Part 17

When your deer is fresh, you will enjoy greatly a dish of liver and bacon. Only the liver you will discover to be a great deal tenderer and more delicate than any calf's liver you ever ate. There is this difference: a deer's liver should be parboiled in order to get rid of a green bitter scum that will rise to the surface and which you must skim off.

Next in order is the "back strap" and tenderloin, which is always tender, even when fresh. The hams should be kept at least five days. Deer-steak, to my notion, is best broiled, though occasionally it is pleasant by way of variety to fry it. In that case a brown gravy is made by thoroughly heating flour in the grease, and then stirring in water. Deer-steak threaded on switches and "barbecued" over the coals is delicious. The outside will be a little blackened, but all the juices will be retained. To enjoy this to the utmost you should take it in your fingers and GNAW. The only permissible implement is your hunting-knife. Do not forget to peel and char slightly the switches on which you thread the meat, otherwise they will impart their fresh-wood taste.

By this time the ribs are in condition. Cut little slits between them, and through the slits thread in and out long strips of bacon. Cut other little gashes, and fill these gashes with onions chopped very fine. Suspend the ribs across two stones between which you have allowed a fire to die down to coals.

There remain now the hams, shoulders, and heart. The two former furnish steaks. The latter you will make into a "bouillon." Here inserts itself quite naturally the philosophy of boiling meat. It may be stated in a paragraph.

If you want boiled meat, put it in hot water. That sets the juices. If you want soup, put it in cold water and bring to a boil. That sets free the juices. Remember this.

Now you start your bouillon cold. Into a kettle of water put your deer hearts, or your fish, a chunk of pork, and some salt. Bring to a boil. Next drop in quartered potatoes, several small whole onions, a half cupful of rice, a can of tomatoes--if you have any. Boil slowly for an hour or so--until things pierce easily under the fork. Add several chunks of bread and a little flour for thickening. Boil down to about a chowder consistency, and serve hot. It is all you will need for that meal; and you will eat of it until there is no more.

I am supposing throughout that you know enough to use salt and pepper when needed.

So much for your deer. The grouse you can split and fry, in which case the brown gravy described for the fried deer-steak is just the thing. Or you can boil him. If you do that, put him into hot water, boil slowly, skim frequently, and add dumplings mixed of flour, baking-powder, and a little lard. Or you can roast him in your Dutch oven with your ducks.

Perhaps it might be well here to explain the Dutch oven. It is a heavy iron kettle with little legs and an iron cover. The theory of it is that coals go among the little legs and on top of the iron cover. This heats the inside, and so cooking results. That, you will observe, is the theory.

In practice you will have to remember a good many things. In the first place, while other affairs are preparing, lay the cover on the fire to heat it through; but not on too hot a place nor too long, lest it warp and so fit loosely. Also the oven itself is to be heated through, and well greased. Your first baking will undoubtedly be burned on the bottom. It is almost impossible without many trials to understand just how little heat suffices underneath. Sometimes it seems that the warmed earth where the fire has been is enough. And on top you do not want a bonfire. A nice even heat, and patience, are the proper ingredients. Nor drop into the error of letting your bread chill, and so fall to unpalatable heaviness. Probably for some time you will alternate between the extremes of heavy crusts with doughy insides, and white weighty boiler-plate with no distinguishable crusts at all. Above all, do not lift the lid too often for the sake of taking a look. Have faith.

There are other ways of baking bread. In the North Country forests, where you carry everything on your back, you will do it in the frying-pan. The mixture should be a rather thick batter or a rather thin dough. It is turned into the frying-pan and baked first on one side, then on the other, the pan being propped on edge facing the fire. The whole secret of success is first to set your pan horizontal and about three feet from the fire in order that the mixture may be thoroughly warmed--not heated--before the pan is propped on edge. Still another way of baking is in a reflector oven of tin. This is highly satisfactory, provided the oven is built on the scientific angles to throw the heat evenly on all parts of the bread-pan and equally on top and bottom. It is not so easy as you might imagine to get a good one made. These reflectors are all right for a permanent camp, but too fragile for transportation on pack-animals.

As for bread, try it unleavened once in a while by way of change. It is really very good,--just salt, water, flour, and a very little sugar. For those who like their bread "all crust," it is especially toothsome. The usual camp bread that I have found the most successful has been in the proportion of two cups of flour to a teaspoonful of salt, one of sugar, and three of baking-powder. Sugar or cinnamon sprinkled on top is sometimes pleasant. Test by thrusting a splinter into the loaf. If dough adheres to the wood, the bread is not done. Biscuits are made by using twice as much baking-powder and about two tablespoonfuls of lard for shortening. They bake much more quickly than the bread. Johnny-cake you mix of corn-meal three cups, flour one cup, sugar four spoonfuls, salt one spoonful, baking-powder four spoonfuls, and lard twice as much as for biscuits. It also is good, very good.

The flapjack is first cousin to bread, very palatable, and extremely indigestible when made of flour, as is ordinarily done. However, the self-raising buckwheat flour makes an excellent flapjack, which is likewise good for your insides. The batter is rather thin, is poured into the piping hot greased pan, "flipped" when brown on one side, and eaten with larrupy-dope or brown gravy.

When you come to consider potatoes and beans and onions and such matters, remember one thing: that in the higher altitudes water boils at a low temperature, and that therefore you must not expect your boiled food to cook very rapidly. In fact, you'd better leave beans at home. We did. Potatoes you can sometimes tease along by quartering them.

Rolled oats are better than oatmeal. Put them in plenty of water and boil down to the desired consistency. In lack of cream you will probably want it rather soft.

Put your coffee into cold water, bring to a boil, let boil for about two minutes, and immediately set off. Settle by letting a half cup of cold water flow slowly into the pot from the height of a foot or so. If your utensils are clean, you will surely have good coffee by this simple method. Of course you will never boil your tea.

The sun was nearly down when we raised our long yell. The cow-puncher promptly responded. We ate. Then we smoked. Then we basely left all our dishes until the morrow, and followed our cow-puncher to his log cabin, where we were to spend the evening.

By now it was dark, and a bitter cold swooped down from the mountains. We built a fire in a huge stone fireplace and sat around in the flickering light telling ghost-stories to one another. The place was rudely furnished, with only a hard earthen floor, and chairs hewn by the axe. Rifles, spurs, bits, revolvers, branding-irons in turn caught the light and vanished in the shadow. The skin of a bear looked at us from hollow eye-sockets in which there were no eyes. We talked of the Long Trail. Outside the wind, rising, howled through the shakes of the roof.

Camp-lingo for any kind of syrup.

ON THE WIND AT NIGHT

The winds were indeed abroad that night. They rattled our cabin, they shrieked in our eaves, they puffed down our chimney, scattering the ashes and leaving in the room a balloon of smoke as though a shell had burst. When we opened the door and stepped out, after our good-nights had been said, it caught at our hats and garments as though it had been lying in wait for us.

To our eyes, fire-dazzled, the night seemed very dark. There would be a moon later, but at present even the stars seemed only so many pinpoints of dull metal, lustreless, without illumination. We felt our way to camp, conscious of the softness of grasses, the uncertainty of stones.

At camp the remains of the fire crouched beneath the rating of the storm. Its embers glowed sullen and red, alternately glaring with a half-formed resolution to rebel, and dying to a sulky resignation. Once a feeble flame sprang up for an instant, but was immediately pounced on and beaten flat as though by a vigilant antagonist.

We, stumbling, gathered again our tumbled blankets. Across the brow of the knoll lay a huge pine trunk. In its shelter we respread our bedding, and there, standing, dressed for the night. The power of the wind tugged at our loose garments, hoping for spoil. A towel, shaken by accident from the interior of a sweater, departed white-winged, like a bird, into the outer blackness. We found it next day caught in the bushes several hundred yards distant. Our voices as we shouted were snatched from our lips and hurled lavishly into space. The very breath of our bodies seemed driven back, so that as we faced the elements, we breathed in gasps, with difficulty.

Then we dropped down into our blankets.

At once the prostrate tree-trunk gave us its protection. We lay in a little back-wash of the racing winds, still as a night in June. Over us roared the battle. We felt like sharpshooters in the trenches; as though, were we to raise our heads, at that instant we should enter a zone of danger. So we lay quietly on our backs and stared at the heavens.

The first impression thence given was of stars sailing serene and unaffected, remote from the turbulence of what until this instant had seemed to fill the universe. They were as always, just as we should see them when the evening was warm and the tree-toads chirped clearly audible at half a mile. The importance of the tempest shrank. Then below them next we noticed the mountains; they too were serene and calm.

Immediately it was as though the storm were an hallucination; something not objective; something real, but within the soul of him who looked upon it. It claimed sudden kinship with those blackest days when nevertheless the sun, the mere external unimportant sun, shines with superlative brilliancy. Emotions of a power to shake the foundations of life seemed vaguely to stir in answer to these their hollow symbols. For after all, we were contented at heart and tranquil in mind, and this was but the outer gorgeous show of an intense emotional experience we did not at the moment prove. Our nerves responded to it automatically. We became excited, keyed to a high tension, and so lay rigid on our backs, as though fighting out the battles of our souls.