with no further food, he fought west. In the mid third day
he fell beneath a lone spruce beside a wide stream that ran open and
which he knew must be the Klondike. Ere blackness conquered him, he
unlashed his pack, said good-by to the bright world, and rolled himself
in the robes.

Chirping, sleepy noises awoke him. The long twilight was on. Above him,
among the spruce boughs, were ptarmigan. Hunger bit him into instant
action, though the action was infinitely slow. Five minutes passed
before he was able to get his rifle to his shoulder, and a second five
minutes passed ere he dared, lying on his back and aiming straight
upward, to pull the trigger. It was a clean miss. No bird fell, but no
bird flew. They ruffled and rustled stupidly and drowsily. His shoulder
pained him. A second shot was spoiled by the involuntary wince he made
as he pulled trigger. Somewhere, in the last three days, though he had
no recollection how, he must have fallen and injured it.

The ptarmigan had not flown. He doubled and redoubled the robe that had
covered him, and humped it in the hollow between his right arm and his
side. Resting the butt of the rifle on the fur, he fired again, and a
bird fell. He clutched it greedily and found that he had shot most of
the meat out of it. The large-caliber bullet had left little else than
a mess of mangled feathers. Still the ptarmigan did not fly, and
he decided that it was heads or nothing. He fired only at heads. He
reloaded and reloaded the magazine. He missed; he hit; and the
stupid ptarmigan, that were loath to fly, fell upon him in a rain of
food--lives disrupted that his life might feed and live. There had been
nine of them, and in the end he clipped the head of the ninth, and lay
and laughed and wept he knew not why.

The first he ate raw. Then he rested and slept, while his life
assimilated the life of it. In the darkness he awoke, hungry, with
strength to build a fire. And until early dawn he cooked and ate,
crunching the bones to powder between his long-idle teeth. He slept,
awoke in the darkness of another night, and slept again to another sun.

He noted with surprise that the fire crackled with fresh fuel and that a
blackened coffee-pot steamed on the edge of the coals. Beside the fire,
within arm's length, sat Shorty, smoking a brown-paper cigarette and
intently watching him. Smoke's lips moved, but a throat paralysis seemed
to come upon him, while his chest was suffused with the menac