At last, when he could endure no more, he jerked his hands apart.  The blazing matches fell sizzling into the snow, but the birch-bark was alight.  He began laying dry grasses and the tiniest twigs on the flame.  He could not pick and choose, for he had to lift the fuel between the heels of his hands.  Small pieces of rotten wood and green moss clung to the twigs, and he bit them off as well as he could with his teeth.  He cherished the flame carefully and awkwardly.  It meant life, and it must not perish.  The withdrawal of blood from the surface of his body now made him begin to shiver, and he grew more awkward.  A large piece of green moss fell squarely on the little fire.  He tried to poke it out with his fingers, but his shivering frame made him poke too far, and he disrupted the nucleus of the little fire, the burning grasses and tiny twigs separating and scattering.  He tried to poke them together again, but in spite of the tenseness of the effort, his shivering got away with him, and the twigs were hopelessly scattered.  Each twig gushed a puff of smoke and went out.  The fire-provider had failed.  As he looked apathetically about him, his eyes chanced on the dog, sitting across the ruins of the fire from him, in the snow, making restless, hunching movements, slightly lifting one forefoot and then the other, shifting its weight back and forth on them with wistful eagerness.

The sight of the dog put a wild idea into his head.  He remembered the tale of the man, caught in a blizzard, who killed a steer and crawled inside the carcass, and so was saved.  He would kill the dog and bury his hands in the warm body until the numbness went out of them.  Then he could build another fire.  He spoke to the dog, calling it to him; but in his voice was a strange note of fear that frightened the animal, who had never known the man to speak in such way before.  Something was the matter, and its suspicious nature sensed danger,—­it knew not what danger but somewhere, somehow, in its brain arose an apprehension of the man.  It flattened its ears down at the sound of the man’s voice, and its restless, hunching movements and the liftings and shiftings of its forefeet became more pronounced but it would not come to the man.  He got on his hands and knees and crawled toward the dog.  This unusual posture again excited suspicion, and the animal sidled mincingly away.

The man sat up in the snow for a moment and struggled for calmness.  Then he pulled on his mittens, by means of his teeth, and got upon his feet.  He glanced down at first in order to assure himself that he was really standing up, for the absence of sensation in his feet left him unrelated to the earth.  His erect position in itself started to drive the webs of suspicion from the dog’s mind; and when he spoke peremptorily, with the sound of whip-lashes in his voice, the dog rendered its customary allegiance and came to him.  As it came within reaching distance,