holding the rope and the other holding his tail. I figured to let both go if he disappeared into the chasm below. He never even stumbled.

In fact, if anything, he seemed put out that I never crawled into the saddle and let him hurry home.

I am sitting here with tears pouring down my cheeks in great appreciation for what you have written about my father in law. I am the mother of "his" triplet grandchildren . . . It is hard for me to explain what a BIG loss it has been because it is hard to explain to people what a great person he truly was / email from Jennifer West

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FATHER'S DAY MANIFESTO

Sure, sure. Just when I chanced into fatherhood, opportunities for employment turned equal, women turned liberated, and kids turned belligerent. Not that I'm opposed to any of the above, as long as they come in singles. But why gang up on the underclass when he's already outclassed?

Equal opportunity is, of course, a joke. What it means is that the distaff side wants my job . . . which is okay, provided I get hers. But popular fiction aside, no lady in her right mind has any intention of letting a man into her kitchen--not after having marshalled the world's heavy industry into making over yesterday's kitchenary torture chamber into a repository of Orwell's vision of the Twenty-Third Century. Why should I think the Cheek household any different?

So insidiously have they prepared their kitchen defenses that only a man of astounding bravery or abominable ignorance would dare risk entry into such a bastion of wifely wizardry. Just the other day I moved a package that for six months had blocked access to the ice cubes. In the same spirit of adventure that brought me ice cube hunting in the first place, I opened that package. It contained bones. As far as I know, they were human bones. Last month amid an intelligence crisis, I sought to open a can of sardines. I began with a can opener and ended with an axe. Even then I barely got to the contents in time for breakfast. Knowing what I know now, you couldn't chase me into the kitchen with a flame thrower.

The only problem with moms channeling the captains of industry into making light with job preferences and kitchen gadgetry is their very success. As selfless as we all know industry captains to be, they're still enamored with the concept of profit, rolling the word around their tongues, bouncing it off their teeth, laughing goofily at each other during weekly debaucheries on their South Seas island.

After saturating the mom market with every advanced heart's desire, then slaking their obsessional thirst in blood from the youth of our fair land, the captains have now turned beetle-eyed gazes on a heretofore unknown market segment--dads.

So finally, whether the products are mixed, poured, pressed, pounded, or strained through a handkerchief, we are finally getting our just desserts--and barely in time! There are new plastic arteries, pacers for an overworked heart, joints for the knee, and a vulcanized cap for our skull after the surgeon quits digging divots from it. There's iron for our blood, marrow for our bone, false for our teeth, and a mop to replace the hair that aliens abducted decades ago.

Please understand these products all come under the heading of industry charity; there's no real reason to keep us around now that moms no longer find us either necessary or expedient. The reason I know this is because with respect would come recliner chairs with built in bar and fly-tying bench, or a robot console TV that follows us from room to room and changes game channels on our slightest whim.

Equal opportunity, what a laugh! My little mommy has a pie wheel trimmer, I get an oxygen bottle. She gets a rotary mincer, I get a blood pressure pump.

So far, the important stuff is yet to come: an automobile jack that makes punctures a pleasure; an unemployment check issued on demand; a portable tree stand that can be folded into your billfold; a sardine can that may, on one's best day, be opened without dissecting one's thumb with an axe.

Father's arise! I say.

"Get out of bed," she says.

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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