got to put
all my grab in the tin cans or we'll go short before spring!" His chief
trouble was to keep his snowshoes out of his tiny companion's reach.
The mouse had developed an unholy passion for babiche, the caribou skin
thongs used in the webs of his shoes, and one of the webs was half
eaten away before Falkner discovered what was going on. At last he was
compelled to suspend the shoes from a nail driven in one of the
roof-beams.

In the evening, when the stove glowed hot, and a cotton wick sputtered
in a pan of caribou grease on the table, Falkner's chief diversion was
to tell the mouse all about his plans, and hopes, and what had happened
in the past. He took an almost boyish pleasure in these one-sided
entertainments--and yet, after all, they were not entirely one-sided,
for the mouse would keep its bright, serious-looking little eyes on
Falkner's face; it seemed to understand, if it could not talk.

Falkner loved to tell the little fellow of the wonderful days of four
or five years ago away down in the sunny Ohio valley where he had
courted the Girl and where they lived before they moved to the farm in
Canada. He tried to impress upon Little Jim's mind what it meant for a
great big, unhandsome fellow like himself to be loved by a tender slip
of a girl whose hair was like gold and whose eyes were as blue as the
wood-violets. One evening he fumbled for a minute under his bunk and
came back to the table with a worn and finger-marked manila envelope,
from which he drew tenderly and with almost trembling care a long,
shining tress of golden hair.

"That HERS," he said proudly, placing it on the table close to the
mouse. "An' she's got so much of it you can't see her to the hips when
she takes it down; an' out in the sun it shines like--like--glory!"

The stove door crashed open, and a number of coals fell out upon the
floor. For a few minutes Falkner was busy, and when he returned to the
table he gave a gasp of astonishment. The curl and the mouse were gone!
Little Jim had almost reached its nest with its lovely burden when
Falkner captured it.

"You little cuss!" he breathed reverently. "Now I know you come from
her! I know it!"

In the weeks that followed the storm Falkner again followed his
trap-lines, and scattered poison-baits for the white foxes on the
Barren. Early in January the second great storm of that year came from
out of the North. It gave no warning, and Falkner was caught ten miles
from camp.