Make It · Book Eight
Knotted Cord and the Pace-Count Map
Every Far-scout carries a knotted cord, and every one of them learned the same two rules before they were let out of the Gate. Keep moving. Count in, count out.
You need
- ten feet of string or a long shoelace
- a pencil
- paper
- and a floor you are allowed to walk on
About half an hour. Everything on that list came out of a kitchen, which is the rule these pages are written to.
Steps
- Find your pace. Walk normally and count every time your left foot lands. That is one pace, and a pace is two steps. Normal steps. Big scout steps lie.
- Measure it. Walk twenty paces in a straight line, then measure that distance any honest way — a tape, a stick, floorboards you counted. Divide by twenty. Write the number down. It is only yours.
- Tie the cord. A knot every twenty paces. Ten knots is two hundred paces. Slide your thumb along it as you walk, so you never have to hold a number in your head — which matters, because a number in your head is the first thing to go somewhere new.
- Walk a route in legs. Door to corner, corner to tree, tree to gate. Knot and write the count at every stop. Do not save them all until the end.
- Take a bearing at every stop — by the sun, by a compass, or by something that cannot move: a chimney, a mast, a hill.
- Draw it. One pace equals one small square, or one finger-width, or whatever you like, but the same all the way through. Each leg is a straight line of the right length in the right direction. Join them up. You have made a map of somewhere that had no map.
- Name every corner for something that happened to you there. Odji objects. Mars does it anyway.
- Walk it backwards off the same cord and see whether you come out where you went in. That is the whole test, and it is the one that keeps people alive in the gold.