Love of Life and Other Stories E-Book

Jack London

• Herausgeber: libreka classics
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 247

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Love of Life and Other Stories by Jack London libreka classics – These are classics of literary history, reissued and made available to a wide audience. Immerse yourself in well-known and popular titles!

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Titel: Love of Life and Other Stories

von Scott Hemphill, L. M. Montgomery, L. Frank Baum, John Milton, René Descartes, Baroness Emmuska Orczy Orczy, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Unknown, Norman F. Joly, Norman Coombs, David Slowinski, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Stephen Crane, John Goodwin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Winn Schwartau, Odd De Presno, Sir Walter Scott, Jules Verne, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, United States. Central Intelligence Agency, United States, Canada, Willa Sibert Cather, Anthony Hope, Edwin Abbott Abbott, Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, William Shakespeare, Bruce Sterling, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gene Stratton-Porter, Richard McGowan, Frances Hodgson Burnett, United States. Bureau of the Census, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anonymous, Jerry Bonnell, Robert Nemiroff, Andrew Lang, G. K. Chesterton, John Bunyan, Sunzi 6th cent. B.C., Harold Frederic, Mary Wollstonecraft, Victor Hugo, René Doumic, Upton Sinclair, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Plato, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ruth M. Sprague, William Dean Howells, Wilkie Collins, Jean Webster, H. G. Wells, Kate Chopin, Mark Eliot Laxer, Louisa May Alcott, Frank Norris, Edith Wharton, S. D. Humphrey, Henry Hunt Snelling, William Morris, Mrs. Susanna Rowson, Christopher Morley, Sax Rohmer, Oscar Wilde, Gaston Leroux, Henry James, Project Gutenberg, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Various, Robert W. Service, A. B. Paterson, Henry Lawson, Jack London, Laozi, D. H. Lawrence, Julius Caesar, Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham, George MacDonald, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Virgil, Theodore Dreiser, Giuseppe Salza, Rudyard Kipling, ca. 50 BCE-16 BCE Sextus Propertius, Robert A. Harris, William Wells Brown, graf Leo Tolstoy, Omar Khayyám, Michael Hart, Library of Congress. Copyright Office, Coalition for Networked Information, Geoffrey Chaucer, Adam Lindsay Gordon, Hiram Corson, Robert Browning, Amy Lowell, Rupert Brooke, Joyce Kilmer, John Gower, Saki, Kenneth Grahame, Anna Sewell, Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, National Atomic Museum, Alexander William Kinglake, Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne, Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr, James Branch Cabell, Bayard Taylor, Horatio Alger, Booth Tarkington, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, Michael Husted, Émile Gaboriau, Jerome K. Jerome, Stephen Vincent Benét, Edwin Arlington Robinson, J. Frank Dobie, Joseph Rodman Drake, Eliot Gregory, John Fox, John Muir, Richard Harding Davis, Edgar A. Guest, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Thomas Nelson Page, Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh, Rebecca Harding Davis, Charles Alexander Eastman, Zitkala-Sa, Marie L. McLaughlin, J. M. Barrie, Bram Stoker, Hesiod, Edna Ferber, John McCrae, Anna Howard Shaw, Elizabeth Garver Jordan, Frances Jenkins Olcott, P.-J. Proudhon, Eleanor H. Porter, Mary Hunter Austin, Sarah Orne Jewett, Russell Herman Conwell, Daniel Defoe, Henry Benjamin Wheatley, Ambrose Bierce, Nettie Garmer Barker, Martí Joan de Galba, Joanot Martorell, Oliver Goldsmith, Zane Grey, Winston Churchill, Arthur Machen, L. Cranmer-Byng, Torquato Tasso, H. De Vere Stacpoole, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Frank Richard Stockton, Rutherford Hayes Platt, Sara Teasdale, Samuel Smiles, W. E. B. Du Bois, Phillis Wheatley, Elbert Hubbard, Richard Jefferies, George Henry Borrow, Sherwood Anderson, Vachel Lindsay, David Graham Phillips, Harry Houdini, Eugene Field, Gustave Le Bon, Henry Brodribb Irving, William Healy, Mary Tenney Healy, Charles Godfrey Leland, Ralph Parlette, Don Marquis, Richard Le Gallienne, Stewart Edward White, Andrew Steinmetz, Madame de La Fayette, Abbé Prévost, Honoré de Balzac, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sara Cone Bryant, William Booth, James Nasmyth, Enrico Ferri, Joe Hutsko, Miriam Michelson, Oliver Optic, Victor MacClure, Calamity Jane, Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton, Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, Henry J. Coke, Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin, Victor [pseud.] Appleton, Carlo Collodi, Hugh Lofting, John Philip Sousa, Andrew Dickson White, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Isaac Taylor Headland, Amy Steedman, B. M. Bower, William Tuckwell, Clarence Edgar Johnson, Sinclair Lewis, Rex Stout, Carl R. Maag, Steve Rohrer, Mariano Azuela, Royall Tyler, John Buchan, Ross Kay, J. L. Kennon, Eros Urides, Friedrich Schiller, William Cowper Brann, Adelaide L. Fries, Beatrix Potter, Mary Lamb, Charles Lamb, William Blake, Francis Bacon, Samuel Johnson, Tadashi Nakashima, Sidney Lanier, Edward Jenkins, Harriet E. Wilson, Ellen Craft, William Craft, Sir Thomas Browne, Alexander H. Japp, Guy de Maupassant, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Snorri Sturluson, William Makepeace Thackeray, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, M. G. Lewis, Lucan, Edwin Lester Linden Arnold, Frank Bird Linderman, Tingfang Wu, Baron Alfred Tennyson Tennyson, Japan, Lodovico Ariosto, Alan Seeger, Anthony Trollope, Lewis Carroll, William James, Jonathan Swift, Edward Bellamy, Richard de Bury, Charles Mackay, Eliza Burt Gamble, R. M. Ballantyne, Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, Mrs. Sutherland Orr, William Sharp, 4th century Smyrnaeus Quintus, Noah Webster, Russ Walter, Plutarch, Charles Kingsley, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sarojini Naidu, Maksim Gorky, Greg Fee, Izaak Walton, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, United States. Army. Corps of Engineers. Manhattan District, European Union, Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, Bertrand Russell, James Whitcomb Riley, S. Weir Mitchell, Horace Walpole, John Ruskin, Martha Young, Richard Lovelace, Henry Van Dyke, Michael Fairless, E. W. Hornung

ISBN 978-3-7429-0661-8

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Love of Life, by Jack London

Transcribed from the 1913 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email [email protected]

LOVE OF LIFEand other stories

by JACK LONDONauthor of “the call of the wild,” “peopleof the abyss,” etc., etc.

New Yorkpublished for THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS COMPANYby the macmillan companyLondon: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. 1913All rights reserved

Copyright, 1906, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

He watched the play of life before him

Set up and electrotyped.  Published September, 1907.  Reprinted December, 1907; December, 1911.  October, 1913.

LOVE OF LIFE

“This out of all will remain—    They have lived and have tossed: So much of the game will be gain,    Though the gold of the dice has been lost.”

They limped painfully down the bank, and once the foremost of the two men staggered among the rough-strewn rocks.  They were tired and weak, and their faces had the drawn expression of patience which comes of hardship long endured.  They were heavily burdened with blanket packs which were strapped to their shoulders.  Head-straps, passing across the forehead, helped support these packs.  Each man carried a rifle.  They walked in a stooped posture, the shoulders well forward, the head still farther forward, the eyes bent upon the ground.

“I wish we had just about two of them cartridges that’s layin’ in that cache of ourn,” said the second man.

His voice was utterly and drearily expressionless.  He spoke without enthusiasm; and the first man, limping into the milky stream that foamed over the rocks, vouchsafed no reply.

The other man followed at his heels.  They did not remove their foot-gear, though the water was icy cold—so cold that their ankles ached and their feet went numb.  In places the water dashed against their knees, and both men staggered for footing.

The man who followed slipped on a smooth boulder, nearly fell, but recovered himself with a violent effort, at the same time uttering a sharp exclamation of pain.  He seemed faint and dizzy and put out his free hand while he reeled, as though seeking support against the air.  When he had steadied himself he stepped forward, but reeled again and nearly fell.  Then he stood still and looked at the other man, who had never turned his head.

The man stood still for fully a minute, as though debating with himself.  Then he called out:

“I say, Bill, I’ve sprained my ankle.”

Bill staggered on through the milky water.  He did not look around.  The man watched him go, and though his face was expressionless as ever, his eyes were like the eyes of a wounded deer.

The other man limped up the farther bank and continued straight on without looking back.  The man in the stream watched him.  His lips trembled a little, so that the rough thatch of brown hair which covered them was visibly agitated.  His tongue even strayed out to moisten them.

“Bill!” he cried out.

It was the pleading cry of a strong man in distress, but Bill’s head did not turn.  The man watched him go, limping grotesquely and lurching forward with stammering gait up the slow slope toward the soft sky-line of the low-lying hill.  He watched him go till he passed over the crest and disappeared.  Then he turned his gaze and slowly took in the circle of the world that remained to him now that Bill was gone.

Near the horizon the sun was smouldering dimly, almost obscured by formless mists and vapors, which gave an impression of mass and density without outline or tangibility.  The man pulled out his watch, the while resting his weight on one leg.  It was four o’clock, and as the season was near the last of July or first of August,—he did not know the precise date within a week or two,—he knew that the sun roughly marked the northwest.  He looked to the south and knew that somewhere beyond those bleak hills lay the Great Bear Lake; also, he knew that in that direction the Arctic Circle cut its forbidding way across the Canadian Barrens.  This stream in which he stood was a feeder to the Coppermine River, which in turn flowed north and emptied into Coronation Gulf and the Arctic Ocean.  He had never been there, but he had seen it, once, on a Hudson Bay Company chart.

Again his gaze completed the circle of the world about him.  It was not a heartening spectacle.  Everywhere was soft sky-line.  The hills were all low-lying.  There were no trees, no shrubs, no grasses—naught but a tremendous and terrible desolation that sent fear swiftly dawning into his eyes.

“Bill!” he whispered, once and twice; “Bill!”

He cowered in the midst of the milky water, as though the vastness were pressing in upon him with overwhelming force, brutally crushing him with its complacent awfulness.  He began to shake as with an ague-fit, till the gun fell from his hand with a splash.  This served to rouse him.  He fought with his fear and pulled himself together, groping in the water and recovering the weapon.  He hitched his pack farther over on his left shoulder, so as to take a portion of its weight from off the injured ankle.  Then he proceeded, slowly and carefully, wincing with pain, to the bank.

He did not stop.  With a desperation that was madness, unmindful of the pain, he hurried up the slope to the crest of the hill over which his comrade had disappeared—more grotesque and comical by far than that limping, jerking comrade.  But at the crest he saw a shallow valley, empty of life.  He fought with his fear again, overcame it, hitched the pack still farther over on his left shoulder, and lurched on down the slope.

The bottom of the valley was soggy with water, which the thick moss held, spongelike, close to the surface.  This water squirted out from under his feet at every step, and each time he lifted a foot the action culminated in a sucking sound as the wet moss reluctantly released its grip.  He picked his way from muskeg to muskeg, and followed the other man’s footsteps along and across the rocky ledges which thrust like islets through the sea of moss.

Though alone, he was not lost.  Farther on he knew he would come to where dead spruce and fir, very small and weazened, bordered the shore of a little lake, the titchin-nichilie, in the tongue of the country, the “land of little sticks.”  And into that lake flowed a small stream, the water of which was not milky.  There was rush-grass on that stream—this he remembered well—but no timber, and he would follow it till its first trickle ceased at a divide.  He would cross this divide to the first trickle of another stream, flowing to the west, which he would follow until it emptied into the river Dease, and here he would find a cache under an upturned canoe and piled over with many rocks.  And in this cache would be ammunition for his empty gun, fish-hooks and lines, a small net—all the utilities for the killing and snaring of food.  Also, he would find flour,—not much,—a piece of bacon, and some beans.

Bill would be waiting for him there, and they would paddle away south down the Dease to the Great Bear Lake.  And south across the lake they would go, ever south, till they gained the Mackenzie.  And south, still south, they would go, while the winter raced vainly after them, and the ice formed in the eddies, and the days grew chill and crisp, south to some warm Hudson Bay Company post, where timber grew tall and generous and there was grub without end.

These were the thoughts of the man as he strove onward.  But hard as he strove with his body, he strove equally hard with his mind, trying to think that Bill had not deserted him, that Bill would surely wait for him at the cache.  He was compelled to think this thought, or else there would not be any use to strive, and he would have lain down and died.  And as the dim ball of the sun sank slowly into the northwest he covered every inch—and many times—of his and Bill’s flight south before the downcoming winter.  And he conned the grub of the cache and the grub of the Hudson Bay Company post over and over again.  He had not eaten for two days; for a far longer time he had not had all he wanted to eat.  Often he stooped and picked pale muskeg berries, put them into his mouth, and chewed and swallowed them.  A muskeg berry is a bit of seed enclosed in a bit of water.  In the mouth the water melts away and the seed chews sharp and bitter.  The man knew there was no nourishment in the berries, but he chewed them patiently with a hope greater than knowledge and defying experience.

At nine o’clock he stubbed his toe on a rocky ledge, and from sheer weariness and weakness staggered and fell.  He lay for some time, without movement, on his side.  Then he slipped out of the pack-straps and clumsily dragged himself into a sitting posture.  It was not yet dark, and in the lingering twilight he groped about among the rocks for shreds of dry moss.  When he had gathered a heap he built a fire,—a smouldering, smudgy fire,—and put a tin pot of water on to boil.

He unwrapped his pack and the first thing he did was to count his matches.  There were sixty-seven.  He counted them three times to make sure.  He divided them into several portions, wrapping them in oil paper, disposing of one bunch in his empty tobacco pouch, of another bunch in the inside band of his battered hat, of a third bunch under his shirt on the chest.  This accomplished, a panic came upon him, and he unwrapped them all and counted them again.  There were still sixty-seven.

He dried his wet foot-gear by the fire.  The moccasins were in soggy shreds.  The blanket socks were worn through in places, and his feet were raw and bleeding.  His ankle was throbbing, and he gave it an examination.  It had swollen to the size of his knee.  He tore a long strip from one of his two blankets and bound the ankle tightly.  He tore other strips and bound them about his feet to serve for both moccasins and socks.  Then he drank the pot of water, steaming hot, wound his watch, and crawled between his blankets.

He slept like a dead man.  The brief darkness around midnight came and went.  The sun arose in the northeast—at least the day dawned in that quarter, for the sun was hidden by gray clouds.

At six o’clock he awoke, quietly lying on his back.  He gazed straight up into the gray sky and knew that he was hungry.  As he rolled over on his elbow he was startled by a loud snort, and saw a bull caribou regarding him with alert curiosity.  The animal was not mere than fifty feet away, and instantly into the man’s mind leaped the vision and the savor of a caribou steak sizzling and frying over a fire.  Mechanically he reached for the empty gun, drew a bead, and pulled the trigger.  The bull snorted and leaped away, his hoofs rattling and clattering as he fled across the ledges.

The man cursed and flung the empty gun from him.  He groaned aloud as he started to drag himself to his feet.  It was a slow and arduous task.

His joints were like rusty hinges.  They worked harshly in their sockets, with much friction, and each bending or unbending was accomplished only through a sheer exertion of will.  When he finally gained his feet, another minute or so was consumed in straightening up, so that he could stand erect as a man should stand.

He crawled up a small knoll and surveyed the prospect.  There were no trees, no bushes, nothing but a gray sea of moss scarcely diversified by gray rocks, gray lakelets, and gray streamlets.  The sky was gray.  There was no sun nor hint of sun.  He had no idea of north, and he had forgotten the way he had come to this spot the night before.  But he was not lost.  He knew that.  Soon he would come to the land of the little sticks.  He felt that it lay off to the left somewhere, not far—possibly just over the next low hill.

He went back to put his pack into shape for travelling.  He assured himself of the existence of his three separate parcels of matches, though he did not stop to count them.  But he did linger, debating, over a squat moose-hide sack.  It was not large.  He could hide it under his two hands.  He knew that it weighed fifteen pounds,—as much as all the rest of the pack,—and it worried him.  He finally set it to one side and proceeded to roll the pack.  He paused to gaze at the squat moose-hide sack.  He picked it up hastily with a defiant glance about him, as though the desolation were trying to rob him of it; and when he rose to his feet to stagger on into the day, it was included in the pack on his back.

He bore away to the left, stopping now and again to eat muskeg berries.  His ankle had stiffened, his limp was more pronounced, but the pain of it was as nothing compared with the pain of his stomach.  The hunger pangs were sharp.  They gnawed and gnawed until he could not keep his mind steady on the course he must pursue to gain the land of little sticks.  The muskeg berries did not allay this gnawing, while they made his tongue and the roof of his mouth sore with their irritating bite.

He came upon a valley where rock ptarmigan rose on whirring wings from the ledges and muskegs.  Ker—ker—ker was the cry they made.  He threw stones at them, but could not hit them.  He placed his pack on the ground and stalked them as a cat stalks a sparrow.  The sharp rocks cut through his pants’ legs till his knees left a trail of blood; but the hurt was lost in the hurt of his hunger.  He squirmed over the wet moss, saturating his clothes and chilling his body; but he was not aware of it, so great was his fever for food.  And always the ptarmigan rose, whirring, before him, till their ker—ker—ker became a mock to him, and he cursed them and cried aloud at them with their own cry.

Once he crawled upon one that must have been asleep.  He did not see it till it shot up in his face from its rocky nook.  He made a clutch as startled as was the rise of the ptarmigan, and there remained in his hand three tail-feathers.  As he watched its flight he hated it, as though it had done him some terrible wrong.  Then he returned and shouldered his pack.

As the day wore along he came into valleys or swales where game was more plentiful.  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 with a rock at the beginning and the fish would have been his.

Thus he thought, and crumpled up and sank down upon the wet earth.  At first he cried softly to himself, then he cried loudly to the pitiless desolation that ringed him around; and for a long time after he was shaken by great dry sobs.

He built a fire and warmed himself by drinking quarts of hot water, and made camp on a rocky ledge in the same fashion he had the night before.  The last thing he did was to see that his matches were dry and to wind his watch.  The blankets were wet and clammy.  His ankle pulsed with pain.  But he knew only that he was hungry, and through his restless sleep he dreamed of feasts and banquets and of food served and spread in all imaginable ways.

He awoke chilled and sick.  There was no sun.  The gray of earth and sky had become deeper, more profound.  A raw wind was blowing, and the first flurries of snow were whitening the hilltops.  The air about him thickened and grew white while he made a fire and boiled more water.  It was wet snow, half rain, and the flakes were large and soggy.  At first they melted as soon as they came in contact with the earth, but ever more fell, covering the ground, putting out the fire, spoiling his supply of moss-fuel.

This was a signal for him to strap on his pack and stumble onward, he knew not where.  He was not concerned with the land of little sticks, nor with Bill and the cache under the upturned canoe by the river Dease.  He was mastered by the verb “to eat.”  He was hunger-mad.  He took no heed of the course he pursued, so long as that course led him through the swale bottoms.  He felt his way through the wet snow to the watery muskeg berries, and went by feel as he pulled up the rush-grass by the roots.  But it was tasteless stuff and did not satisfy.  He found a weed that tasted sour and he ate all he could find of it, which was not much, for it was a creeping growth, easily hidden under the several inches of snow.

He had no fire that night, nor hot water, and crawled under his blanket to sleep the broken hunger-sleep.  The snow turned into a cold rain.  He awakened many times to feel it falling on his upturned face.  Day came—a gray day and no sun.  It had ceased raining.  The keenness of his hunger had departed.  Sensibility, as far as concerned the yearning for food, had been exhausted.  There was a dull, heavy ache in his stomach, but it did not bother him so much.  He was more rational, and once more he was chiefly interested in the land of little sticks and the cache by the river Dease.

He ripped the remnant of one of his blankets into strips and bound his bleeding feet.  Also, he recinched the injured ankle and prepared himself for a day of travel.  When he came to his pack, he paused long over the squat moose-hide sack, but in the end it went with him.

The snow had melted under the rain, and only the hilltops showed white.  The sun came out, and he succeeded in locating the points of the compass, though he knew now that he was lost.  Perhaps, in his previous days’ wanderings, he had edged away too far to the left.  He now bore off to the right to counteract the possible deviation from his true course.

Though the hunger pangs were no longer so exquisite, he realized that he was weak.  He was compelled to pause for frequent rests, when he attacked the muskeg berries and rush-grass patches.  His tongue felt dry and large, as though covered with a fine hairy growth, and it tasted bitter in his mouth.  His heart gave him a great deal of trouble.  When he had travelled a few minutes it would begin a remorseless thump, thump, thump, and then leap up and away in a painful flutter of beats that choked him and made him go faint and dizzy.

In the middle of the day he found two minnows in a large pool.  It was impossible to bale it, but he was calmer now and managed to catch them in his tin bucket.  They were no longer than his little finger, but he was not particularly hungry.  The dull ache in his stomach had been growing duller and fainter.  It seemed almost that his stomach was dozing.  He ate the fish raw, masticating with painstaking care, for the eating was an act of pure reason.  While he had no desire to eat, he knew that he must eat to live.

In the evening he caught three more minnows, eating two and saving the third for breakfast.  The sun had dried stray shreds of moss, and he was able to warm himself with hot water.  He had not covered more than ten miles that day; and the next day, travelling whenever his heart permitted him, he covered no more than five miles.  But his stomach did not give him the slightest uneasiness.  It had gone to sleep.  He was in a strange country, too, and the caribou were growing more plentiful, also the wolves.  Often their yelps drifted across the desolation, and once he saw three of them slinking away before his path.

Another night; and in the morning, being more rational, he untied the leather string that fastened the squat moose-hide sack.  From its open mouth poured a yellow stream of coarse gold-dust and nuggets.  He roughly divided the gold in halves, caching one half on a prominent ledge, wrapped in a piece of blanket, and returning the other half to the sack.  He also began to use strips of the one remaining blanket for his feet.  He still clung to his gun, for there were cartridges in that cache by the river Dease.

This was a day of fog, and this day hunger awoke in him again.  He was very weak and was afflicted with a giddiness which at times blinded him.  It was no uncommon thing now for him to stumble and fall; and stumbling once, he fell squarely into a ptarmigan nest.  There were four newly hatched chicks, a day old—little specks of pulsating life no more than a mouthful; and he ate them ravenously, thrusting them alive into his mouth and crunching them like egg-shells between his teeth.  The mother ptarmigan beat about him with great outcry.  He used his gun as a club with which to knock her over, but she dodged out of reach.  He threw stones at her and with one chance shot broke a wing.  Then she fluttered away, running, trailing the broken wing, with him in pursuit.

The little chicks had no more than whetted his appetite.  He hopped and bobbed clumsily along on his injured ankle, throwing stones and screaming hoarsely at times; at other times hopping and bobbing silently along, picking himself up grimly and patiently when he fell, or rubbing his eyes with his hand when the giddiness threatened to overpower him.