, flooding the country with silver. Once in a while a
coyote barked. The rabbits all were out, hopping in the shine and
shadow. We saw a snowshoe kind, with its big hairy feet. We saw several
porcupines, and an owl as large as a buzzard. This was a different world
from that of day, and it seemed to us that people miss a lot of things
by sleeping.

Our course was due west, by the North Star. We were down off the pass,
and had struck a valley, with meadow and scattered pines, and a stream
rippling through, and the moonlight lying white and still. In about
three hours we came upon sign of another camp, where somebody had
stopped and had made a fire and had eaten. There were burro tracks here,
so that it might have been a prospectors' camp; and there was an empty
tin can like a large coffee can.

"I think we had better rest again," said Major Henry. "We can have a
snack and a short sleep."

We didn't cook any meat. We weren't going to take out any of the Red Fox
dishes, but Fitz started to fill the tin can with water, to make soup in
that. It was Red Fox Scout Ward who warned us.

"Here," he objected. "Do you think we ought to do that? You know
sometimes a tin can gives off poison when you cook in it."

"And we don't know what was in this can," added Van Sant. "We don't want
to get ptomaine poisoning. I'd rather unpack ten packs than run any
risk."

That was sense. The can _looked_ clean, inside, and the idea of being
made sick by it hadn't occurred to us Elks. But we remembered, now, some
things that we'd read. So we kicked the can to one side, that nobody
else should use it, and Fitz made the soup in a regulation dish from the
Red Fox aluminum kit. (Note 62.)

We drank the soup and each chewed a slice of the bear-meat cold. It was
sweet and good, and the soup helped out. Then we rolled in our blankets
and went to sleep. We all had it on our minds to wake in four hours, and
the mind is a regular clock if you train it.

I woke just about right, according to the stars. The two stars in the
bottom of the Little Dipper, that we used for an hour hand, had been
exactly above a pointed spruce, when I had dozed off, and now when I
looked they had moved about three feet around the Pole Star. While I lay
blinking and warm and comfortable, and not thinking of anything in
particular, I heard a crackle of sticks and the scratch of a match. And
there squatting on the edge of a shadow was somebody already up and
making a fire.