"Perhaps that will be the best way," Godfrey said. "We have nothing left but six squirrels. We finished the last piece of bread this morning and the meat last night. How had we better do these squirrels?"
"I will skin them, Godfrey, while you are seeing to the fire. Then we will spit them on a ramrod, and I will hold them in the flame."
"I think we can manage better than that," Godfrey said, and he went to the bushes and cut two sticks of a foot long with a fork at one end. He stuck these in the ground, on the opposite sides of the fire. "There," he said, "you can lay the ramrod on these forks, and all you have got to do is to give it a turn occasionally."
"How long do you suppose these things want cooking?"
"Not above five minutes, I should think. I know that a steak only takes about eight minutes before a good fire, and these little beggars are not half the thickness of a steak. They are beginning to frizzle already, and the water is just on the boil."
The squirrels were pronounced very good eating. When the meal was over Godfrey filled the kettle again and gave it to Alexis, and then, taking his gun, started down the valley. He was away three hours, and brought back twenty birds of various sorts, but for the most part small.
"No very great sport," he said as he emptied his haversack. "However, they will do for breakfast, and I may have better luck to-morrow. There are some fish in the pools, but I do not see how we are to get them. I saw one spring out of the water; it must have weighed a couple of pounds."
"You might shoot them, Godfrey, if you could find a place where the bank is pretty high so as to look down on the water."
"So I could; I did not think of that. I must try to-morrow."
"If it hadn't been for my feet," Alexis said, "we should have been down on the [Selenga] to-morrow, and we had calculated on being able to buy food at one of the villages there."