ushing back hunger and faintness, he summoned up his spirit, and
vowed that if the beasts could fight their way to cover, he could.
Then his woodcraft should force the forest to render him something in
the way of food that would suffice to keep life in his veins.

For perhaps half an hour this defiant and unvanquishable spirit kept
Pete Noel going. But as the brief northern day began to wane, and a
shadow to darken behind the thick, white gloom of the storm, his
forces, his tough, corded muscles and his tempered nerves, again began
to falter. He caught himself stumbling, and seeking excuse for delay
in getting up. In spite of every effort of his will, he saw
visions--thick, protecting woods close at one side or the other, or a
snug log camp, half buried in the drifts, but with warm light flooding
from its windows. Indignantly he would shake himself back into sanity,
and the delectable visions would vanish. But while they lasted they
were confusing, and presently when he aroused himself from one that
was of particularly heart-breaking vividness, he found that he had let
his rifle drop! It was gone hopelessly. The shock steadied him for
some minutes. Well, he had his knife. After all, that was the more
important of the two. He ploughed onward, once more keenly awake, and
grappling with his fate.

The shadows thickened rapidly; and at last, bending with the insane
riot of the storm, began to make strange, monstrous shapes.
Unravelling these illusions, and exorcising them, kept Pete Noel
occupied. But suddenly one of these monstrous shapes neglected to
vanish. He was just about to throw himself upon it, in half delirious
antagonism, when it lurched upward with a snort, and struggled away
from him. In an instant Pete was alive in every faculty, stung with an
ecstasy of hope. Leaping, floundering, squirming, he followed, open
knife in hand. Again and yet again the foundered beast, a big caribou
bull, buried halfway up the flank, eluded him. Then, as his savage
scramble at last overtook it, the bull managed to turn half about, and
thrust him violently in the left shoulder with an antler-point.
Unheeding the hurt, Noel clutched the antler with his left hand, and
forced it inexorably back. The next moment his knife was drawn with
practised skill across the beast's throat.

Like most of our eastern woodsmen, Pete Noel was even finicky about
his food, and took all his meat cooked to a brown. He loathed
underdone flesh. Now, how