Mart cut out the heart and the plump liver. The heart continued to beat in its regular rhythm. Florry’s eyes widened and Mart laughed silently at her astonishment.

“Jest you wait ’til you see what happens in the pan,” he chuckled.

In the face of her ignorance, he did the cooking. He boned the pieces of pink and white meat, dipped them in meal and salt, and fried them in the black iron Dutch oven that was their only cooking utensil. The lid vibrated alarmingly and in a few moments he lifted it to show her the heart still beating in the bubbling grease and the muscles of the legs twitching spasmodically.

“Mart,” she protested, “dogged if I wants to eat arything you has to stand on the lid to keep it from poppin’ out o’ the pan.”

But when the meat was fried golden brown and tender, she agreed, after a first cautious nibbling, that it was plumb noble rations. The left-over pieces, with the shell-less eggs, Mart made into a stew the next day, with a little wild garlic for seasoning. The shell-eggs he boiled in salted water.

“They ain’t done thu,” Florry declared.

Again he could laugh at her, for the white of a turtle egg will not solidify, not though it be boiled a week and a day. The eggs were slightly musty in flavor, but fine eating. After that, Florry, too, kept watch for cooters, come on shore to lay. She delighted to poke one with a stick and watch the flat brown pancake body lunge viciously forward and the evil, snakelike head snap futilely. She had to be fast on her feet to run one down before it could reach water ahead of her; quick to flip it on its back.

The cabin, with trapping rights, Mart rented for a percentage of his hides. They went hungry often through December while he acquired a few skins and reinvested them in more traps. A dozen traps were needed to show a profit. Game was plentiful. Cool weather had set in early and the pelts were thick and glossy. In the hammock were ’coons and ’possums, skunks, foxes and an occasional wildcat. In the marsh were mink and a few otters. The mink were of poor quality, but the rare otters were large and fine.

Mart showed Florry an otter slide on a slight clay elevation. She wanted to come and watch the play the next moonlit night. Mart said she was foolish and set his largest trap at the top of the slide. A big trap with inch-long teeth was necessary to hold an otter in the full of his strength.

“Hit don’t seem right,” Florry said, “a-settin’ trapses where a creetur plays.”

But he trapped one very seldom, and when he received thirty dollars for a fine pelt, in January, she forgot her scruples. “That’s a powerful piece of cash money for a varmint hide,” she said.