"To stretch skins on. Dinna ye know that all skins have to be stretched?" Alec tossed the board one side and reached for another.
"Don't know a thing about trapping or furs except that Dad has promised me a new fur coat when I get back," retorted Hal. "I'm painfully and sublimely ignorant, but willing to learn, and I have a hunch that there are others. Suppose you elucidate the facts by way of killing time."
"Here, here! That will do for you, Hal!" cried Upton. "Your alleged poetry is bad enough without springing anything like that. What have you been doing at that prep school—confabulating with the profs or flirting with the dictionary? Elucidate! I move, fellows, that if he springs anything more like that we throw him in the snow. I would suggest doing it anyway if his idea wasn't so good. Go to it, Alec, and tell us about fur."
"I dinna ken where to begin," protested Alec as he carefully rounded the smaller of his board to a point so that it looked much like one of the shingle boats every boy knows.
"Begin with that thing you're making—stretching board, I believe you called it," said Hal.
"That would be holding the gun by the wrong end," protested Pat. "The story all happens before one of these things is needed." Pat was himself at work on a stretching board.
"Begin with the kinds of fur, and the ways in which it is trapped, and the life of a trapper and all that sort of stuff," suggested Upton.
"Just tell us what youse do every day and how youse live all alone and de scraps youse gets inter wid de bears 'n' things, and how youse has t' foight for life, an' pass it out hot—right off de fire."
"That's the stuff, Sparrer! That's what we want," cried Hal, as everybody laughed. "Give us the story of trapping right off the griddle."
"Ye dinna find anything very hot aboot a trapper's life." Alec paused in his work to gaze reflectively into the fire. "It's mostly cold and lonesomeness and hard work. There's no fighting with the beasties worth mentioning; it's mostly fighting with storms and sometimes hunger, and a struggle with nature. I've sometimes wondered if some of the grand ladies and men, too, would be so proud and take so much pleasure in their fine furs if they knew what it has cost in suffering to man and beastie to get them. And yet I am no complaining, laddies. Ye ken that. It's a hard life, and yet there is something aboot it that gets down into a man and calls him, and he has to hit the trails and is no happy until he does.