The bear was dragged into the cabin. Jack picked out a bent stick of round wood, and with an axe quickly sharpened its ends into points, making of it a "gambrel" stick, about two and a half feet long. Inserting its sharpened ends under the big tendons of the animal's hind legs, he had him ready to hang up for dressing. Meantime, another of the boys had driven another stick in between two of the upper logs of the cabin, letting its end protrude a foot or two into the cabin. Four of the boys seized the bear, which weighed not much less than two hundred pounds, and after some exertion succeeded in hanging it, head downwards, upon this stick. Then, with sharp knives, they set to work to skin it.
"Oh stop!" cried Ed. "I know a better plan than that. If you wait to skin the bear, we sha'n't get any meat to eat before morning. Treat him as a butcher treats a deer or calf. Cut him open, and give me the heart, liver and kidneys to cook, and you can skin him afterwards just as well as before. In the meantime I'll be getting supper."
The boys were much too nearly famished to dispute over any suggestion that promised to hurry meal time, so they did at once what Ed had bidden them do. They ripped the animal open, removed the viscera, detached the heart, liver and kidneys, and delivered them into Ed's hands.
Ed washed them and cut them into small bits, discarding the gristle-like linings of the heart. Then he put the whole mass into the kettle in which the beans were cooking, adding a goodly piece of the bear's fat and a pint or two of water.
"It'll be a new dish," he muttered to himself—"'bear giblets and beans'. But if I'm not mistaken nobody in this company will hesitate to eat of it."
"I say, fellows," he called out presently, "save every ounce of that fat! We'll need it for cooking purposes if ever we get anything besides bear beef to cook."
"By the way, Tom," said Jack, as he worked at the task of skinning the bear, "how did this fellow come to be prowling around our cabin?"
"He was hungry, like the rest of us," answered Tom. "The snow has cut off his customary sources of supply, so he set out, precisely as I intended to do in the morning, to find something to eat. Bears always do that when the snow is heavy. They have often gone down, in hard winters, to the Piedmont region—sometimes as far as Amelia or Powhatan county. They are searching for something to eat—corn in a crib if they can get at it, or pork in a barrel, or a robust boy if they can't get anything better. This fellow was hunting for anything he could find, and, unluckily for him, he found me, with my rifle. What a splendid gun that is, by the way, Doctor! Every shot I fired at the big beast went right through him and hurtled off into the air beyond."
"That's the nitro powder," said the Doctor.
"By which you mean—what?" asked Tom.