This was living!  They plucked the sweet, juicy berries from the vines; they served as dessert and were also used in the fashioning of delicious puddings with rice and sugar.  Several times she found certain treasures laid by for winter use by the squirrels or the digging people—­and perfectly preserved nuts and acorns, The latter, parched over coals, became one of the staples of their diet.

She gathered leaves of the red weed and dried them for tea.  She searched out the nests of the grouse and robbed them of their eggs; and always high celebration in the cave followed such a find as this.  Fried eggs, boiled eggs, poached eggs tickled their palates for mornings to come.  And she traced down, one memorable day when their sugar was all but gone, a tree that the wild bees had stored with honey.

In the way of meat they had not only caribou, but the tender veal of moose and all manner of northern small game.  Ben did not, however, spend rifle cartridges in reckless shooting.  When at last his enemies came filing down through the beaver meadow he had no desire to be left with a half-empty gun.  He had never fired this more powerful weapon since he had felled their first caribou.  The moose calves and all the small game were taken with Beatrice’s pistol.

Sometimes he took ptarmigan—­those whistling, sprightly grouse of the high steeps—­and Beatrice served uncounted numbers of them, like the famous blackbirds, baked in a pie.  Fried ptarmigan was a dish never to forget; roast ptarmigan had a distinctive flavor all its own, and the memory of ptarmigan fricassee often called Ben home to the cavern an hour before the established mealtime.  Indeed, they partook of all the northern species of that full-bosomed clan, the upland game birds; little, brown quail, willow grouse, fool hens, and the incomparable blue grouse, half of the breast of which was a meal.  It was true that their little store of pistol cartridges was all but gone, but worlds of big game remained to fall back upon.

Ben never ceased regretting that he had not brought a single fishhook and a piece of line.  He had long since carried the canoe from the river bank and hid it in the tall reeds of the lake shore, not only for pleasure’s sake, but to preserve it for the autumn floods when they might want to float on down to the Indian villages; and surely it would have afforded the finest sport in the way of trolling for lake trout.  But with utter callousness he made his pistol serve as a hook and line.  Often he would crawl down, cautiously as a stalking wolf, to the edge of a trout pool, then fire mercilessly at a great, spotted beauty below.  The bullet itself did not penetrate the water, but the shock carried through and the fish usually turned a white belly to the surface.  A fat brook or lake trout, dipped in flour and fried to a chestnut brown, was a delight that never grew old.