job, you can compromise by taking along the manual on composition and a cheap fixed-focus box or a vest-pocket camera for your experimenting. Then you can emphasize the study of pictures rather than of your outfit. (And the cheap box is not be despised for real work either, if you learn its capabilities thoroughly. A handsome tendollar book on my desk was illustrated throughout with enlargements from an old-fashioned 31⁄2 X 31⁄2 camera of this sort.) Simplicity counts for a whole lot in this matter. And not alone simplicity in your outfit, but in to emphasize your high lights. Get up early in the morning and see how the soft light transforms hard outlines. If you get softness and beauty in your negative, even the professional enlargement, made in haste and on a commercial basis, will in a measure preserve them. But after a while you will get the "bug" and want to make your own negatives and your own enlargements, and then you will be on the way to find the real joy and education that your vacation camera can bring you. J' HOW IM DE LONG'S boys can't go to the movies. Living 35 miles from a post office and 240 miles from a railway, they miss some of the current educational opportunities. Jim De Long is ranger on the Kaibab National Forest, in northern Arizona, and has seven useful children. The oldest is sixteen and is useful in tending the baby. The baby is a year old and is useful in supplying amusement, occupation, and education to the older ones. In the Kaibab Forest all about Jacob Lake Ranger Station are wild deerherds of them, thousands of them. Any day those De Long children can sit on the steps and see the deer in the front yard. They can almost play with them. On their ponies they can ride among them. They watch the bucks grow horns and lose them again. They see the does, with one or two pretty spotted fawns apiece, feeding in the open parks or hiding in the chaparral. Now if some gay film producer could get pictures of those Kaibab deer in their daily round of life and play, he would have a story good for three reels and a repeat. It would beat the news reel of Jack Dempsey eating ham and eggs for breakfast at his training quarters. It would be as entertaining as seeing a slap-stick comedian drink gasoline from the garage pump. It would be as educational as a picture showing the manufacture of pure Havana cigars in New Haven. The deer would also be as pretty and as graceful and as intelligent as a film of bathing beauties at a California beach. All of this; and yet the aforementioned De Long children see this picture every day for nothing. If they tire of deer, there are the white-tailed squirrels. Now the whitetailed squirrels are just as interesting as the deer, and much more rare. There are only a few of them when the whole census is taken, and they inhabit nowhere except this Kaibab Forest, preferably in the neighbor TO ESCAPE THE MOVIES BY FRANK A. WAUGH hood of Jacob Lake Ranger Station, on the same ground as those seven useful young De Longs. Think of a large gray squirrel, extra large and dark gray; think of him wearing a great bushy pure-white plume of a tail, and that's the rare Kaibab squirrel. He is so rare that the ordinary visitor, speeding along the Forest road in his automobile, sees five hundred deer to each white-tail; quite frequently sees the five hundred deer and misses the squirrels altogether. So, while this deer could be filmedany good operator could go down there and get five hundred feet of deer film any sunny day-the squirrels couldn't be touched with the camera. Neither can they be trapped or shot, for this is one of Uncle Sam's game preserves, and Jim De Long himself is there to watch. But the seven De Long kiddies have only to sit on the overturned wash-boiler at the back door and watch those rare and beautiful rodents romping through the tops of the yellow pines and skittering across the ranch yard. Once more the De Long children have stolen a march on the movies. Or, if squirrels are too trifling and unspectacular as a substitute for the movies, there are cougars. For here is the very spot where Teddy Roosevelt came cougar hunting with Jim Owens; and Jim Owens and the cougars still live the nearest neighbors to Jim De Long and his seven welleducated children. Uncle Jim is getting old, but his offer still stands to go out and catch a cougar any day for any dude who wants a guide and has got the price. And if Uncle Jimmy can do it, so can the De Long boys. Leave it to them. If we left it to them, they would probably lasso the beast. For of course they ride and throw the rope as naturally as a flapper fox-trots. Every one of these children has ridden horseback before he learned to walk. Their facility in these matters is astounding. Here is an incident to illustrate. Besides deer, white-tailed squirrels, cougars, and buffalo, there are ranging on the Kaibab hundreds of wild horses. These are not strayed cow ponies, but genuinely wild mustangs"brushies"-the kind you read about in those Thompson Seton stories. Well, this spring the De Long boys found that a band of "brushies" were taking their daily drink at a pool at the foot of a steep spur of Buckskin Mountain. So Billy and Joe, aged fifteen and twelve, took their ponies and their ropes and their welldeveloped wits and staged a little scenario of their own. One of them hid in the chaparral below the drinking pool, and when the band of wild horses came for water he raised a great hue and cry, frightening them half out of their shaggy skins. So the horses bolted straight up the steep slope; but when they arrived at the top, well winded and startled, there was Billy De Long waiting for them with his lasso and his good saddlehorse, Spider. And thus on three different occasions this spring did Billy and Joe De Long, aged fifteen and twelve, capture a wild horse from the ranges. Not only captured them, but kept them, tamed them, and broke them to saddle. In fact, I saw Billy mount without a saddle and ride with nothing but a hackamore a fine young stallion which he had roped out of the wild less than a week before. It struck me that if the boys of twelve and fifteen who attend the movies in Hackensack, New Jersey, or Dayton, Ohio, could see a reel or two of Billy and Joe De Long roping wild horses on the Kaibab they would think they had had a treat. That ought to be worth all the imitation cowboy stuff ever produced in Hollywood. But those seven useful De Long children can't go to the movies. All they can do is to go out and enact a performance of their own. |