he animal attacked him? He drew himself up to his
most imposing stature, gripping the knife and staring hard at the bear.
The bear advanced clumsily a couple of steps, reared up, and gave vent to
a tentative growl. If the man ran, he would run after him; but the man
did not run. He was animated now with the courage of fear. He, too,
growled, savagely, terribly, voicing the fear that is to life germane and
that lies twisted about life's deepest roots.

The bear edged away to one side, growling menacingly, himself appalled by
this mysterious creature that appeared upright and unafraid. But the man
did not move. He stood like a statue till the danger was past, when he
yielded to a fit of trembling and sank down into the wet moss.

He pulled himself together and went on, afraid now in a new way. It was
not the fear that he should die passively from lack of food, but that he
should be destroyed violently before starvation had exhausted the last
particle of the endeavor in him that made toward surviving. There were
the wolves. Back and forth across the desolation drifted their howls,
weaving the very air into a fabric of menace that was so tangible that he
found himself, arms in the air, pressing it back from him as it might be
the walls of a wind-blown tent.

Now and again the wolves, in packs of two and three, crossed his path.
But they sheered clear of him. They were not in sufficient numbers, and
besides they were hunting the caribou, which did not battle, while this
strange creature that walked erect might scratch and bite.

In the late afternoon he came upon scattered bones where the wolves had
made a kill. The debris had been a caribou calf an hour before,
squawking and running and very much alive. He contemplated the bones,
clean-picked and polished, pink with the cell-life in them which had not
yet died. Could it possibly be that he might be that ere the day was
done! Such was life, eh? A vain and fleeting thing. It was only life
that pained. There was no hurt in death. To die was to sleep. It meant
cessation, rest. Then why was he not content to die?

But he did not moralize long. He was squatting in the moss, a bone in
his mouth, sucking at the shreds of life that still dyed it faintly pink.
The sweet meaty taste, thin and elusive almost as a memory, maddened him.
He closed his jaws on the bones and crunched. Sometimes it was the bone
that broke, sometimes his teeth. Then he crushed the bo