He lifted his pack. As he swung it before him, one arm thrust through a strap, he gave a startled cry. Half of one side of the pack was eaten away! He thrust his hands through the breach, and a moan of despair sobbed on his lips when he found that his food was gone. A thin trickle of flour ran through his fingers upon the snow. He pulled out a gnawed pound of bacon, a little tea—and that was all.
Frantically he ripped the rent wider in his search, and when he stood up, his wild face staring into the chaos about him, he held only the bit of bacon in his hand. In it were the imprints of tiny teeth—sharp little razor-edged teeth that told him what had happened. While he had slept a mink had robbed him of his food!
With one of his shoes he began digging furiously in the snow. He tore his balsam bed to pieces. Somewhere—somewhere not very far away—the little animal must have cached its theft. He dug down until he came to the frozen earth. For an hour he worked and found nothing.
Then he stopped. Over a small fire he melted snow for tea and broiled a slice of the bacon, which he ate with the few biscuit crumbs he found in the pack. Every particle of flour that he could find he scraped up with his knife and put into one of the deep pockets of his caribou coat. After that he set cut in the direction in which he thought he would find Lac Bain.
Still he shouted for Dixon, and fired an occasional shot from his rifle. By noon he should have struck the lake. Noon came and passed; the gloom of a second night fell upon him. He built himself a fire, and ate two-thirds of what remained of the bacon. The handful of flour in his pocket he did not disturb.
It was still night when he broke his rest and struggled on. His first fears were gone. In place of them, there filled him now a grim sort of pleasure. A second time he was battling with death for Mélisse. And this, after all, was not a very hard fight for him. He had feared death in the red plague, but he did not fear the thought of this death that threatened him in the big snows. It thrilled him, instead, with a strange sort of exhilaration. If he died, it would be for Mélisse, and for all time she would remember him for what he had done.
When he ate the last bit of his bacon, he made up his mind what he would do when the end came. In the stock of his rifle he would scratch a few last words to Mélisse. He even arranged the words in his brain—four of them—"Mélisse, I love you." He repeated them to himself as he staggered on, and that night, beside the fire he built, he began by carving her name.
"To-morrow," he said softly, "I will do the rest."
He was growing very hungry, but he did not touch the flour. For six hours he slept, and then drank his fill of hot tea.
"We will travel until day, Jan Thoreau," he informed himself, "and then, if nothing turns up, we will build our last camp, and eat the flour. It will be the last of us, for there will be no meat above this snow for days."