With maniacal laughter Smoke flung it all out on the hardening snow-crust and went back into the blackness.

He dreamed.  The Yukon ran dry.  In its bed, among muddy pools of water and ice-scoured rocks, he wandered, picking up fat nugget-gold.  The weight of it grew to be a burden to him, till he discovered that it was good to eat.  And greedily he ate.  After all, of what worth was gold that men should prize it so, save that it was good to eat?

He awoke to another sun.  His brain was strangely clear.  No longer did his eyesight blur.  The familiar palpitation that had vexed him through all his frame was gone.  The juices of his body seemed to sing, as if the spring had entered in.  Blessed well-being had come to him.  He turned to awaken Labiskwee, and saw, and remembered.  He looked for the food flung out on the snow.  It was gone.  And he knew that in delirium and dream it had been the Yukon nugget-gold.  In delirium and dream he had taken heart of life from the life sacrifice of Labiskwee, who had put her heart in his hand and opened his eyes to woman and wonder.

He was surprised at the ease of his movements, astounded that he was able to drag her fur-wrapped body to the exposed thawed gravel-bank, which he undermined with the ax and caved upon her.

Three days, with no further food, he fought west.  In the mid third day he fell beneath a lone spruce beside a wide stream that ran open and which he knew must be the Klondike.  Ere blackness conquered him, he unlashed his pack, said good-by to the bright world, and rolled himself in the robes.

Chirping, sleepy noises awoke him.  The long twilight was on.  Above him, among the spruce boughs, were ptarmigan.  Hunger bit him into instant action, though the action was infinitely slow.  Five minutes passed before he was able to get his rifle to his shoulder, and a second five minutes passed ere he dared, lying on his back and aiming straight upward, to pull the trigger.  It was a clean miss.  No bird fell, but no bird flew.  They ruffled and rustled stupidly and drowsily.  His shoulder pained him.  A second shot was spoiled by the involuntary wince he made as he pulled trigger.  Somewhere, in the last three days, though he had no recollection how, he must have fallen and injured it.

The ptarmigan had not flown.  He doubled and redoubled the robe that had covered him, and humped it in the hollow between his right arm and his side.  Resting the butt of the rifle on the fur, he fired again, and a bird fell.  He clutched it greedily and found that he had shot most of the meat out of it.  The large-caliber bullet had left little else than a mess of mangled feathers.  Still the ptarmigan did not fly, and he decided that it was heads or nothing.  He fired only at heads.  He reloaded and reloaded the magazine.  He missed; he hit; and the stupid ptarmigan, that were loath to fly, fell upon him in a rain of food—­lives disrupted that his life might feed and live.  There had been nine of them, and in the end he clipped the head of the ninth, and lay and laughed and wept he knew not why.