The scratching of the lynx seemed to him louder and bolder; more imminent and menacing. The great beast, it would seem, could not dislodge the heavy, flat stones with which the cache was overlaid. There was not room enough for that—too little purchase to be obtained. He looked around. The lynx had abandoned its old purpose, and was coming through into the hut. It was working on the wood now. That was what had made the change in the sound of the scratching. Already a huge, wicked paw appeared, a paw armed with chisels! The lynx snuffled. If not pemmican, then Man!
Carefully, gingerly, Pete drew the first match along the side of the box. But the oily side caused it to slip without igniting. At the second trial the head crumbled off the stick. He threw away the useless stick and took the second. It broke off, close to the head. He fumbled after the head on the floor, his hands like lumps of lead. At last he got it between his thumb and the side of the box. It would burn him, he knew; but what was a burn? He rubbed it against the box. It flared suddenly, died at once, giving him a vicious burn in the process, and smoked out to a tiny, inconsiderable cinder.
Pete turned pale under the dirt of his unshaven cheeks, and reached for his last match. He struck it, with infinite care, seven times, drawing it along different portions of the better preserved box-side. It fizzled at last, but that was all. The head crumbled off as the first had done.
Pete sat there looking at the fragments of the broken box and the useless sticks in a dumb frenzy of despair. He was done—at the end of his rope. Then, suddenly animated, he seized the useless wreck of the empty box and threw it on the hard earthen floor, and ground it with his heel. He sat and stared at it. The lynx broke off a great splinter of wood, but Pete did not notice the lynx. What was that? It looked like a good match-head, there under the edge of the flimsy match box now ground and crushed flat.
Almost perishing now with the bitter cold in his ungloved hands, which made them feel like useless lumps of lead, Pete groped for it. He got it at last in his numb fingers, and carefully gathered up a bit of the box-side, a mere splinter. He carried the find over to the fireplace where he had his fire ready laid and looked closely at what he had picked up in the failing light. It was the thin match, intact. Pete’s grinding, angry heel had only rolled her about in the dirt. Her body was wrenched—her poor, pitiful little body, thin and crooked—but there had been something of stiffness in that disfiguring brown streak which she had inherited from being too near the bark.
The thin match summoned up all her resolution. The time had come for her to fulfill her destiny....
Against his broken, begrimed fragment of the box-side, Pete scraped the crazy, splintered, wobbly, thin match. A bright, steady little flame sprang up at him. Not breathing, his aching hands laboriously cupped, he reached for the under side of the fire.
The thin match slipped from between his numbed fingers and fell, but she landed just within the fireplace. Exactly above her hung a fragment of oily pine bark. With her last expiring fragment of will, the thin match, now two-thirds burned away, squeezed a thin trickle of yellow flame up until it touched the very tip of the fringed edge of that piece of pine bark. There was a fearful instant of suspense; then—then—a thin and growing little blaze began to run up the bark-splinter’s edge; the fire caught and roared up the stone chimney. Pete wept, crouching there benumbed, his great body in the ungainly furs sagging down almost against the blaze under the stress of this reaction.