Mountain Storms by Max Brand

There was a Bible, and there was a copy of Malory, both sadly battered by the packing, but both still readable. To Tommy they were inexhaustible treasures. Malory he knew before in fragments. Now he devoured it whole. As for the Bible, he had felt it to be a great and dreary book fit for old women and Sunday, but, when the conversation-hunger drove him, he opened it perforce—and was suddenly lost in talks of old wars, wild vengeances, strange prophecies, inspired men. There was much of it that he could not follow easily, but he found long passages that were solid entertainment, and many and many a long hour he spent tracing out the words, one by one, with the motion of a grimy little forefinger.
    Grimy Tommy certainly was. Suppose a close look is made of him on the day of his tragedy, that fatal accident that nearly snuffed out poor Tommy’s life. Hunger wakes him. He sits up in the dim twilight of the winter and the cave combined. He lights a fire, groaning and shivering in the cold. The rising tongue of yellow flame shows first a ragged mop of long hair, partly standing on end and partly falling down across ears and neck. He is huddled in a blanket that for the moment covers his body. The firelight gleams on a berry-brown face, thin, with the cheeks, which should be rounded by childhood, as flat and straight as the cheeks of a grown man. His eyes, sunken under frowning brows, glitter with the firelight; keen, blue eyes as restless as the eyes of Madame Grizzly herself.
    Now hunger rouses him. He stands up and goes to the nearest shelf of rock and takes from it two frozen fish, for yesterday he had broken the ice of a pool and had caught several prizes. But suddenly the thought of fish makes his stomach and throat close tight in revolt. He throws them back on the shelf. He steps into a pair of huge shoes—an extra pair of John Parks’s shoes, for his own had worn out that summer. He winds the blanket as deftly as an Indian chief. He goes to the entrance of the cave, rolls a stone back, and steps out onto the crackling, hard, frozen surface of the snow.
    There he stands, breathing deeply of the fresher air, the color leaping up into his cheeks. He is a tall boy for his age—some three inches short of five feet, big-boned, with the promise of great hulk when he is matured—if he may live to maturity. But nine months of solitary life, solitary work and play in the wilderness, have hardened him like leather. The muscles of those lean, long arms have surprising strength.
    He looks about him upon a white world. All the mountains that step away north and east and south are sheeted like ghosts. The plateau is thick with snow, which has blown here and there into mounds and drifts. The level branches of the evergreens are pressed down by thick layers of the heavy snow. A keen wind is blowing. It takes edges of the blanket and tugs them straight out. It pries through the loose folds of the cloth and sends its icy teeth through and through the slender body of the boy. But Tommy only shrugs his shoulders and steps out.
    Yonder he enters the forest. Here the walking is better, for he does not have to wade to his knees through the snow. He needs only to pick a course where the trees have sifted the snow to the side, and where the ground is covered with only a thin layer. But, even so, now and again he steps into a little hollow up to the waist. In half an hour he is wet and freezing cold. But still he shrugs his shoulders and sets his teeth. If he lives to a happier day and a greater strength, the world will have to pay him a heavy toll for all this pain.
    Now he stops short. His keen eyes have seen three little humps of snow and ice thrust up on a branch halfway to the top of a tall tree. He stands watching them intently, making sure. These are three young partridges, he is sure. They have roosted yonder in the early winter. Snow has covered them in a night. The warmth of their bodies has melted the nearest snow,