nor hold his sheath-
knife nor throttle the animal. He released it, and it plunged wildly
away, with tail between its legs, and still snarling. It halted forty
feet away and surveyed him curiously, with ears sharply pricked forward.
The man looked down at his hands in order to locate them, and found them
hanging on the ends of his arms. It struck him as curious that one
should have to use his eyes in order to find out where his hands were. He
began threshing his arms back and forth, beating the mittened hands
against his sides. He did this for five minutes, violently, and his
heart pumped enough blood up to the surface to put a stop to his
shivering. But no sensation was aroused in the hands. He had an
impression that they hung like weights on the ends of his arms, but when
he tried to run the impression down, he could not find it.

A certain fear of death, dull and oppressive, came to him. This fear
quickly became poignant as he realized that it was no longer a mere
matter of freezing his fingers and toes, or of losing his hands and feet,
but that it was a matter of life and death with the chances against him.
This threw him into a panic, and he turned and ran up the creek-bed along
the old, dim trail. The dog joined in behind and kept up with him. He
ran blindly, without intention, in fear such as he had never known in his
life. Slowly, as he ploughed and floundered through the snow, he began
to see things again--the banks of the creek, the old timber-jams, the
leafless aspens, and the sky. The running made him feel better. He did
not shiver. Maybe, if he ran on, his feet would thaw out; and, anyway,
if he ran far enough, he would reach camp and the boys. Without doubt he
would lose some fingers and toes and some of his face; but the boys would
take care of him, and save the rest of him when he got there. And at the
same time there was another thought in his mind that said he would never
get to the camp and the boys; that it was too many miles away, that the
freezing had too great a start on him, and that he would soon be stiff
and dead. This thought he kept in the background and refused to
consider. Sometimes it pushed itself forward and demanded to be heard,
but he thrust it back and strove to think of other things.

It struck him as curious that he could run at all on feet so frozen that
he could not feel them when they struck the earth and took the weight of
his body. He seemed to himself to ski