“But how can you tell when you’re ten or twenty feet away from it?” Tom stopped to ask.
“The carrion crows can tell at almost any distance,” Cal returned, “and if it were even tainted, they’d be quarreling over it.”
Tom was not satisfied, and so he climbed the tree to inspect. Sliding down again, he gave judgment:
“Why, the thing’s as black as ink and as hard as the bark of a white oak tree. It’s dried beef—or dried venison, rather.”
“You’re mistaken, Tom,” said Larry. “It is sun-crusted, as Cal said, but that’s very different. Inside it is probably as juicy as a steak from a stall-fed ox.”
“What do you mean by ‘sun-crusted,’” asked Dick.
“Oh, I see,” Larry answered. “You and Tom are not familiar with our way of preserving meat in emergencies. When we are out hunting and have a joint of fresh red meat that we want to keep fresh, we don’t salt it or smoke it or do anything of that sort to it. We just hang it out in the very strongest sunlight we can find. In a brief while the surface of the meat is dried into a thin black crust as hard as wood, and after that it will keep for days in any cool, shady place. Flies cannot bore through the hard crust, and the air itself is shut out from the meat below the surface.”
“How long will it keep in that way?”
“How long, Cal?” asked Larry, referring the question to his brother’s larger experience.
“That depends on several things,” Cal answered. “I’ve kept meat in that way for a week or ten days, and at other times I’ve eaten my whole supply at the first meal. But I say, fellows, we’re wasting precious time. The night cometh when no man can work, and we have a good deal to do before it comes. We must find a safe anchorage for the Hunkydory and set up a camp for ourselves. In aid of that we must find fresh water, and I have an idea we’ll find that somewhere along under the line of bluffs—at some point where they trend well back from the shore with a sandy beach between. The hermit must get water from somewhere near, and there’s no sign of any around here.”