ne of your nerves, just the same.
You're a little afraid of the sound and the explosion, and you flinch
back--just a little movement of your hand--when you pull the trigger.
If it is only an eighth of an inch here, it's quite a miss by the time
the bullet gets out there. Try again, but convince yourself first that
you won't flinch. You won't jerk or throw off your aim."

She lowered the weapon and rested her nerves. Then she quietly lifted
the gun again. And the fourth bullet knocked the can spinning from the
log.

The man shouted his approval, and her flushed face showed what a real
triumph it was to her. Few of her lifelong accomplishments she had
valued more. Yet it caused no self-wonder; she only knew that she
respected and prized the good opinion of this stalwart woodsman, and by
this one little act she had proved to him the cool, strong quality of
her nerves.

And it was no little triumph. She had really learned the basic concept
of good shooting,--to throw the whole force of the nervous system into
the second firing. It was the same precept that makes toward all
achievement. The fact that she had grasped it so quickly was a guaranty
of her own metal. She felt something of that satisfaction that strong
men feel when they prove, for their own eyes alone, their self-worth.
It was the instinct that sends the self-indulgent business man, riding
to his work in a limousine, into the depths of the dreadful wilderness
to hunt, and that urges the tenderfoot to climb to the crest of the
highest peaks.

It did not mean that she was a dead shot already. Months and years of
practice are necessary to obtain full mastery of pistol or rifle. She
had simply made a most creditable start. There would be plenty of
misses thereafter; in fact, the next six shots she missed the can four
times. She had to learn sight control, how to gauge distance and wind
and the speed of moving objects; but she was on the straight road to
success.

While Virginia cooked lunch, Bill cut young spruce trees and made a
sled: and after the meal pushed out through the whirling snow to being
in the remainder of the moose meat. It was the work of the whole
afternoon to urge the sled up the ridge and then draw it home through
the drifts. The snow mantle had deepened alarmingly during the night,
and he came none too soon. It was only a matter of days, perhaps of
hours, before the snow would be impassable except with snowshoes. Until
at