“Why, because the close season isn’t over yet, and the birds are protected by law.”
Tom and his cousins had nothing to say, but they wondered if Arthur Hastings always obeyed the game laws when he was alone in the woods. They had not much respect for him if he did. They could not lay claim to any great skill themselves. An October grouse on the wing would have been as safe from harm a dozen yards away from the muzzles of their double-barrels, as though he had been on the other side of the globe. They always killed their game sitting; and they would shoot at a robin as soon as they would shoot at a wild turkey.
“We didn’t come down here to go home hungry,” said Joe, pointing to a bunch of squirrels that lay at the foot of the nearest tree. “We’ll have two courses to our dinner or breakfast, or whatever you call a meal eaten at this time of day, and there’s plenty of water in the spring to wash it down with.”
The boys were all hungry, and there was nothing appetizing in looking forward to a breakfast of meat and fish. Joe Wayring and his friends did not mind it, for they had eaten many such meals during their vacation wanderings in the woods; but Tom Bigden was not much accustomed to roughing it, and he condemned the squatter almost as bitterly for walking off with the hard-boiled eggs, sardines, canned fruit and bottle of cold coffee, which he had provided as his share of the common dinner, as he did for stealing his fishing-rod.
“When Matt opens my bundle and finds all that buttered tissue paper in it I guess he’ll wonder,” said Joe, as he stepped into Roy’s canoe and picked up one of the joints of the double paddle. “He won’t know what I intended to do with it; do you, Bigden?”
After a little reflection Tom concluded that he couldn’t tell what use the buttered tissue paper could be put to, unless Joe intended to start a fire with it, and the latter went on to explain.
“We always take a supply with us as a substitute for a frying-pan,” said he. “After cleaning the fish in good shape, we wrap him up in this tissue paper, and then add three or four thicknesses of wet brown paper. In the meantime, the fellow whose business it is to see to the fire has taken care to have a nice bed of coals ready. We rake these coals apart, put in the fish, and cover him up so quickly that the paper around him has no time to get afire, and there he stays until he is done. Then we poke him out, and when the paper is taken off the skin and scales come with it; and if you relish a well-cooked fish, there he is.”