ands in our
pockets and our guns under our arms. Our boots, which were wrapped in
wool so that we might be able to walk without slipping on the frozen
river, made no sound, and I looked at the white vapor which our dogs'
breath made.

We were soon on the edge of the marsh, and entered one of the lanes of
dry rushes which ran through the low forest.

Our elbows, which touched the long, ribbonlike leaves, left a slight
noise behind us, and I was seized, as I had never been before, by the
powerful and singular emotion which marshes cause in me. This one was
dead, dead from cold, since we were walking on it, in the middle of its
population of dried rushes.

Suddenly, at the turn of one of the lanes, I perceived the ice-hut
which had been constructed to shelter us. I went in, and as we had
nearly an hour to wait before the wandering birds would awake, I rolled
myself up in my rug in order to try and get warm. Then, lying on my
back, I began to look at the misshapen moon, which had four horns
through the vaguely transparent walls of this polar house. But the
frost of the frozen marshes, the cold of these walls, the cold from the
firmament penetrated me so terribly that I began to cough. My cousin
Karl became uneasy.

"No matter if we do not kill much to-day," he said: "I do not want you
to catch cold; we will light a fire." And he told the gamekeeper to cut
some rushes.

We made a pile in the middle of our hut which had a hole in the middle
of the roof to let out the smoke, and when the red flames rose up to
the clear, crystal blocks they began to melt, gently, imperceptibly, as
if they were sweating. Karl, who had remained outside, called out to
me: "Come and look here!" I went out of the hut and remained struck
with astonishment. Our hut, in the shape of a cone, looked like an
enormous diamond with a heart of fire which had been suddenly planted
there in the midst of the frozen water of the marsh. And inside, we saw
two fantastic forms, those of our dogs, who were warming themselves at
the fire.

But a peculiar cry, a lost, a wandering cry, passed over our heads, and
the light from our hearth showed us the wild birds. Nothing moves one
so much as the first clamor of a life which one does not see, which
passes through the somber air so quickly and so far off, just before
the first streak of a winter's day appears on the horizon. It seems to
me, at this glacial hour of dawn, as if that passing cry which is
carried aw