"François will trail you," declared the Bird.
"He may do that," admitted Wolverine, "but he'll not find the Eating. Has he a scent-nose of the Woods to see it through many covers of snow?"
"This is just lovely!" piped Jack, hopping about in the dough; "it's like the mud at White Clay River. Butter!" he screamed in delight, perching on the edge of a wooden firkin, off which his friend had knocked the top. "I just love this stuff--it puts a gloss on one's feathers. We are having our revenge, aren't we, old Plaster-coat?"
"I am--Whe-e-e-cugh!" cried the fat little desperado, coughing much flour from his clogged lungs.
"I say, Hunchback, wouldn't you like to be a Man, and have all these things to eat, without the eternal worry of stealing them? I should--I'd be eating butter all the time;" and Jack drove his beak with great rapidity into the firkin's yellow contents.
"I'll return in a minute after I've cached this," said Wolverine, as he backed out of the Shack dragging a big piece of bacon.
"Oh, my strong Friend of much Brain, please cache this wooden-thing of Yellow-eating for me," pleaded Jay, when Carcajou reappeared. "By the Year of Famine! but it's delicious--it must be great for a Singer's throat. Did I ever tell you how I was sold once at Wapiscaw over a bit of butter?"
"No, my guzzling Friend--nor would you now, if you didn't want me to do a favour," grunted the industrious toiler, rolling Whisky-Jack's tub of butter off into the Forest.
"Well, it was this way--I saw a cake of this Yellow-eating in the Factor's Shack; you know the square holes they leave for light--it was in one of those. I swooped down and tried to drive my beak into it--"
"Like the hot pork," interrupted the tub-roller.