_All Night Work_
The bear was dragged into the cabin. Jack picked out a bent stick of
round wood, and with an axe quickly sharpened its ends into points,
making of it a "gambrel" stick, about two and a half feet long.
Inserting its sharpened ends under the big tendons of the animal's hind
legs, he had him ready to hang up for dressing. Meantime, another of the
boys had driven another stick in between two of the upper logs of the
cabin, letting its end protrude a foot or two into the cabin. Four of
the boys seized the bear, which weighed not much less than two hundred
pounds, and after some exertion succeeded in hanging it, head downwards,
upon this stick. Then, with sharp knives, they set to work to skin it.
"Oh stop!" cried Ed. "I know a better plan than that. If you wait to
skin the bear, we sha'n't get any meat to eat before morning. Treat him
as a butcher treats a deer or calf. Cut him open, and give me the
heart, liver and kidneys to cook, and you can skin him afterwards just
as well as before. In the meantime I'll be getting supper."
The boys were much too nearly famished to dispute over any suggestion
that promised to hurry meal time, so they did at once what Ed had bidden
them do. They ripped the animal open, removed the viscera, detached the
heart, liver and kidneys, and delivered them into Ed's hands.
Ed washed them and cut them into small bits, discarding the gristle-like
linings of the heart. Then he put the whole mass into the kettle in
which the beans were cooking, adding a goodly piece of the bear's fat
and a pint or two of water.
"It'll be a new dish," he muttered to himself--"'bear giblets and
beans'. But if I'm not mistaken nobody in this company will hesitate to
eat of it."
"I say, fellows," he called out presently, "save every ounce of that
fat! We'll need it for cooking purposes if ever we get anything besides
bear beef to cook."
"By the way, Tom," said Jack, as he worked at the task of skinning the
bear, "how did this fellow come to be prowling around our cabin?"
"He was hungry, like the rest of us," answered Tom. "The snow has cut
off his customary sources of supply, so he set out, precisely as I
intended to do in the morning, to find something to eat. Bears always do
that when the snow is heavy. They have often gone down, in hard winters,
to the Piedmont region--sometimes as far as Amelia or Powhatan county.
They are searching for something to eat--corn in a crib if they can get
at it, or pork in a barrel, or a robust boy if they can't get anything
better. This fellow was hunting for anything he could find, and,
unluckily for him, he found me, with my rifle. What a splendid gun that
is, by the way, Doctor! Every shot I fired at the big beast went right
through him and hurtled off into the air beyond."
"That's the nitro powder," said the Doctor.
"By which you mean--what?" asked Tom.
"Why, nitro powder is smokeless powder. It is mainly composed of
nitro-glycerine, and it has an explosive force many times greater than
that of ordinary gunpowder. That is what gives to the guns that are
loaded with it so much greater a range than ordinary guns have. You see,
it starts the bullet with a vastly greater velocity than that of a
bullet propelled by the explosion of ordinary gunpowder, and so the
missile goes very much faster, with very much more force, and in a much
straighter line, and the gun is more accurate and greatly deadlier in
its aim."
"Well, now I want to say," interrupted Ed, "that I've got a supper ready
which will go to the spot with a much surer aim than any bullet ever did
in the world."
The boys responded instantly, as a matter of course. They were literally
starving, or so nearly so, that they afterwards confessed that they had
had great difficulty in resisting the temptation, while skinning the
bear, to cut off mouthfuls of the meat and consume it raw.
There was, of course, no criticism, therefore, upon Ed's new dish of
"bear giblets and beans," and not until the last morsel of it was
consumed, did any boy in the party relinquish his assiduous attention to
it.
"Now," said Jack, "we can go to work again. To-morrow, we'll dig the
house out of the snowdrift any how."
"Yes," said Tom, "and as I needn't go hunting now, I'll help in that.
The snow has settled a good deal by its own weight now and it will
settle a good deal more before morning."
"Why?" asked Ed.
"Because it is raining," said Tom, "and nothing settles snow like a
drizzling rain."
"It is now two o'clock," said Jack, "and I for one am going to bed."
"Better sit up for half an hour longer," said the Doctor.
"Why?" asked Jack.
"Because our stomachs are full. They have been seriously weakened by
several days of starvation, and are apt to do their work rather badly
for a time. Let's give them a chance."
"But, Doctor," said Jack, "I have noticed that all the animals lie down
and sleep as soon as they have fed heartily. Why isn't it a good thing
for men to do the same thing? Men are after all, animals on one side of
their nature."
"Yes, I know," said the Doctor, "and I have known physicians to argue in
that way in favor of late suppers. But experience hardly bears out the
argument. A man may sleep well on a heavy meal, but often he gets up
with a bad taste in his mouth and with a morbid craving for food, which
means that he hasn't properly assimilated the food that he has already
eaten."
"What do you mean by 'assimilating' food?" asked Tom, adding: "I'm
afraid you'll think me very ignorant."
"Not at all," replied the Doctor. "Most people don't understand that.
You see, there are two distinct processes by which we turn food to
account in building up our bodies, making strength and heat, and
generally carrying on the processes of life. One of those processes is
digestion, and the other assimilation. Digestion simply reduces the food
which we have eaten to a condition in which it can be assimilated. By
assimilation certain organs of the body take up the food thus prepared
for them, convert it into blood and send it through the system to
nourish it. In the passage of the blood through the arteries and veins,
it leaves deposits of muscle here, fat there, bone in another place, and
so on. This is a very rude statement of the matter, but it is sufficient
to show you what I mean, at least in a general way. Very well. It does a
man no good whatever to digest his food if he doesn't assimilate it. No
matter how perfectly the stomach does its work, the body is not
nourished unless the organs charged with the function of assimilating
the digested food do theirs also. Once, in a hospital, I saw a little
baby die of actual starvation, although it had an abundance of food, and
digested it perfectly. It simply could not assimilate."
"But what has that to do with our going to bed at two o'clock in the
morning?" asked Jack, who was disposed to be a trifle cross as the
result of the long starvation and strain.
"Only this," answered the Doctor, "that unless we give our weakened
stomachs a little chance to digest our food properly before we go to
sleep, the process of assimilation will be very imperfectly performed
and we shall not be as perfectly nourished as we need to be. Still, I
think we might safely go to bed now," added the Doctor, "as the half
hour is gone, and it is now two thirty"--looking at his watch.
With that the exhausted company prepared for bed. Jim Chenowith was the
first to approach the bunks, under which the earthen floor was a little
lower than in the rest of the cabin. As he did so, having slipped off
his boots, Jim called out:
"Hello! What's this? I say, fellows, we have a creek here under our
beds!"
A hasty examination confirmed his statement. There was a vigorous stream
of water running directly under the bunks, and worse still, as an
exploration with torches soon revealed, the water was not only running
in under the lower logs of the hut, but was also pouring through every
opening it could find in the chinking of the walls above, and streaming
into the bunks.
The Doctor hastily went outside to study conditions and, returning,
said:
"There's a terrific rain on, boys, and the thermometer stands at fifty.
So the snow is melting rapidly, and the two things together--the rain
and the melting snowdrift--are flooding us."
Tired and sleepy as Jack was, he rose instantly to the occasion.
"There's no sleep for us to-night, boys!" he said. "We must go to work
at once and dig the house out of the snowdrift. Get some fatwood torches
ready and let's go to work."
The boys responded quickly, and presently all of them except Ed, whom
the Doctor forbade to do any further work that involved strenuous
physical exertion, were engaged in shoveling the snow away from the
house and opening a passageway around it fully eight feet wide.
By daylight this was accomplished. It put an end to the inflow of water
through the chinking of the upper logs; but, as Tom expressed it, there
was still "a young river" flowing into the house, from the bottom of the
snow bank, underneath the lower logs of the hut. Not only was all the
warm rain flowing through the snow bank, but in its passage it was
dissolving a great deal of the snow, and so the volume of water flowing
out at the bottom and running into the house was quite double that which
the rain itself would have supplied.
"We ought to have made a bank of earth around the lower part of the
cabin," said the Doctor, after studying the situation for a time.
"True," said Jack, "but we had no tools with which to do it. Neither
have we any now. So I don't see what is to be done."
"I do!" said Tom, the alert of mind. "I do, and it is perfectly simple."
"What's your idea, Tom?" asked Jack.
"Why, to make the snow protect us against itself."
"But how?"
"Why, by building a little snow bank between the big snow bank and the
house, hammering it into solid ice, with our mauls, and in that way
making a ditch that will carry off the water around the end of the house
and down over the cliff."
"That's a superb idea, Tom," said Jack, "and we'll get to work at it at
once. I'd give the proceeds of all my winter's work for a head half as
good as yours, Tom."
"Oh, pshaw!" said Tom. "My head isn't of much account. It is only that I
look straight at things and try to use common sense."
"Yes," said the Doctor, "and that is what we call 'genius' in science.
It is the men who 'look straight at things and try to use common sense'
who do the great things in science. Darwin did that, and so did Asa
Gray, and Edison, and Agassiz, and all the rest of them. Scientific
genius is nothing in the world but common sense, reinforced by a habit
of observation."
But there was no further time for talk. The boys quickly built a low
snow embankment between their house and the great snowdrift, and beat it
down with their mauls, into a condition of solid ice. With this barrier
to aid them they succeeded in compelling the water from the rain and the
melting snow to flow in a sort of ditch around their house, and to cease
flowing through it.
Inside, however, the condition of things was deplorable. The earthen
floor under the bunks was a mud hole. The broom straw that constituted
the beds was soaking wet, and the task of drying it promised to be no
easy one.
"We've simply got to sleep on hard clapboards for two or three nights,"
said Ed.
"Well, what of that?" asked Tom, "I've often slept on much harder beds
than clapboards make."
"For example?" asked Jim.
"Well, I've slept on big rocks for one thing."
"Why did you do that? Why didn't you sleep on the softer ground?"
"Because the softer ground was much too soft, being mud. I've slept on
two rails placed about eight inches apart, with one end stuck into a
fence so as to keep me out of the mud, and a pretty good bed rails make.
Finally, I have slept on the worst bed there is in the world."
"What is that?"
"Why, a pile of pebbles. That's the very worst there is, but you can
sleep on it, if you've got to. Now, let's have some breakfast, Ed, and
after devouring a proper quantity of bear steak, I'll show you fellows
how a healthy fellow who has worked all night can sleep on clapboards in
spite of the daylight that the Doctor's rag windows are letting in, now
that we've shoveled the snow away from them."
Ed had breakfast already well under way. It was to consist solely of
bear steak and coffee, for coffee was their one supply which was not
exhausted, and during the starving time they would hardly have endured
their hunger but for that resource.
"But," said Jack, as they ate their breakfast, "what are we going to do
with that bear meat? It won't keep long in this soft weather. By the
way, Jim, throw another stick on the fire. It's cold."
"So it is," said the Doctor, who had just come in after a consultation
with his scientific instruments. "The thermometer has sunk twenty
degrees within the last hour, and stands now at two degrees below
freezing. It will go much lower, for the barometer is rising and the
wind has shifted to the northwest. We're in for a trip to the Arctic
regions without doing any traveling to get there."
"Let's hang the bear out of doors, then," said Jack. "It will freeze
there."
"Yes, and every carnivorous animal in these woods will come and eat for
us," said Tom, whose authority on the habits of wild creatures was
accepted by all the boys as final.
"Besides," said the Doctor, "it isn't necessary. Our bear will freeze
hanging just where he is, by the door there."
With that he arose, went outside, and brought in a thermometer, which he
pinned to the bear's carcass.
"We're down to twenty-six degrees outside now," he said, "and it is
growing steadily colder." Then, after waiting for five minutes, he
consulted the thermometer that he had hung upon the bear, and announced:
"It stands at thirty-three degrees--fruit-house temperature."
"What do you mean by 'fruit-house temperature?'" asked Tom.
"Why, don't you know? The houses in which fresh fruits of the summer are
preserved for winter use are kept always at a temperature of
thirty-three degrees. If the temperature were higher than that, the
fruits would ferment and decay. If it were a single degree lower they
would freeze--for thirty-two degrees is the freezing point. But at a
temperature of thirty-three degrees nothing decays and nothing freezes.
So they keep the fruit houses always at that temperature, and they keep
fresh strawberries and peaches and all the rest of the fruits all winter
in nearly as good condition as when they were picked."
"Well, what do they do with a boy," asked Tom, "who has worked all night
and is mightily sleepy, except let him go to bed, even if it is the
usual time for going to work, instead? Good morning, and pleasant dreams
to all of you."
With that Tom rolled himself up in his blanket and lay down upon the
clapboard flooring of his bed, taking a stick of wood with him for a
pillow. The rest immediately followed his example and in spite of
adverse conditions, they were all presently sound asleep.