“You need a shave,” he told himself.  “You’d scare fits out of anything alive!  Now that we’ve got company we’ve got to spruce up, an’ look civilized.”

It took him an hour to get rid of his heavy beard.  His face looked almost boyish again.  He was inspecting himself in the mirror when he heard a sound that turned him slowly toward the table.  The little mouse was nosing about his tin plate.  For a few moments Falkner watched it, fearing to move.  Then he cautiously began to approach the table.  “Hello there, old chap,” he said, trying to make his voice soft and ingratiating.  “Pretty late for breakfast, ain’t you?”

At his approach the mouse humped itself into a motionless ball and watched him.  To Falkner’s delight it did not run away when he reached the table and sat down.  He laughed softly.

“You ain’t afraid, are you?” he asked.  “We’re goin’ to be chums, ain’t we?  Yessir, we’re goin’ to be chums!”

For a full minute the mouse and the man looked steadily at each other.  Then the mouse moved deliberately to a crumb of bannock and began nibbling at its breakfast.

For ten days there was only an occasional lull in the storm that came from out of the North.  Before those ten days were half over, Jim and the mouse understood each other.  The little mouse itself solved the problem of their nearer acquaintance by running up Falkner’s leg one morning while he was at breakfast, and coolly investigating him from the strings of his moccasin to the collar of his blue shirt.  After that it showed no fear of him, and a few days later would nestle in the hollow of his big hand and nibble fearlessly at the bannock which Falkner would offer it.  Then Jim took to carrying it about with him in his coat pocket.  That seemed to suit the mouse immensely, and when Jim went to bed nights, or it grew too warm for him in the cabin, he would hang the coat over his bunk, with the mouse still in it, so that it was not long before the little creature made up its mind to take full possession of the pocket.  It intimated as much to Falkner on the tenth and last day of the storm, when it began very business-like operations of building a nest of paper and rabbits’ fur in the coat pocket.  Jim’s heart gave a big and sudden jump of delight when he saw the work going on.

“Bless my soul, I wonder if it’s a girl mouse an’ we’re goin’ to have babies!” he gasped.

After that he did not wear the coat, through fear of disturbing the nest.  The two became more and more friendly, until finally the mouse would sit on Jim’s shoulder at meal time, and nibble at bannock.  What little trouble the mouse caused only added to Falkner’s love for it.

“He’s a human little cuss,” he told himself one day, as he watched the mouse busy at work caching away scraps of food, which it carried through a crack in the sapling floor.  “He’s that human I’ve got to put all my grab in the tin cans or we’ll go short before spring!” His chief trouble was to keep his snowshoes out of his tiny companion’s reach.  The mouse had developed an unholy passion for babiche, the caribou skin thongs used in the webs of his shoes, and one of the webs was half eaten away before Falkner discovered what was going on.  At last he was compelled to suspend the shoes from a nail driven in one of the roof-beams.