darkness. Even if he found it, even if he could cut kindling with his
knife, he couldn't maintain a blaze. Building and mending a fire with
green timber is a cruel task even with vision; and he knew as well as he
knew the fact of his own life that it would be wholly impossible to the
blind.

Then what was left? Only a deeper, colder darkness than this he knew
now. Death was left--nothing else. In an hour, perhaps in a
half-hour, possibly not until the night had gone and come again with its
wind and its chill, the end would be the same. There was no light to
guide him home, no landmarks that he could see.

Then his thought seized upon an idea so fantastic, seemingly so
impossible of achievement, that at first he could not give it credence.
His mind had flashed to those unfortunates that had sometimes lost their
way in the dark chambers of an underground cavern and thence to that
method by which they guarded against this danger. These men carried
strings, unwinding them as they entered the cavern and following them
out. He had not carried a string-end here, but he had made a trail!
His snowshoe tracks probably were not yet obliterated under the
wind-blown snow. Could he feel his way along them back to the cabin?

The miles were many and long, but he wouldn't have to creep on hands and
knees all the way. Perhaps he could walk, stooped, touching the
depressions in the snow at every step. In his own soul he did not
believe that he had one chance in a hundred of making it through to
safety. Crawling, creeping, groping from track to track would wear him
out quickly. But was there any other course for him? If he didn't try
that, would he have any alternative other than to lie still and die? He
wasn't sure that he could even find the tracks in the snow, but if he
were able to encircle the cabin at a radius of fifty feet he could not
miss them. He groped about at the side of the cabin for his snowshoes.

He found them in a minute, then walked straight as he could fifty feet
out from the door. Once more he went on hands and feet, groping in the
icy snow. He started to make a great circle.

Fifteen feet farther he felt a break in the even surface. The snow had
been so soft and his shoes had sunk so deep that the powdered flakes the
wind had strewn during the night had only half filled his tracks. He
started to follow them down.

He walked stooped, groping with one hand, and after an endless time his
fing