“I prefer to make ’em myself,” answered Roy, “just as the Indians make ’em in the woods.”
Philip smiled and Norman and Paul looked somewhat disappointed but neither made objection.
“Here’s my flour,” explained Roy who had already rolled up his sweater sleeves and produced an old flour bag with a few pounds of flour in the bottom of it. “I mixed the baking powder with the flour before we left camp so as to save time,” he explained.
“Seems to me we’ve got all night,” interrupted Norman. “They don’t do that to save time—you’re mixed. They do that to save carrying the baking powder in a separate package.”
“Anyway,” retorted Roy, “it’s the way real trappers do.”
He had rolled the sides of the sack down to make a kind of receptacle at the bottom of which lay his flour. Then with a piece of wood he pried off the top of the tea kettle and was about to pour some boiling water onto the flour when Philip with a grunt stopped him.
“Non,” exclaimed the Indian. “You spoil him.”
Over Roy’s feeble protest the Indian scooped up snow and deposited it in the boiling water until the fluid was somewhat cooler. Then he passed the kettle to the waiting Roy who began to mix his Indian bread. But had Philip allowed Roy to proceed in his generous application of water, his proposed bannocks would have resulted in flour paste. In the end, because Roy had to get his pork ready, the volunteer cook permitted Philip to finish the fashioning of a bannock as big as the frying pan,—the only cooking utensil that Roy had thought necessary to bring with them.
“Now,” exclaimed Roy, as he deposited a generous piece of salt pork in the frying pan, “I’ll show you how the hungry trapper makes a supper fit for a king.”
As the pork began to sizzle in the pan those who were eagerly watching the amateur cook saw the piece separating into thin sections.