Finally, having lashed the tent bottom to the protruding willow tops, by grace of heavy lifting they strained their flapping shelter up sufficiently to crawl within.

“By Gar!  She’s blow hup ver’ queeck,” yelled Pierre, as he set the ten-pound sheet-iron stove, its pipe swaying drunkenly with the heaving tent.

“Good t’ing she hit us in the brush.”  He spoke as calmly as though danger was distant, and a moment later the little box was roaring with its oil-soaked kindlings.

“Will this stove burn green willow tops?” cried Willard.

“Sure!  She’s good stove.  She’ll burn hicicles eef you get ’im start one times.  See ’im get red?”

They rubbed the stiff spots from their cheeks, then, seizing the axe, Willard crawled forth into the storm and dug at the base of the gnarled bushes.  Occasionally a shrub assumed the proportions of a man’s wrist—­but rarely.  Gathering an armful, he bore them inside, and twisting the tips into withes, he fed the fire.  The frozen twigs sizzled and snapped, threatening to fail utterly, but with much blowing he sustained a blaze sufficient to melt a pot of snow.  Boiling was out of the question, but the tea leaves became soaked and the bacon cauterized.

Pierre freed and fed the dogs.  Each gulped its dried salmon, and, curling in the lee of the tent, was quickly drifted over.  Next he cut blocks from the solid bottom snow and built a barricade to windward.  Then he accumulated a mow of willow tops without the tent-fly.  All the time the wind drew down the valley like the breath of a giant bellows.

“Supper,” shouted Willard, and as Pierre crawled into the candle-light he found him squatted, fur-bundled, over the stove, which settled steadily into the snow, melting its way downward toward a firmer foundation.

The heat was insufficient to thaw the frozen sweat in his clothes; his eyes were bleary and wet from smoke, and his nose needed continuous blowing, but he spoke pleasantly, a fact which Pierre noted with approval.

“We’ll need a habeas corpus for this stove if you don’t get something to hold her up, and I might state, if it’s worthy of mention, that your nose is frozen again.”

Pierre brought an armful of stones from the creek edge, distributing them beneath the stove on a bed of twisted willows; then swallowing their scanty, half-cooked food, they crawled, shivering, into the deerskin sleeping-bags, that animal heat might dry their clammy garments.

Four days the wind roared and the ice filings poured over their shelter while they huddled beneath.  When one travels on rations delay is dangerous.  Each morning, dragging themselves out into the maelstrom, they took sticks and poked into the drifts for dogs.  Each animal as found was exhumed, given a fish, and became straightway reburied in the whirling white that seethed down from the mountains.

On the fifth, without warning, the storm died, and the air stilled to a perfect silence.