MUDDY CREEK TWP - The squeaking of cedar rubbing cedar stopped and the four men watched the only one standing puff breaths into his collection of cattail down.

Jeff Yeckle, 33, of Dormont hoped he was breathing life onto smoking tinder bundle, which came from friction from a whittled spindle and two wooden blocks.

A few more breaths later, his shoulders sagged and the concentrated look on his face turned to disappointment.

"It burned out," he said turning away from his tinder bundle and setting back to work.

Wildlife survival instructor Yeckle, who doubles as a guitar instructor in Pittsburgh, demonstrated to a college graduate student, a hospital employee, and a Boy Scout leader and his son how to master the ancient art of making a fire without matches and conquer priority three.

In Yeckle's classes, like the one Saturday at Moraine State Park's Davis Hollow Outdoor Center, it's all about priorities.

Staying alive when lost or stranded means thinking and acting quickly, and in one- or two-day classes he summarizes the knowledge he learned from weeks of training at the Tom Brown Jr. Tracker School, a school with classes across the country teaching wildlife survival.

Yeckle started studying outdoor survival with a few classes at Community College of Allegheny County before he went to New Jersey and the tracker school.

In the past year, he's started teaching classes at parks. Most classes have about 10 people from the regional area. Some of the people are women in their 20s, while others are older men.

Saturday's four-person class was composed of men from the Pittsburgh area, many of whom learned about the class from an e-mail list from Venture Outdoors.

The Pittsburgh nonprofit group coordinates educational events and outdoor activities in parks.Yeckle said the outdoors makes him feel closer to "the Creator." But the information he's learned is also practical."When that realization sets in that you don't know where you are and your friends are far away, you start to panic," he said.The results can be disastrous. Instead, he teaches the students he has in classes every few weeks to remember the sacred order of priorities and start acting.Priority one: shelter. Yeckle said that in adverse weather a person would only survive three to four hours without shelter.The men walked down the North Country Trail into the woods a hundred yards to learn how to make the contraption to prevent hypothermia and protect them from the elements.At a small clearing, they spend an hour dodging the hanging inchworms, hunting out appropriately sized limbs and twigs, and piling layers of leaves on the shelter.First, Mike and Matt Cresenta of Neville Island searched out a ridgepole, a limb that should measure a foot taller than the hand stretched above the head.Matt Cresenta, 19, brought his father to the class as a Father's Day present. Mike Cresenta has been camping for 40 years and a scout leader for 10.The two laid the limb in the center of a tree trunk split to make a Y. Next, all set out for ribbing - branches rested perpendicular to the ridgepole.Ryan Dugina, a hospital employee from Brookline, came to the class to learn what he would do if he were to get lost in the woods. He goes camping with his mother's fiancé as often as he can, he said.His first attempts at ribbing were too long, but he soon started finding branches that would enclose a tent-shaped area."Small is beautiful," Yeckle explained. The less air inside, the warmer and the better.

With the skeleton built, everyone started scraping the ground for handfuls of dropped leaves to pile on the shelter as insulation.John Turner, a Shadyside resident who studies operational research at Carnegie Mellon University, asked about the amount of insulation needed.To survive where the nights cool to 30 degrees, the shelter needs to have enough insulating debris. That amount can be measured by using the length of the arm from the wrist to shoulder, Yeckle said.When the group finished, one by one, they walked in the crevice created between the tree trunk and the first rib and stretched out inside.It's dark, proof they made a good shelter, and smells of earth, but was not uncomfortable."This is easier to build than a sandcastle," Dugina said.Had they not had their watches, they could know it was time for lunch by a high sun and their hunger, but most had brought a survival backpack with something to tell time by.Priority two: water. Yeckle gave a lecture on food, which is priority four, and water.Drawing on marker board as the students sat on the back porch of the outdoor center, he explained how to create a solar still by draping a clear plastic sheet over a hole in the ground. Below the bevel of the plastic, he told the students, a container is placed with a plastic tube reaching from the cup up to the lip of the hole. The tube acts as a straw to drink the water from the container after it condenses on the plastic and rolls into the container.He also talked about the big four edible plants: grasses, cattails, pine trees and acorns, describing which parts are best in which season.Cattails, what he calls "a wilderness supermarket," also have medicinal properties and are used in the fire starting.It's the first time Yeckle has taught anyone to make a fire with just wood and string.

With a sharp knife, everyone whittles a cedar block into a round spindle and points the ends. In two other blocks, they create depressions to fit the points in.Then begins the time-taking process of creating friction. The spindle is looped through a bow, a curved stick with a high-tension string tied from end to end, and placed in the grooves of the two blocks.Moving the bow to and fro while on bended knee, the spindle moves around, heating the ends and working away at the blocks.Turner, the most successful in the class at getting groves brandished into the blocks, said it's difficult to keep enough pressure on the top block to keep the spindle straight.The class spends the majority of the afternoon talking about American Indian movies and a new miniseries about the Wild West over the creak of cedar and the sighs of frustration when the spindle twists out of the bow loop.Then Yeckle, who alternately has been helping students and working at his pre-made fire kit, announced to the students he has another smoking tinder bundle.They stop.Bows drop.Spindles roll.And the simple flash of fire creates awe.