“Nothing, I hope,” I answered.

He worked in silence for a while. Then he said, “In that case, why are we scraping off the hair?”

“Because, if things go wrong, we may have to eat this deerskin.”

He laughed. “You are doing it to me again.”

“Didn’t you ever hear of starving men eating their shoes?”

“Yes, but we’re not starving.”

“I hope that we never will be. But if it comes to that, rawhide is very good food, although mighty hard to chew. On the other hand, it will do no good to eat your shoes, according to Indian Pete, for the process of tanning destroys all the food value. But a piece of natural hide such as this is as high in protein as the meat it covered.”

“You couldn’t get a tooth into it,” Tim said.

“We would cut it into small pieces and boil it as long as we could,” I said. “If we couldn’t do that, we’d take even smaller pieces and chew them until our jaws got tired, and then swallow them whole.”

“In that case, why chew?” he asked. “Why not just gulp them down?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “Maybe it’s because the chewing would help relieve our hunger pangs, or perhaps there is something in our saliva that benefits the food.”

“Go away,” he said. “You’re making me ill.”

Our meal that day was to be a fish chowder I was making from a small northern pike Tim had found on his night line. These skinny, eel-like fish are very bony and have a strong flavor. But they’re fat and greasy, which was why I had used even the head in the chowder. I decided not to mention the head to Tim. I would dispose of the bones after the meat had been cooked off them, and he would never know the difference.

That day, December 6, was when we heard the loud cracking noises outside and rushed out, fearing that our convict had returned and was shooting at us. But it was only the deep freeze gripping green saplings and splitting them with a loud report that was like a gunshot.

My father’s prediction that this would be the worst winter in memory was being fulfilled. It had become harder and harder to keep the cabin comfortable, and Tim and I now spent as much time searching for tiny drafts and chinking them up as we did at any other task. Even so, when we got up in the morning the water in the bucket was frozen all the way to the bottom, and it was agony to put our feet onto the cold floor.