The muddy oozing bank was alive with crawfish.  “Are you afraid of them?”  He looked at her.  “Never mind.  I forgot who I was talking to.”  Quickly, she ran and got a bucket from the wagon.

“Can you stand in the creek?”

“Sure, why not?  I’ll be wet for the rest of my life.”  He climbed down the bank.

“Dump as many as you can get in here.”  It wasn’t hard.  “Then it just needs to be tipped over a couple times to rinse and drain them.”

With that accomplished, Chace climbed back out of the creek.

“Are these dinner?” he said.  “Hope they’re worth it.”

“That’s what I don’t know.  Whether you’ll think so or not.”

Charlotte built a fire in the cabin and set water to boiling in the Dutch oven.

“I need a cow.”

“To cook crawfish?”

“For butter.  Wait,” she said suddenly.  “Maybe I still have some.”  She ran back to the wagon and rummaged in the sack of flour.  There it was, buried deep, still floating in its jar of water.  When the water boiled in the pot, she dropped the crawfish in, counting the seconds.

“Now I have to dump them out.  Well, actually, you do.”

He used her heavy folded cloths to lift the Dutch oven from the fire, then stood back outside as the boiling water splattered into gullies in the already muddy ground.  Charlotte showed him how to eat one, twisting off the head, pulling off the tail, removing the white sweet flesh with her fingers and dipping it into the melted butter.

“So good,” she said.  “Is all that taking apart too much for you?”

“On buffalo hunts the youngest ones ate slices of the raw liver while it was still steaming.  When there was hunger we ate grubs.  So no.”  He did as she had done, dipped the contents in butter and slowly put it in his mouth.

She couldn’t read his face. “What do you think?”

“Better than buffalo’s liver.  Probably more like oats would be for a horse that hadn’t ever had them before.”

She smiled.  “Are you serious?”

“It was worth it,” he said and reached for another crawfish.

<>

They decided to stay at the cabin until they got tired of being there.

“How far?”  Charlotte said.  “I can’t keep pretending forever.  I suppose I need to know the truth.”

“Not all that far.  You don’t have to think about it right now.  But we sleep outside.”

“Why?”

“There are guns and ammunition in that wagon.  And it’s better protection for the horses.”  And that other reason, she thought.