-but rarely. Gathering an armful, he bore them inside, and
twisting the tips into withes, he fed the fire. The frozen twigs
sizzled and snapped, threatening to fail utterly, but with much blowing
he sustained a blaze sufficient to melt a pot of snow. Boiling was out
of the question, but the tea leaves became soaked and the bacon
cauterized.

Pierre freed and fed the dogs. Each gulped its dried salmon, and,
curling in the lee of the tent, was quickly drifted over. Next he cut
blocks from the solid bottom snow and built a barricade to windward.
Then he accumulated a mow of willow tops without the tent-fly. All the
time the wind drew down the valley like the breath of a giant bellows.

"Supper," shouted Willard, and as Pierre crawled into the candle-light
he found him squatted, fur-bundled, over the stove, which settled
steadily into the snow, melting its way downward toward a firmer
foundation.

The heat was insufficient to thaw the frozen sweat in his clothes; his
eyes were bleary and wet from smoke, and his nose needed continuous
blowing, but he spoke pleasantly, a fact which Pierre noted with
approval.

"We'll need a habeas corpus for this stove if you don't get something
to hold her up, and I might state, if it's worthy of mention, that your
nose is frozen again."

Pierre brought an armful of stones from the creek edge, distributing
them beneath the stove on a bed of twisted willows; then swallowing
their scanty, half-cooked food, they crawled, shivering, into the
deerskin sleeping-bags, that animal heat might dry their clammy
garments.

Four days the wind roared and the ice filings poured over their shelter
while they huddled beneath. When one travels on rations delay is
dangerous. Each morning, dragging themselves out into the maelstrom,
they took sticks and poked into the drifts for dogs. Each animal as
found was exhumed, given a fish, and became straightway reburied in the
whirling white that seethed down from the mountains.

On the fifth, without warning, the storm died, and the air stilled to a
perfect silence.

"These dog bad froze," said Pierre, swearing earnestly as he harnessed.
"I don' like eet much. They goin' play hout I'm 'fraid." He knelt and
chewed from between their toes the ice pellets that had accumulated. A
malamoot is hard pressed to let his feet mass, and this added to the
men's uneasiness.

As they mounted the great divide, mountains rolled away on every hand,
barren, des