Lost in the Wild?

I was thrilled to hear that 12-year-old Boy Scout Michael Auberry was found safe and nearly sound after his ordeal of being lost in the wilds of North Carolina.
When I was a teenager, I was Boy Scout and one summer a group of us from Troop 7 in Woodbury went to Philmont, N.M., for a couple of weeks.
On the first or second day on the trail, my tentmate and I promptly got lost. We got separated from our group after we made camp and hiked up a hill into the woods, and got all turned around.
The sun began to set and our crack survival skills came into play. My tentmate Jack seemed focused on the idea that bears were everywhere ready to pounce on us, so he began to growl constantly as a way to keep them at bay.
The only thing I could remember is that when you are lost, you're supposed to fire three shots in the air, or make three smoky fires. We had no gun, and I must have been absent the day that they taught us how to make fire without, say, a gallon of gasoline and a book of matches.
So what we finally did was start yelling "Help! Help! Help! We're lost! We're lost! We're lost!'' (See, in threes...)
After a couple of hours in the dark we bumbled our way back to the campsite where exactly nobody was looking for us.
"We weren't going to look for you idiots until the morning,'' one of the leaders explained.
So it's a good thing our training in survival kicked in.