In spite of his warm gloves and the hard exercise of cutting, the numbing, biting frost was getting to his fingers. But he mustn’t let his hand grow stiff and awkward. He did not forget that the handholds, to which his fingers must cling, were yet to be made. They had to be finished with even greater skill than the footholds. Very wisely, he turned to them next.
He made the first of them as high as he could reach. Then he put one in about a foot below. Three more footholds were put in at about twelve-inch intervals between.
At that point he found it necessary to stop and spend a few of his precious moments in rest. He must not let fatigue dull him and take the cunning from his hand. But the first stage of the work was done;—deliverance looked already immeasurably nearer. If he could climb up, then cling on and cut a new hold! Placing the knife between his teeth, he put his moccasin into the first foothold and pulled himself up.
It did not take long, however, to convince him that the remaining work bordered practically on the impossible. These holes in the ice were not like irregularities in stone. The fingers slipped over them: it was almost impossible to cling on with both hands, much less one. But clinging with all his might, he tried to free his right hand to procure his knife.
He made it at last, and at a frightful cost of nervous energy succeeded in cutting some sort of a gash in the icy wall above his head. Standing so close he could not look up, it was impossible to do more than hack out a ragged hole. And because life lay this way and no other, he put the blade once more between his teeth, reached his right hand into the hole, and tried to pull himself up again.
But disaster, bitter and complete, followed that attempt. His numbing hands failed to hold under the strain, and he slipped all the way back to his shelf. Something rang sharply against the ice wall, far below him.
He did not hear it again; but the truth went home to him in one despairing instant. Try as hard as he could, his jaws had released their hold upon the knife, and it had fallen into the depths of the crevice below. He was not in the least aware of the vicious wound its blade had cut in his shoulder, of the warm blood that was trickling down under his furs. He only knew, with that cold fatalism with which the woodsman regards life, that he had fought a good fight,—and he had lost.
There was no use of trying any more. He had no other knife or axe, no tool that could hack a hole in the icy wall. What other things he carried about him—the furs on his back, his box of safety matches, and other minor implements of his trade—could not help him in the least. And soon it became increasingly difficult to think either upon the fight he had made or the fate that awaited him.
It was hard to remember anything but the growing cold.
It hurt worst in his hands. So he took to rubbing his hands together, hard as he could. He felt the blood surge back into them, and soon they were fairly warm in the great mittens of fur.