Ah! Wallie looked at a picture of a rabbit lying on a platter with its legs in the air and artistically decorated with parsley until he felt more hungry than ever. Then he read aloud with gusto: "Barbecued rabbit. Casserole of rabbit. Roast rabbit. Smothered rabbit. Stewed rabbit."
He perused all the recipes carefully. After giving weighty consideration to each, roast rabbit seemed to make the strongest appeal to him. He read the recipe aloud twice that he might the better comprehend it: "Dress and wash the wily coureur de bois, but leave the heads on in cleaning them. Stuff the bodies with a forcemeat of fat, salt pork, minced onions, and fine bread crumbs well seasoned with salt and pepper. Sew them up with fine thread and lay upon thin slices of pork, covering the grating of the roaster. Lay other slices of pork over them, pour over all a cupful of stock, and roast one hour. Remove the pork, then wash with butter and dredge with flour and brown.
"Drain off the gravy, lay the bits of bacon about the rabbit in the dish: thicken the gravy with browned flour. Boil up, add a tablespoonful of tomato catsup and a glass of claret, then take from the fire."
Wallie reflected, as he sat with his feet on the stove-hearth overflowing with ashes, that when it came to the "forcemeat" he was "there with the crumbs," since he had an accumulation of ancient biscuit too hard to eat. Also he had salt pork and onions. The butter, tomato catsup, stock, claret, he must dispense with. After all, the prairie-dogs were the main thing and he had them.
He congratulated himself that he had decided to leave on the heads when skinning them. The recipe so enthused him that he decided to prepare them before starting in with his washing.
Obviously the first thing to do was to thaw the onions, so he put them in the oven, after which he went to a box in the corner and selected a few biscuit. Crumbs were crumbs, as he viewed it, and biscuit crumbs were quite as good as bread crumbs for his purpose.
There were certain marks on these biscuit that were made unmistakably by the teeth of mice and chipmunks, but these traces he removed painstakingly. As he reduced the biscuit to crumbs with a hammer, he recalled that he had been awakened several times by the sound of these pestiferous animals frisking in the box in the corner. He did not allow his mind to dwell upon this, however, lest it prejudice him when it came to the eating of the "forcemeat."