The place was habitable by sundown. While the long northern twilight
held the three of them carried up the freight that burdened the canoe,
and piled it in one corner, sacks of flour, sides of bacon and salt
pork, boxes of dried fruit, the miscellaneous articles with which a man
must supply himself when he goes into the wilderness.

That night they slept upon a meager thickness of blanket spread on the
hard floor.

In the morning Mike went to work again. He showed Thompson how to
arrange a mattress of hemlock boughs on the bed frame. It was a simple
enough makeshift, soft and springy when Thompson spread his bedding over
it. Then Mike superintended the final disposition of his supplies so
that there would be some semblance of order instead of an
indiscriminately mixed pile in which the article wanted was always at
the bottom. Incidentally he strove to impart to Thompson certain
rudimentary principles in the cooking of simple food. He illustrated the
method of mixing a batch of baking-powder bread, and how to parboil salt
pork before cooking, explained to him the otherwise mysterious
expansion of rice and beans and dried apples in boiling water, all of
which Breyette was shrewd enough to realize that Thompson knew nothing
about. He had a ready ear for instructions but a poor understanding of
these matters. So Mike reiterated out of his experience of camp cooking,
and Thompson tried to remember.

Meanwhile, MacDonald, who had vanished into the woods with a rifle in
his hand at daybreak, came back about noon with a deer's carcass slung
on his sturdy back. This, after it was skinned, the two breeds cut into
pieces the thickness of a man's wrist and as long as they could make