r burning rose
continually.

It was at this time that they ran short of beans and that Elijah was
despatched to the main camp to bring up more grub. Elijah was one of
the hard-bitten old-time travelers himself. The round trip was a
hundred miles, but he promised to be back on the third day, one day
going light, two days returning heavy. Instead, he arrived on the
night of the second day. They had just gone to bed when they heard him
coming.

"What in hell's the matter now?" Henry Finn demanded, as the empty sled
came into the circle of firelight and as he noted that Elijah's long,
serious face was longer and even more serious.

Joe Hines threw wood on the fire, and the three men, wrapped in their
robes, huddled up close to the warmth. Elijah's whiskered face was
matted with ice, as were his eyebrows, so that, what of his fur garb,
he looked like a New England caricature of Father Christmas.

"You recollect that big spruce that held up the corner of the cache
next to the river?" Elijah began.

The disaster was quickly told. The big tree, with all the seeming of
hardihood, promising to stand for centuries to come, had suffered from
a hidden decay. In some way its rooted grip on the earth had weakened.
The added burden of the cache and the winter snow had been too much for
it; the balance it had so long maintained with the forces of its
environment had been overthrown; it had toppled and crashed to the
ground, wrecking the cache and, in turn, overthrowing the balance with
environment that the four men and eleven dogs had been maintaining.
Their supply of grub was gone. The wolverines had got into the wrecked
cache, and what they had not eaten they had destroyed.

"They plumb e't all the bacon and prunes and sugar and dog-food,"
Elijah reported, "and gosh darn my buttons, if they didn't gnaw open
the sacks and scatter the flour and beans and rice from Dan to
Beersheba. I found empty sacks where they'd dragged them a quarter of
a mile away."

Nobody spoke for a long minute. It was nothing less than a
catastrophe, in the dead of an Arctic winter and in a game-abandoned
land, to lose their grub. They were not panic-stricken, but they were
busy looking the situation squarely in the face and considering. Joe
Hines was the first to speak.

"We can pan the snow for the beans and rice... though there wa'n't
more'n eight or ten pounds of rice left."

"And somebody will have to take a team and pull for Sixty M