d three pipefuls of
his rank, black tobacco as substitute for the square meal which his
stomach was craving.

All through the biting silent day he floundered resolutely on, every
now and then drawing his belt a little tighter, and all the while
keeping a hungry watch for game of some kind. What he hoped for was
rabbit, partridge, or even a fat porcupine; but he would have made a
shift to stomach even the wiry muscles of a mink, and count himself
fortunate. By sunset he came out on the edge of a vast barren,
glorious in washes of thin gold and desolate purple under the touch of
the fading west. Along to eastward ran a low ridge, years ago licked
by fire, and now crested with a sparse line of ghostly rampikes, their
lean, naked tops appealing to the inexorable sky. This was the head of
the Big Barren. With deep disgust, and something like a qualm of
apprehension, Pete Noel reflected that he had made only fifteen miles
in that long day of effort. And he was ravenously hungry. Well, he was
too tired to go farther that night; and in default of a meal, the best
thing he could do was sleep. First, however, he unlaced his larrigans,
and with the thongs made shift to set a clumsy snare in a rabbit track
a few paces back among the spruces. Then, close under the lee of a
black wall of fir-trees standing out beyond the forest skirts, he
clawed himself a deep trench in the snow. In one end of this trench he
built a little fire, of broken deadwood and green birch saplings
laboriously hacked into short lengths with his clasp-knife. A supply
of this firewood, dry and green mixed, he piled beside the trench
within reach. The bottom of the trench, to within a couple of feet of
the fire, he lined six inches deep with spruce-boughs, making a dry,
elastic bed.

By the time these preparations were completed, the sharp-starred
winter night had settled down upon the solitude. In all the vast there
was no sound but the occasional snap, hollow and startling, of some
great tree overstrung by the frost, and the intimate little whisper
and hiss of Pete's fire down in the trench. Disposing a good bunch of
boughs under his head, Pete lighted his pipe, rolled himself in his
blankets, and lay down with his feet to the fire.

There at the bottom of his trench, comforted by pipe and fire, hidden
away from the emptiness of the enormous, voiceless world outside, Pete
Noel looked up at the icy stars, and at the top of the frowning black
rampart of the f