iful. A band of caribou passed by, twenty and odd animals,
tantalizingly within rifle range. He felt a wild desire to run after
them, a certitude that he could run them down. A black fox came toward
him, carrying a ptarmigan in his mouth. The man shouted. It was a
fearful cry, but the fox, leaping away in fright, did not drop the
ptarmigan.

Late in the afternoon he followed a stream, milky with lime, which ran
through sparse patches of rush-grass. Grasping these rushes firmly near
the root, he pulled up what resembled a young onion-sprout no larger than
a shingle-nail. It was tender, and his teeth sank into it with a crunch
that promised deliciously of food. But its fibers were tough. It was
composed of stringy filaments saturated with water, like the berries, and
devoid of nourishment. He threw off his pack and went into the
rush-grass on hands and knees, crunching and munching, like some bovine
creature.

He was very weary and often wished to rest--to lie down and sleep; but he
was continually driven on--not so much by his desire to gain the land of
little sticks as by his hunger. He searched little ponds for frogs and
dug up the earth with his nails for worms, though he knew in spite that
neither frogs nor worms existed so far north.

He looked into every pool of water vainly, until, as the long twilight
came on, he discovered a solitary fish, the size of a minnow, in such a
pool. He plunged his arm in up to the shoulder, but it eluded him. He
reached for it with both hands and stirred up the milky mud at the
bottom. In his excitement he fell in, wetting himself to the waist. Then
the water was too muddy to admit of his seeing the fish, and he was
compelled to wait until the sediment had settled.

The pursuit was renewed, till the water was again muddied. But he could
not wait. He unstrapped the tin bucket and began to bale the pool. He
baled wildly at first, splashing himself and flinging the water so short
a distance that it ran back into the pool. He worked more carefully,
striving to be cool, though his heart was pounding against his chest and
his hands were trembling. At the end of half an hour the pool was nearly
dry. Not a cupful of water remained. And there was no fish. He found a
hidden crevice among the stones through which it had escaped to the
adjoining and larger pool--a pool which he could not empty in a night and
a day. Had he known of the crevice, he could have closed it wi