When I was growing up in Haiti, we kids used to read the Boy Scout magazines my grandparents sent us, poured over the Boy Scout manuals and learned all the types of knots, communication methods such as sign language, Braille, Morse Code, flags, etc., built huts and made bows and arrows, learned to read wild animals tracks.
I was all excited about attending actual Boy Scout meetings when we visited the US when I was nine. To my horror, I had to attend a GIRL Brownie Scout meeting, which consisted of sitting around someone's living room in the suburbs, wearing an ugly SKIRT, eating cookies, hearing minutes being read.
I never went back, I was so disillusioned and disgusted. I thought it was because I was forced to attend a Brownies meeting for GIRLS, but when I talked to boys who went to scout meetings and camps it wasn't much better. It was more like a "club" where you got together and had snacks.
Later, I read the book "The Tracker," written by a Tom Brown, a boy trained by the grandfather of his Apache friend to be an Apache tracker, and when he grew up had his own "Boy Scouts" troops, trained by him to be silent, accurate trackers of anything..even ANTS, over ROCK, even in the DARK. They had deadly accuracy with handmade Native Indian weapons, and were often dispatched to to find missing people, or take care of dangerous renegade wild dog packs.
https://www.amazon.com/Tracker-True-Story-Tom-Brown/dp/0425101339/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1482889332&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=the+tracker+tom+brown
