He could not feel his feet as he lifted and put them down; when he saw them moving they looked like things independent of himself. He had ceased to feel cold. He no longer felt anything, except a deadly weariness that was crushing him into the snow.
He went on, however, driven by the fighting instinct, till of a sudden he saw it—the birch tree he was seeking, shining spectrally among the black spruces by the river.
It was an old, half-dead tree, covered with great curls of bark that would flare up at the touch of a match. He had matches in a water-proof box, and he contrived to get them out of his frozen pocket. He dropped the box half a dozen times in trying to open it, opened it at last with his teeth, and dropped it again, spilling the matches into the snow.
Snow is as dry as sand at that temperature, however, and he scraped them up, and tried to strike one on the gun barrel. But he was unable to hold the bit of wood in his numbed fingers; there was absolutely no feeling in his hands, and the match fell from his grasp at every attempt. This is a familiar peril in the North Woods, where dozens of men have frozen to death with firewood and matches beside them, from sheer inability to strike a light.
Mac beat his hands together without effect. He began to grow indifferent; and as he fumbled again for the dropped match he fell at full length into the snow.
A sense of pleasant relief overcame him, and he decided to rest there for a few minutes. The snow was soft, and he had never before realized how warm it was. His shoulders were propped against the roots of the birch, and with a hazy consciousness that game might be expected, he dragged his gun across his knees and cocked it. Then, with a comfortable sense of duty done, he closed his eyes.
Curious and delightful fancies began at once to flood his brain, fancies so vivid that he seemed not to lose consciousness at all. How long he lay there he never knew. But he grew alive at last to a vise-like pressure on his left arm that seemed to have lasted for years, and which was growing to excruciating pain.
He opened his eyes with a great effort. There were savage, hairy faces close to his own, pouring out clouds of steaming breath into the frosty air. Something had him by the arm with such force that he almost felt the bones cracking, and something was tugging at his leg.
The nervous shock aroused him as nothing else on earth could have done. A tingle of horrified animation rushed through his body. He was on the point of being torn to pieces by the wolf pack that had trailed him, and the powerful stimulus of the new peril called out the last reserves of strength.
He made a convulsive start. His frozen hand was on the trigger of the shotgun, and both barrels went off. At the sudden flash and report the half-dozen wolves bolted incontinently—all but one gray monster that got the full force of the buckshot and dropped in its tracks.