Love of Life | Page 4

And always the ptarmigan rose,
whirring, before him, till their ker - ker - ker became a mock to him,
and he cursed them and cried aloud at them with their own cry.
Once he crawled upon one that must have been asleep. He did not see it
till it shot up in his face from its rocky nook. He made a clutch as
startled as was the rise of the ptarmigan, and there remained in his hand
three tail-feathers. As he watched its flight he hated it, as though it had
done him some terrible wrong. Then he returned and shouldered his
pack.
As the day wore along he came into valleys or swales where game was
more plentiful. A band of caribou passed by, twenty and odd animals,
tantalizingly within rifle range. He felt a wild desire to run after them, a
certitude that he could run them down. A black fox came toward him,
carrying a ptarmigan in his mouth. The man shouted. It was a fearful
cry, but the fox, leaping away in fright, did not drop the ptarmigan.
Late in the afternoon he followed a stream, milky with lime, which ran
through sparse patches of rush-grass. Grasping these rushes firmly near
the root, he pulled up what resembled a young onion- sprout no larger
than a shingle-nail. It was tender, and his teeth sank into it with a
crunch that promised deliciously of food. But its fibers were tough. It
was composed of stringy filaments saturated with water, like the berries,

and devoid of nourishment. He threw off his pack and went into the
rush-grass on hands and knees, crunching and munching, like some
bovine creature.
He was very weary and often wished to rest - to lie down and sleep; but
he was continually driven on - not so much by his desire to gain the
land of little sticks as by his hunger. He searched little ponds for frogs
and dug up the earth with his nails for worms, though he knew in spite
that neither frogs nor worms existed so far north.
He looked into every pool of water vainly, until, as the long twilight
came on, he discovered a solitary fish, the size of a minnow, in such a
pool. He plunged his arm in up to the shoulder, but it eluded him. He
reached for it with both hands and stirred up the milky mud at the
bottom. In his excitement he fell in, wetting himself to the waist. Then
the water was too muddy to admit of his seeing the fish, and he was
compelled to wait until the sediment had settled.
The pursuit was renewed, till the water was again muddied. But he
could not wait. He unstrapped the tin bucket and began to bale the pool.
He baled wildly at first, splashing himself and flinging the water so
short a distance that it ran back into the pool. He worked more carefully,
striving to be cool, though his heart was pounding against his chest and
his hands were trembling. At the end of half an hour the pool was
nearly dry. Not a cupful of water remained. And there was no fish. He
found a hidden crevice among the stones through which it had escaped
to the adjoining and larger pool - a pool which he could not empty in a
night and a day. Had he known of the crevice, he could have closed it
with a rock at the beginning and the fish would have been his.
Thus he thought, and crumpled up and sank down upon the wet earth.
At first he cried softly to himself, then he cried loudly to the pitiless
desolation that ringed him around; and for a long time after he was
shaken by great dry sobs.
He built a fire and warmed himself by drinking quarts of hot water, and
made camp on a rocky ledge in the same fashion he had the night
before. The last thing he did was to see that his matches were dry and

to wind his watch. The blankets were wet and clammy. His ankle
pulsed with pain. But he knew only that he was hungry, and through his
restless sleep he dreamed of feasts and banquets and of food served and
spread in all imaginable ways.
He awoke chilled and sick. There was no sun. The gray of earth and
sky had become deeper, more profound. A raw wind was blowing, and
the first flurries of snow were whitening the hilltops. The air about him
thickened and grew white while he made a fire and boiled more water.
It was wet snow, half rain, and the flakes were large and soggy. At first
they melted as soon as they came in contact with the