Love of Life | Page 7

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 bones
between rocks, pounded them to a pulp, and swallowed them. He
pounded his fingers, too, in his haste, and yet found a moment in which
to feel surprise at the fact that his fingers did not hurt much when
caught under the descending rock.
Came frightful days of snow and rain. He did not know when he made
camp, when he broke camp. He travelled in the night as much as in the
day. He rested wherever he fell, crawled on whenever the dying life in
him flickered up and burned less dimly. He, as a man, no longer strove.
It was the life in him, unwilling to die, that drove him on. He did not
suffer. His nerves had become blunted, numb, while his mind was filled
with weird visions and delicious dreams.
But ever he sucked and chewed on the crushed bones of the caribou
calf, the least remnants of which he had gathered up and carried with
him. He crossed no more hills or divides, but automatically followed a
large stream which flowed through a wide and shallow valley. He did
not see this stream nor this valley. He saw nothing save visions. Soul
and body walked or crawled side by side, yet apart, so slender was the
thread that bound them.
He awoke in his right mind, lying on his back on a rocky ledge. The
sun was shining bright and warm. Afar off he heard the squawking of
caribou calves. He was aware of vague memories of rain and wind and
snow, but whether he had been beaten by the storm for two days or two
weeks he did not know.

For some time he lay without movement, the genial sunshine pouring
upon him and saturating his miserable body with its warmth. A fine day,
he thought. Perhaps he could manage to locate himself. By a painful
effort he rolled over on his side. Below him flowed a wide and sluggish
river. Its unfamiliarity puzzled him. Slowly he followed it with his eyes,
winding in wide sweeps among the bleak, bare hills, bleaker and barer
and lower-lying than any hills he had yet