The thin match

by Henry S. Whitehead

It was more than four months before the crushed and battered old box, so worn and greasy now that the printing on the cover could hardly have been read by even the most learned Scandinavian, was brought to light again in Pete’s cabin on the upper reaches of the Nasquapee.

It was a desperate day of still cold. The thermometer had sunk and sunk for the past several weeks. It was too cold now for any more snow to fall, but Pete was snowed in.

That sound behind him was the scratching of a lynx’s claws, a lynx which had dug down through the snow to the lean-to, braced in with river-bottom rocks—great, flat rocks, outside the hut—the lean-to where Pete kept his spare provisions against this commonest of sub-Arctic setbacks: being snowed in. Pete had plenty of provisions, both inside the hut and out there in the handy lean-to, covered in. The lynx had besieged him now for two days and nights.

He had plenty of food, and he might have shot the lynx at any time. But he dared not shoot the lynx. He dared not shoot the lynx because he had one cartridge left, and one only. The great ravenous animal, with the deadly hunger-courage of the far North, had utterly put aside all his natural fear of Man. Pete could thrust his rifle against the satiny black fur which showed through the chinks of the hut and blow it to pieces at any time.

But he dared not. He dared not because he had no matches. By a stroke of the wildest ill-fortune he had destroyed a full box, the last box in his store, by omitting to close it before striking one on its side. He had struck it toward the end where the heads were, and they had flared up and burned off to cinders in precisely two seconds. He was relying on that cartridge, that last cartridge, to light the fire. He would have to light it soon. There had not been a live ember since early yesterday morning when the snow that had accumulated above his stone chimney, far above at the outlet, had come pouring down and doused his fire.

He could not kill the lynx and light the fire too. He must choose. And now, crouched on the floor before the cold embers, his back to the lynx, which scratched and scratched, the man, bundled like a great ball in his parka and seal leggings and with his heavy furs about his chilled body, was dully trying to decide what to do.

It was death either way, it seemed. He could only choose between the bloody, riving death at the lynx’s claws, or the slower but perhaps no less deadly alternative of being frozen stiff.

Suddenly, he thought of that old coat! There might—there just might be, in one of the pockets, a stray match. He had worn it, he remembered, on the train trip and for the first day on board the ship, and had carried matches in the side pockets. First pounding his hands together to start up some little circulation, he dug, with his great fur gloves still on his hands, under his bunk against the end wall. Out came the old coat at last. He hadn’t worn it for months now. Laying it out roughly before him on the edge of the bunk, and again slapping his gloved hands together, he hastily pulled off the right glove with his teeth. Then he thrust into the pockets, first the right one, then the left. What was this? He clawed out the crumbling remains of the old box. Matches? He shook the box close to his ear. Matches! God!—matches!

He spilled them on the bunk in his agitation and relief, which shook him from head to foot with a violent trembling. He wept uncontrollably and started to pick them up carefully. There were three, all good, sound matches.

He slapped his hands together again, pulled off his other glove, and rubbed his hands briskly up and down on the heavy fur of his parka. Then he took his rifle, and laid it, ready loaded, beside him on the bunk.