One September afternoon some of the Indian boys and I were playing in the first woods. At the back end of the woods, by the river was a dump of sorts. Various things like old fencing and useless lumber were dumped there to rot or get carried away by the high water. In this dump we found an old five-gallon can that seemed to be in pretty good shape.

We pondered at length what to do with the can and finally decided we would build a fire and make a stew just like the hobos did in the movies we saw on Saturday afternoon at the theatre in town.

No sooner said than done. Somebody had matches to light the fire. We gathered stones for a fire ring and in no time we had a pot of river water boiling. What to put in the stew? Three blocks away was the school building and immediately east of the building along the road between the barn and the building was the garden that Uncle Jack cultivated for the Indian School. We ambled up to the garden and sneakily picked some carrots, kohlrabi, tomatoes and other ripe vegetables. On the way back to the fire we stopped in the cornfield and picked some Evergreen white sweet corn. Everything was then hacked up and dumped into the stew pot.

But we were missing meat. What to do? Finally we went down to the river and caught a bunch of crayfish, the kind that are green and swim backwards. They are easy enough to catch if you lift up a few rocks. We also picked some river clams from the river bottom. Into the pot the clams and crayfish went. And then a most amazing thing happened! The crayfish turned red!

I had never seen a shrimp or a lobster, of course, and nobody ever ate crayfish, so I had no occasion to see one cooked. Therefore, I had no idea that green shellfish turned red when boiled. I can remember being quite astonished.

The stew smelled wonderful as it cooked, but for a variety of reasons, none of us wanted to partake. For one thing, we hadn't been particularly careful in cleaning the vegetables, and they had gone in sand, roots, tops and all. And then there were those clams and crayfish. They smelled real good but we didn't know if they were fit to eat or not. Could have been poison or something, you know. So we upended the can and spilled all the stew on the ground, clams, red crayfish and all. But we still had a fire and were beginning to get hungry, so we went to the nearby field and picked some ripe "field" corn.

It is important to know that while field corn is ripe and hard in September, Evergreen sweet corn is still soft. I think the Evergreen is planted a lot later than ordinary corn. It was a favorite at the Indian School because it could be served to the kids when they returned to school in September. By that time the Golden Bantam and other sweet corns were long past.

Anyway, field corn is the raw material for "cook-corn," a kind of ersatz popcorn that is made in a tin tomato can with holes punched in the bottom. Cook-corn is pretty tough and hard to eat, but it does smell good and tastes terrific. Try to imagine eating only the Old-Maids when you make popcorn. That's "cook-corn." Anyway, we went back to the dump, picked up a useable tomato can, punched holes in the bottom with a rusty nail, attached a split stick to serve as a handle, dumped in some field corn kernels, and cooked our supper over the open fire. It was super! We felt just like tramps.