one chance shot broke a wing. Then she fluttered away, running,
trailing the broken wing, with him in pursuit.
The little chicks had no more than whetted his appetite. He hopped
and bobbed clumsily along on his injured ankle, throwing stones and
screaming hoarsely at times; at other times hopping and bobbing
silently along, picking himself up grimly and patiently when he
fell, or rubbing his eyes with his hand when the giddiness
threatened to overpower him.
The chase led him across swampy ground in the bottom of the valley,
and he came upon footprints in the soggy moss. They were not his
own – he could see that. They must be Bill’s. But he could not
stop, for the mother ptarmigan was running on. He would catch her
first, then he would return and investigate.
He exhausted the mother ptarmigan; but he exhausted himself. She
lay panting on her side. He lay panting on his side, a dozen feet
away, unable to crawl to her. And as he recovered she recovered,
fluttering out of reach as his hungry hand went out to her. The
chase was resumed. Night settled down and she escaped. He
stumbled from weakness and pitched head foremost on his face,
cutting his cheek, his pack upon his back. He did not move for a
long while; then he rolled over on his side, wound his watch, and
lay there until morning.
Another day of fog. Half of his last blanket had gone into foot-
wrappings. He failed to pick up Bill’s trail. It did not matter.
His hunger was driving him too compellingly – only – only he
wondered if Bill, too, were lost. By midday the irk of his pack
became too oppressive. Again he divided the gold, this time merely
spilling half of it on the ground. In the afternoon he threw the
rest of it away, there remaining to him only the half-blanket, the
tin bucket, and the rifle.
An hallucination began to trouble him. He felt confident that one
cartridge remained to him. It was in the chamber of the rifle and
he had overlooked it. On the other hand, he knew all the time that
the chamber was empty. But the hallucination persisted. He fought
it off for hours, then threw his rifle open and was confronted with
LOVE OF LIFE AND OTHER STORIES
10
emptiness. The disappointment was as bitter as though he had
really expected to find the cartridge.
He plodded on for half an hour, when the hallucination arose again.
Again he fought it, and still it persisted, till for very relief he
opened his rifle to unconvince himself. At times his mind wandered
farther afield, and he plodded on, a mere automaton, strange
conceits and whimsicalities gnawing at his brain like worms. But
these excursions out of the real were of brief duration, for ever
the pangs of the hunger-bite called him back. He was jerked back
abruptly once from such an excursion by a sight that caused him
nearly to faint. He reeled and swayed, doddering like a drunken
man to keep from falling. Before him stood a horse. A horse! He
could not believe his eyes. A thick mist was in them, intershot
with sparkling points of light. He rubbed his eyes savagely to
clear his vision, and beheld, not a horse, but a great brown bear.
The animal was studying him with bellicose curiosity.
The man had brought his gun halfway to his shoulder before he
realized. He lowered it and drew his hunting-knife from its beaded
sheath at his hip. Before him was meat and life. He ran his thumb
along the edge of his knife. It was sharp. The point was sharp.
He would fling himself upon the bear and kill it. But his heart
began its warning thump, thump, thump. Then followed the wild
upward leap and tattoo of flutters, the pressing as of an iron band
about his forehead, the creeping of the dizziness into his brain.
His desperate courage was evicted by a great surge of fear. In his
weakness, what if the animal attacked him? He drew himself up to
his most imposing stature, gripping the knife and staring hard at
the bear. The bear advanced clumsily a couple of steps, reared up,
and gave vent to a tentative growl. If the man ran, he would run
after him; but the man did not run. He was animated now with the
courage of fear. He, too, growled, savagely, terribly, voicing the
fear that is to life germane and that lies twisted about life’s
deepest roots.
The bear edged away to one side, growling menacingly, himself
appalled by this mysterious creature that appeared upright and
unafraid. But the man did not move. He stood like a statue till
the danger was past, when he yielded to a fit of trembling and sank
down into the wet moss.
He pulled himself together and went on, afraid now in a new way.
It was not the fear that he should die passively from lack of food,
but that he should be destroyed violently before starvation had
exhausted the last particle of the endeavor in him that made toward
surviving. There were the wolves. Back and forth across the
desolation drifted their howls, weaving the very air into a fabric
of menace that was so tangible that he found himself, arms in the
air, pressing it back from him as it might be the walls of a wind-
blown tent.
Now and again the wolves, in packs of two and three, crossed his
path. But they sheered clear of him. They were not in sufficient
numbers, and besides they were hunting the caribou, which did not
battle, while this strange creature that walked erect might scratch
LOVE OF LIFE AND OTHER STORIES
11
and bite.
In the late afternoon he came upon scattered bones where the wolves
had made a kill. The debris had been a caribou calf an hour
before, squawking and running and very much alive. He contemplated
the bones, clean-picked and polished, pink with the cell-life in
them which had not yet died. Could it possibly be that he might be
that ere the day was done! Such was life, eh? A vain and fleeting
thing. It was only life that pained. There was no hurt in death.
To die was to sleep. It meant cessation, rest. Then why was he
not content to die?
But he did not moralize long. He was squatting in the moss, a bone
in his mouth, sucking at the shreds of life that still dyed it
faintly pink. The sweet meaty taste, thin and elusive almost as a
memory, maddened him. He closed his jaws on the bones and
crunched. Sometimes it was the bone that broke, sometimes his
teeth. Then he crushed the bones between rocks, pounded them to a
pulp, and swallowed them. He pounded his fingers, too, in his
haste, and yet found a moment in which to feel surprise at the fact
that his fingers did not hurt much when caught under the descending
rock.
Came frightful days of snow and rain. He did not know when he made
camp, when he broke camp. He travelled in the night as much as in
the day. He rested wherever he fell, crawled on whenever the dying
life in him flickered up and burned less dimly. He, as a man, no
longer strove. It was the life in him, unwilling to die, that
drove him on. He did not suffer. His nerves had become blunted,
numb, while his mind was filled with weird visions and delicious
dreams.
But ever he sucked and chewed on the crushed bones of the caribou
calf, the least remnants of which he had gathered up and carried
with him. He crossed no more hills or divides, but automatically
followed a large stream which flowed through a wide and shallow
valley. He did not see this stream nor this valley. He saw
nothing save visions. Soul and body walked or crawled side by
side, yet apart, so slender was the thread that bound them.
He awoke in his right mind, lying on his back on a rocky ledge.
The sun was shining bright and warm. Afar off he heard the
squawking of caribou calves. He was aware of vague memories of
rain and wind and snow, but whether he had been beaten by the storm
for two days or two weeks he did not know.
For some time he lay without movement, the genial sunshine pouring
upon him and saturating his miserable body with its warmth. A fine
day, he thought. Perhaps he could manage to locate himself. By a
painful effort he rolled over on his side. Below him flowed a wide
and sluggish river. Its unfamiliarity puzzled him. Slowly he
followed it with his eyes, winding in wide sweeps among the bleak,
bare hills, bleaker and barer and lower-lying than any hills he had
yet encountered. Slowly, deliberately, without excitement or more