his hand. His flesh was burning. He could smell it. Deep down below the
surface he could feel it. The sensation developed into pain that grew acute.
And still he endured it, holding the flame of the matches clumsily to the
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bark that would not light readily because his own burning hands were in
the way, absorbing most of the flame.
At last, when he could endure no more, he jerked his hands apart. The
blazing matches fell sizzling into the snow, but the birch-bark was alight.
He began laying dry grasses and the tiniest twigs on the flame. He could
not pick and choose, for he had to lift the fuel between the heels of his
hands. Small pieces of rotten wood and green moss clung to the twigs, and
he bit them off as well as he could with his teeth. He cherished the flame
carefully and awkwardly. It meant life, and it must not perish. The
withdrawal of blood from the surface of his body now made him begin to
shiver, and he grew more awkward. A large piece of green moss fell
squarely on the little fire. He tried to poke it out with his fingers, but his
shivering frame made him poke too far, and he disrupted the nucleus of
the little fire, the burning grasses and tiny twigs separating and scattering.
He tried to poke them together again, but in spite of the tenseness of the
effort, his shivering got away with him, and the twigs were hopelessly
scattered. Each twig gushed a puff of smoke and went out. The fireprovider
had failed. As he looked apathetically about him, his eyes
chanced on the dog, sitting across the ruins of the fire from him, in the
snow, making restless, hunching movements, slightly lifting one forefoot
and then the other, shifting its weight back and forth on them with wistful
eagerness.
The sight of the dog put a wild idea into his head. He remembered the tale
of the man, caught in a blizzard, who killed a steer and crawled inside the
carcass, and so was saved. He would kill the dog and bury his hands in the
warm body until the numbness went out of them. Then he could build
another fire. He spoke to the dog, calling it to him; but in his voice was a
strange note of fear that frightened the animal, who had never known the
man to speak in such way before. Something was the matter, and its
suspicious nature sensed danger — it knew not what danger, but
somewhere, somehow, in its brain arose an apprehension of the man. It
flattened its ears down at the sound of the man’s voice, and its restless,
hunching movements and the liftings and shiftings of its forefeet became
more pronounced; but it would not come to the man. He got on his hands
and knees and crawled toward the dog. This unusual posture again excited
suspicion, and the animal sidled mincingly away.
The man sat up in the snow for a moment and struggled for calmness.
Then he pulled on his mittens, by means of his teeth, and got upon his feet.
He glanced down at first in order to assure himself that he was really
standing up, for the absence of sensation in his feet left him unrelated to
the earth. His erect position in itself started to drive the webs of suspicion
from the dog’s mind; and when he spoke peremptorily, with the sound of
whip-lashes in his voice, the dog rendered its customary allegiance and
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came to him. As it came within reaching distance, the man lost his control.
His arms flashed out to the dog, and he experienced genuine surprise when
he discovered that his hands could not clutch, that there was neither bend
nor feeling in the fingers. He had forgotten for the moment that they were
frozen and that they were freezing more and more. All this happened
quickly, and before the animal could get away, he encircled its body with
his arms. He sat down in the snow, and in this fashion held the dog, while
it snarled and whined and struggled.
But it was all he could do, hold its body encircled in his arms and sit there.
He realized that he could not kill the dog. There was no way to do it. With
his helpess hands he could neither draw nor hold his sheath-knife nor
throttle the animal. He released it, and it plunged wildly away, with tail
between its legs, and still snarling. It halted forty feet away and surveyed
him curiously, with ears sharply pricked forward. The man looked down at
his hands in order to locate them, and found them hanging on the ends of
his arms. It struck him as curious that one should have to use his eyes in
order to find out where his hands were. He began threshing his arms back
and forth, beating the mittened hands against his sides. He did this for five
minutes, violently, and his heart pumped enough blood up to the surface to
put a stop to his shivering. But no sensation was aroused in the hands. He
had an impression that they hung like weights on the ends of his arms, but
when he tried to run the impression down, he could not find it.
A certain fear of death, dull and oppressive, came to him. This fear
quickly became poignant as he realized that it was no longer a mere matter
of freezing his fingers and toes, or of losing his hands and feet, but that it
was a matter of life and death with the chances against him. This threw
him into a panic, and he turned and ran up the creek-bed along the old,
dim trail. The dog joined in behind and kept up with him. He ran blindly,
without intention, in fear such as he had never known in his life. Slowly,
as he ploughed and floundered through the snow, he began to see things
again, — the banks of the creek, the old timber-jams, the leafless aspens,
and the sky. The running made him feel better. He did not shiver. Maybe,
if he ran on, his feet would thaw out; and, anyway, if he ran far enough, he
would reach camp and the boys. Without doubt he would lose some
fingers and toes and some of his face; but the boys would take care of him,
and save the rest of him when he got there. And at the same time there was
another thought in his mind that said he would never get to the camp and
the boys; that it was too many miles away, that the freezing had too great a
start on him, and that he would soon be stiff and dead. This thought he
kept in the background and refused to consider. Sometimes it pushed itself
forward and demanded to be heard, but he thrust it back and strove to
think of other things.
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It struck him as curious that he could run at all on feet so frozen that he
could not feel them when they struck the earth and took the weight of his
body. He seemed to himself to skim along above the surface, and to have
no connection with the earth. Somewhere he had once seen a winged
Mercury, and he wondered if Mercury felt as he felt when skimming over
the earth.
His theory of running until he reached camp and the boys had one flaw in
it: he lacked the endurance. Several times he stumbled, and finally he
tottered, crumpled up, and fell. When he tried to rise, he failed. He must
sit and rest, he decided, and next time he would merely walk and keep on
going. As he sat and regained his breath, he noted that he was feeling quite
warm and comfortable. He was not shivering, and it even seemed that a
warm glow had come to his chest and trunk. And yet, when he touched his
nose or cheeks, there was no sensation. Running would not thaw them out.
Nor would it thaw out his hands and feet. Then the thought came to him
that the frozen portions of his body must be extending. He tried to keep
this thought down, to forget it, to think of something else; he was aware of
the panicky feeling that it caused, and he was afraid of the panic. But the
thought asserted itself, and persisted, until it produced a vision of his body
totally frozen. This was too much, and he made another wild run along the
trail. Once he slowed down to a walk, but the thought of the freezing
extending itself made him run again.
And all the time the dog ran with him, at his heels. When he fell down a
second time, it curled its tail over its forefeet and sat in front of him,