Mountain Storms by Max Brand Page A

so that it touches them in no place, and the heavy frost has frozen the outer layer of the snow to an iron-hard consistency. And so their winter house is made.
    While he stands there, motionless, his eye catches on something white as the very snow, and moving like an arrow across its surface. It is a weasel, that fierce little wolf that preys on all small life. It darts past almost across his feet, so intent is the terrible killer on the blood trail across the surface of the pure snow. Instantly he is gone. Tommy looks after him with an involuntary shudder. Then he is into the branches of the tree. No matter that those branches are slippery with ice, no matter that the deft feet of Tommy are burdened with those great, oversized shoes; he is climbing to make a kill, and he will not slip.
    Up he goes. He lies out on the branch, twining his legs around it. He crumbles the first icehouse. Yes, he was right! He wrings the neck of the poor bird and drops it to the ground, and so with the next, so with the third. But the third is smaller. He will carry it down with him. So he thrusts back a fold of the blanket and stuffs it into his coat pocket. Suddenly he thrills with fear. In that pocket are the matches, and they must not be moistened by this wet body.
    He jerks out the bird again, and behold! Down through the air flutters a whole drift of matches that have adhered to its damp feathers. The sharp wind catches them. They blow away in a cloud and disappear among the branches of the next tree.
    Poor Tommy! His heart stopped when he saw that dreadful mischance. He dropped the partridge unheeded. He thrust his hand into the pocket—not a match was left!
    For the moment, he lay there, half stunned by his fortune. All he can see now is how small was that fire that he started to build before he left the cave. Down the tree he drops like a veritable monkey from branch to branch. He falls from the last one upon his face in the snow. But that is no matter. Neither do the precious birds matter to Tommy. Off he started, racing through the snow. If only the fire will last until he reaches the cave.
    But he has come much farther than he dreamed. It seems that he would never be able to cover the distance between. At last, with burning lungs, with blinded eyes, with the blood pounding in his head, he rushes into the mouth of the cave and finds that the floor is black as night. Not one spark of the fire has lived!
    Above it he stands, sick and stunned. There are the small branches lying in a little circle, with their center portions burned away, until they were out of touch with one another, and so the flame died in the cold air.
    Tommy sinks down upon the sandy floor and presses his hands over his face. This, then, is the sentence of death. On raw meat he might live a little time, but without fire he must surely perish.

C HAPTER T WELVE
    H EAVEN -S ENT H EAT
    The miserable days dragged on, and he still lived. He managed, by heaping all the blankets and the tarpaulin upon him, to keep warm enough in the cave so long as he was lying down, but, when he moved around, the cold ate into him venomously. If he had had the proper food, he could have endured well enough, but raw meat was more than his stomach could stand unless he were exercising vigorously, and in that bleak weather he dared not expose himself for long at a stretch. Gradually his strength diminished. A great drowsiness began to grow in him. It spread through his body first—an aching fever, a false warmth broken with fierce spells of shivering and utter cold. Then it reached his brain, so that he wanted to do nothing but lie still all the day in the heap of warmth-giving stuff that he had piled up.
    But, even in his drowsy times, there was an anguish of hunger, a craving for food that he could not have. He found himself wasting with a terrible rapidity. His body grew emaciated. His cheeks sunk. His hands, when he raised them, were wasted to a point that he hardly recognized them.