He pulled the mitten on hurriedly and stood up.  He was a bit frightened.  He stamped up and down until the stinging returned into the feet.  It certainly was cold, was his thought.  That man from Sulphur Creek had spoken the truth when telling how cold it sometimes got in the country.  And he had laughed at him at the time!  That showed one must not be too sure of things.  There was no mistake about it, it was cold.  He strode up and down, stamping his feet and threshing his arms, until reassured by the returning warmth.  Then he got out matches and proceeded to make a fire.  From the undergrowth, where high water of the previous spring had lodged a supply of seasoned twigs, he got his firewood.  Working carefully from a small beginning, he soon had a roaring fire, over which he thawed the ice from his face and in the protection of which he ate his biscuits.  For the moment the cold of space was outwitted.  The dog took satisfaction in the fire, stretching out close enough for warmth and far enough away to escape being singed.

When the man had finished, he filled his pipe and took his comfortable time over a smoke.  Then he pulled on his mittens, settled the ear-flaps of his cap firmly about his ears, and took the creek trail up the left fork.  The dog was disappointed and yearned back toward the fire.  This man did not know cold.  Possibly all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold one hundred and seven degrees below freezing-point.  But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge.  And it knew that it was not good to walk abroad in such fearful cold.  It was the time to lie snug in a hole in the snow and wait for a curtain of cloud to be drawn across the face of outer space whence this cold came.  On the other hand, there was keen intimacy between the dog and the man.  The one was the toil-slave of the other, and the only caresses it had ever received were the caresses of the whip-lash and of harsh and menacing throat-sounds that threatened the whip-lash.  So the dog made no effort to communicate its apprehension to the man.  It was not concerned in the welfare of the man; it was for its own sake that it yearned back toward the fire.  But the man whistled, and spoke to it with the sound of whip-lashes, and the dog swung in at the man’s heels and followed after.

The man took a chew of tobacco and proceeded to start a new amber beard.  Also, his moist breath quickly powdered with white his moustache, eyebrows, and lashes.  There did not seem to be so many springs on the left fork of the Henderson, and for half an hour the man saw no signs of any.  And then it happened.  At a place where there were no signs, where the soft, unbroken snow seemed to advertise solidity beneath, the man broke through.  It was not deep.  He wetted himself half-way to the knees before he floundered out to the firm crust.