“Well, there’s one last resort, if we _have_ to come to it!” remarked Bluff, with an assumed dejected air, as he rubbed his chin between his thumb and forefinger.
Something about his manner caused Jerry to look at him in horror.
“Now, I can guess what you’re hinting at, and I tell you right straight from the shoulder I never could be hired to eat wolf, not if I was actually starving.”
“Oh, well, I can’t say I’m really hankering after the dish myself,” Bluff admitted; “but you never can tell what you may have to come to. Some people don’t like to eat crow, but it’s been found they’re not so _very_ bad, after all. It might turn out the same way with wolf.”
“Are you going to help me get that jacket off the rascal?” demanded Jerry.
“Sure I will!” he was told. “You’d make a sorry mess of the job, I reckon; and if the thing’s worth saving at all it ought to be taken the right way. I don’t say I could do it as well as Frank, who’s had a heap more experience; but you’ll get the pelt, Jerry, never fear.”
“Then the sooner we finish the job the better,” said the other boy; “because it strikes me we had better be leaving here and heading for home as soon as we can make it. I only hope we don’t get lost, and that we strike camp in time for the middle-of-the-day feed.”
Both were speedily engaged in the task of taking off the skin of the slain wolf. Bluff did the main part of the work, but the other was handy at times in various ways.
“I don’t remember hearing another howl the whole night through; did you, Bluff?” Jerry presently asked, when the skin had been rolled up in as compact a bundle as possible.
“And now, do we make a start for home?” demanded Jerry anxiously. “I hope you’ve got your bearings all correct.”
“Leave that for me,” the other boy replied; “but before we quit this region for good I’d like to take a turn over yonder.” And he pointed in a quarter which his chum knew took in the region where they had had the meeting with Bill Nackerson and his two friends, after bringing down the big moose.
“Yes, we ought to see what became of our moose, hadn’t we?” Jerry admitted.
“That’s right, for I’d like to get hold of those splendid horns. But there’s another thing I want to find out.”