it, and reasonably amenable to control._

_It was worth trying, anyway._

* * * * *

October 3rd, Ed Brown got up to the base cabin of his trap line with his
winter's outfit.

He hung an N. C. Company calendar on the wall and started marking off
the days.

October 8th, the hole into the other world opened.

In the meantime, of course, Ed had not been idle. All summer the cabin
had stood empty. He got his bedding, stove, and other cabin gear down
from the cache and made the place livable. The mice were thick, a good
fur sign, but a nuisance otherwise. Down in the cellar hole, when he
went to clear it out for the new spud crop, he found burrowings
everywhere.

Well, old Tom would take care of that in short order. Tom was a big,
black, bobtailed cat eleven years old who had lived with Ed since he was
a kitten. Not having any feline companionship to distract him, his only
interest was hunting mice. Generally he killed a lot more than he could
eat, racking the surplus in neat piles beside the trail, on the
doorstep, or on a slab in the cellar. He was the best mouser in interior
Alaska.

Ed propped the cellar hatch with a stick so old Tom could come and go as
he pleased, and went on about his chores, working with a methodical
efficiency that matched Tom's and went with his thinning gray hair and
forty years in the woods. He dug the spuds he had planted that spring.
He made a swing around his beaver lakes, tallying the blankets in each
house. He took the canoe and moved supplies to his upper cabin. He
harvested some fat mallards that had moved down on the river with the
coming of skim ice on the lakes. He bucked up firewood and stacked it to
move into camp with the first snow.

On the fifth morning, as he was going down to the boat landing with a
pail for water, he found the hole into the other world.

Ed had never seen a hole into another world, of course, nor even heard
of such a thing. He was as surprised as any one would naturally be to
find one not fifty feet from their front door.

Still, his experience had been all in the direction of believing what
his eyes told him. He had seen a lot of strange things in his life, and
one more didn't strain him too much. He stood stockstill where he had
first noticed the hole and studied it warily.

It was two steps off the trail to the left, right beside the old leaning
birch, a rectangular piece of scenery that did not fit. It looked to