In the morning he awoke as from the sleep of death.  In his ears were strange sounds.  He did not know where he was, and looked about him stupidly until he caught sight of the frying-pan with the last piece of meat in it, partly eaten.  Then he remembered all, and with a quick start turned his attention to the strange sounds.  He sprang from the blankets with an oath.  His scurvy-ravaged legs gave under him and he winced with the pain.  He proceeded more slowly to put on his moccasins and leave the tent.

From the cache up the hillside arose a confused noise of snapping and snarling, punctuated by occasional short, sharp yelps.  He increased his speed at much expense of pain, and cried loudly and threateningly.  He saw the wolves hurrying away through the snow and underbrush, many of them, and he saw the scaffold down on the ground.  The animals were heavy with the meat they had eaten, and they were content to slink away and leave the wreckage.

The way of the disaster was clear to him.  The wolves had scented his cache.  One of them had leapt from the trunk of the fallen tree to the top of the cache.  He could see marks of the brute’s paws in the snow that covered the trunk.  He had not dreamt a wolf could leap so far.  A second had followed the first, and a third and fourth, until the flimsy scaffold had gone down under their weight and movement.

His eyes were hard and savage for a moment as he contemplated the extent of the calamity; then the old look of patience returned into them, and he began to gather together the bones well picked and gnawed.  There was marrow in them, he knew; and also, here and there, as he sifted the snow, he found scraps of meat that had escaped the maws of the brutes made careless by plenty.

He spent the rest of the morning dragging the wreckage of the moose down the hillside.  In addition, he had at least ten pounds left of the chunk of meat he had dragged down the previous day.

“I’m good for weeks yet,” was his comment as he surveyed the heap.

He had learnt how to starve and live.  He cleaned his rifle and counted the cartridges that remained to him.  There were seven.  He loaded the weapon and hobbled out to his crouching-place on the bank.  All day he watched the dead trail.  He watched all the week, but no life passed over it.

Thanks to the meat he felt stronger, though his scurvy was worse and more painful.  He now lived upon soup, drinking endless gallons of the thin product of the boiling of the moose bones.  The soup grew thinner and thinner as he cracked the bones and boiled them over and over; but the hot water with the essence of the meat in it was good for him, and he was more vigorous than he had been previous to the shooting of the moose.

It was in the next week that a new factor entered into Morganson’s life.  He wanted to know the date.  It became an obsession.  He pondered and calculated, but his conclusions were rarely twice the same.  The first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, and all day as well, watching by the trail, he worried about it.  He awoke at night and lay awake for hours over the problem.  To have known the date would have been of no value to him; but his curiosity grew until it equalled his hunger and his desire to live.  Finally it mastered him, and he resolved to go to Minto and find out.