Explore "Operation Terror" by Murray Leinster on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
When darkness fell, Lockley and Jill were many miles away from the clearing where he had made the S. O. S. They were under a dense screen of leaves from a monster tree whose roots rose above ground at the foot of its enormous trunk. They formed a shelter of sorts against observation from a distance. Lockley had spotted a fallen tree far gone with wood-rot. He broke pieces of the punky stuff with his fingers. Then he realized that without a pot the bracken shoots he'd gathered could not be cooked. They had to be boiled or not cooked at all.
"We'll call it a salad," he told Jill, "minus vinegar and oil and garlic, and eat what we can."