long right in front of the building I was
in that I put down my foolish fears and got up and fired at them,
hoping to scare them away and maybe get another skin for my coat. One
fell, and the others made off at a great rate. I watched the one on
the snow till I was sure he was dead, and I heard nothing more of the
others that night. In the morning there was neither hide nor hair of
the dead wolf.

But the work I had to do kept my mind off of my terror a good deal,
and saved me, I really believe, from going stark mad. I will tell
about my great system of tunnels presently, but before I began it I
did much else. One of the first things was to make a long, light sled
for Kaiser to draw, and also a harness for him. The materials and
tools for the one I got from the wagon-repair shop attached to
Beckwith's blacksmith shop, and the same for the other from the
harness shop, where I kept up one of my fires. I was always handy with
all kinds of tools, inheriting a love for them from my father;
besides, I had worked with him in the shop at home a good deal, and
had thus become a fairly good mechanic for my age. I could handle a
plane or a drawshave or a riveting-hammer, or even an awl, for the
matter of that, with any of them.

I used this dog rig chiefly for taking over ground feed from the depot
to the barn for the horses and cow; but Kaiser learned to enjoy the
work of dragging the sled so much that I soon came to use him nearly
always in good weather in making my rounds to look after the fires or
patrol the town. He would whisk me along on top of the frozen drifts
at such a rate that it would nearly take my breath away sometimes. I
practised with the skees till there was no danger of turning my ankle
again, and would sometimes run races with him on them; but he could
beat me all hollow unless there was a good, stiff load on the sled.

Another thing that I made was a pair of leather spectacles, something
which my mother had used often to tell me I needed when I was small
and could not see something that was plain as a pikestaff. My
spectacles were made out of a strip of black leather two inches wide
which went over my eyes and around my head, with two slits through
which I could look. These I wore on the dazzling bright days and was
troubled no more by snow-blindness, which had made my eyes so painful
the day I came back from Mountain's.

It was about New-Year's that I began to spend my evenings in noting
down in the hot