him: he said no, half the
pleasure would be in killing it himself; he felt as strong as a buffalo,
and knew he could walk a dozen miles. So he got up, and put on his
thick coat, and took down his rifle from the peg to which it hung, and
said he was ready. I looked at him with wonder. His cheeks were so wan
and his hands so thin I did not think he could have held his rifle.

"`If you will go, I will go with you, Blount,' said I, and took down my
rifle to follow him.

"I had just got to the door of our hut, when I heard him say, `Ah! there
is the turkey cock.' So, sure enough, there was one sitting on the
bough of a tree not fifty yards from us. As he spoke the crack of his
rifle sounded in my ears--down came the bird. It seemed as if he was
going to run to pick it up; but he staggered forward a few paces, and
before I could get up to him he had fallen flat on his face. The blood
gushed from his mouth. I lifted him from the ground; he pressed my
hand, and before I got him back to our hut he was dead. I sat down and
did what I had not done for many a long year before--I burst into tears.
He had been my companion and friend, faithful and true, almost from his
youth upward--son, wife, everything to me--and now he was gone, and I
was alone in the great white melancholy wilderness.

"After a time I became quite foolish--I spoke to him, I called out his
name, I entreated him to answer me. I felt at last that I should go mad
if I kept him longer near me, so I roused myself and dragged his body to
a distance under an old hickory tree. The ground was too hard to let me
dig a grave, so I made a hole in the snow, and collected all the stones
I could find near the river, and piled them over him; I never went near
the spot again. The next three or four weeks were the most miserable I
ever passed in my life. Not that I had any great reason to be anxious
about myself. I had an abundance of food, and I knew that I could
easily find my way to the settlements in the spring; but it was the
long, long solitude which I dreaded."

"I can enter into your feelings," said I, interrupting him, and I told
him what I had suffered, and on comparing notes we found that we had
been within a hundred miles of each other. "However, go on," said I,
and Short continued his narrative.

"Three or four weeks had passed away after the death of Blount, when one
day, as I was standing near my hut wishing for the return of spring--for
I had ver