He remembered the advice of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek, and smiled.
The old-timer had been very serious in laying down the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below.
Well, here he was; he had had the accident; he was alone; and he had saved himself.
Those old-timers were rather womanish, some of them, he thought.
All a man had to do was to keep his head, and he was all right.
Any man who was a man could travel alone.
But it was surprising, the rapidity with which his cheeks and nose were freezing.
And he had not thought his fingers could go lifeless in so short a time.
Lifeless they were, for he could scarcely make them move together to grip a twig, and they seemed remote from his body and from him.
When he touched a twig, he had to look and see whether or not he had hold of it.
The wires were pretty well down between him and his finger-ends.
All of which counted for little.
There was the fire, snapping and crackling and promising life with every dancing flame.
He started to untie his moccasins.
They were coated with ice; the thick German socks were like sheaths of iron half-way to the knees; and the mocassin strings were like rods of steel all twisted and knotted as by some conflagration.
For a moment he tugged with his numbed fingers, then, realizing the folly of it, he drew his sheath-knife.
But before he could cut the strings, it happened.
It was his own fault or, rather, his mistake.
He should not have built the fire under the spruce tree.
He should have built it in the open.
But it had been easier to pull the twigs from the brush and drop them directly on the fire.
Now the tree under which he had done this carried a weight of snow on its boughs.
No wind had blown for weeks, and each bough was fully freighted.
Each time he had pulled a twig he had communicated a slight agitation to the tree—an imperceptible agitation, so far as he was concerned, but an agitation sufficient to bring about the disaster.
High up in the tree one bough capsized its load of snow.
This fell on the boughs beneath, capsizing them.
This process continued, spreading out and involving the whole tree.
It grew like an avalanche, and it descended without warning upon the man and the fire, and the fire was blotted out!
Where it had burned was a mantle of fresh and disordered snow.
The man was shocked.
It was as though he had just heard his own sentence of death.
For a moment he sat and stared at the spot where the fire had been.
Then he grew very calm.
Perhaps the old-timer on Sulphur Creek was right.
If he had only had a trail-mate he would have been in no danger now. The trail-mate could have built the fire.
Well, it was up to him to build the fire over again, and this second time there must be no failure.
Even if he succeeded, he would most likely lose some toes.
His feet must be badly frozen by now, and there would be some time before the second fire was ready.
Such were his thoughts, but he did not sit and think them.
He was busy all the time they were passing through his mind, he made a new foundation for a fire, this time in the open; where no treacherous tree could blot it out.
Next, he gathered dry grasses and tiny twigs from the high-water flotsam.
He could not bring his fingers together to pull them out, but he was able to gather them by the handful.
In this way he got many rotten twigs and bits of green moss that were undesirable, but it was the best he could do.
He worked methodically, even collecting an armful of the larger branches to be used later when the fire gathered strength.
And all the while the dog sat and watched him, a certain yearning wistfulness in its eyes, for it looked upon him as the fire-provider, and the fire was slow in coming.
When all was ready, the man reached in his pocket for a second piece of birch-bark.
He knew the bark was there, and, though he could not feel it with his fingers, he could hear its crisp rustling as he fumbled for it.
Try as he would, he could not clutch hold of it.
And all the time, in his consciousness, was the knowledge that each instant his feet were freezing.
This thought tended to put him in a panic, but he fought against it and kept calm.