By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.”
I said the clouds cleared late that afternoon, but it was still raining when, after dinner, I brought a box from the woodshed to the front porch for Burroughs to skin the woodchuck. Here we sat down together, the flabby, flaccid marmot between us, the whole October afternoon our own.
Burroughs pulled a rudimentary whetstone out of his coat pocket and touched up the blade of his knife—of his spirit, too, running his thumb along the blade of every faculty as he settled to the skinning, his shining eyes, his vibrant voice, his eager movements, all showing how razor-keen an edge the old man was still capable of taking. He got hold of a forefoot of the ’chuck and started to talk on the flight of birds, reviewing the various stages of the controversy on the soaring of hawks that he had been carrying on in the press, when, suddenly dropping his knife, he disappeared through the door and returned in a minute with a letter from some scientist, whose argument, as I remember it, was wholly at variance with Burroughs’s theory, but which closed with a strange word, a word the old man had never seen before and could not find in his dictionary. It was some aeronautical term, I think. Handing me the letter, his finger, as well as his eyes, fastened to that stranger from beyond the dictionary, he said:
“That chap doesn’t know much about soaring hawks; but there’s a new word. See that! He knows a heap more than I do about the English language.”
He sat down to the skinning again. No cut had yet been made, nor ever would be made, apparently, unless he used the back of his blade, for it was plain that Burroughs kept that old whetstone for his wits only. He sawed away and talked as if inspired. I held the other forefoot, a short, broad foot, like a side-hill gouger’s, on the oldest, toughest ’chuck in the Catskills.
“Do you know what I am going to do?” he asked, switching the conversation into the hard-working knife. “I’m going to pickle this old rascal and send him by you to your family. I want you all to have a dish of ‘Roxbury Lamb.’”
“But we have our own Hingham Lamb out on Mullein Hill,” I suggested cautiously. “And I don’t like to rob you this way.”
“No robbery at all. Besides, these are a better breed than yours in Hingham.”
“But my folks don’t seem very fond of ’em,” I protested. “They cook with a rank odor.”
“Oh, you don’t know how to prepare them,” he answered. “Let me show you a trick,” and deftly cutting in between the neck and the shoulder, he took out the thyroid glands.