se. There lay the man closely wrapped in his moose skin, fur side
in, and the heavy hide frozen to the hardness of iron!

"I'm all cramped up," wailed the man. "I can't move."

The man was wrapped, head and all, in the frozen hide. Fortunately, he
had left an air space but this had nearly sealed shut by the continued
freezing of his breath about its edges.

Rolling him over the two grasped the edge of the heavy hide and
endeavoured to unroll it, but they might as well have tried to unroll
the iron sheathing of a boiler.

"We've got to build a fire and thaw him out," said Connie.

"Tak' um to de cabin," suggested the Indian. "Kin drag um all same
toboggan."

The plan looked reasonable but they had no rope for a trace line. Connie
overcame the difficulty by making a hole with his hand ax in a flap of
the hide near the man's feet, and cutting a light spruce sapling which
he hooked by means of a limb stub into the hole.

By using the sapling in the manner of a wagon tongue, they started for
the cabin, keeping to the top of the ridge where the snow was shallow
and wind-packed.

All went well until they reached the end of the ridge. A mile back,
where they had ascended the slope, the pitch had not been great, but as
they neared the river the sides grew steeper, until they were confronted
by a three hundred foot slope with an extremely steep pitch. This slope
was sparsely timbered, and great rocks protruded from the snow. Connie
was for retracing the ridge to a point where the ascent was not so
steep, but 'Merican Joe demurred.

[Illustration: "The third day dawned cold and clear, and daylight found
the outfit on the move."

Drawn by Frank E. Schoonover]

"It git dark queek, now. We git um down all right. Turn um roun' an'
mak de pole lak de tail rope on de toboggan--we hol' um back easy." The
early darkness was blurring distant outlines and the descent at that
point meant the saving of an hour, so Connie agreed and for the first
twenty yards all went well. Then suddenly the human toboggan struck the
ice of a hillside spring and shot forward. The pole slipped from the
snowy mittens of the two and, enveloped in a cloud of flying snow, the
man in the frozen moose hide went shooting down the slope! Connie and
'Merican Joe barely saved themselves from following him, and, squatting
low on their webs they watched in a fascination of horror as the flying
body struck a tree trunk, shot sidewise, ploughed through the snow,