more. All this happened quickly, and before the animal could get away,
he encircled its body with his arms. He sat down in the snow, and in
this fashion held the dog, while it snarled and whined and struggled.

But it was all he could do, hold its body encircled in his arms and sit
there. He realized that he could not kill the dog. There was no way to
do it. With his helpless hands he could neither draw nor hold his sheath-
knife nor throttle the animal. He released it, and it plunged wildly
away, with tail between its legs, and still snarling. It halted forty
feet away and surveyed him curiously, with ears sharply pricked forward.
The man looked down at his hands in order to locate them, and found them
hanging on the ends of his arms. It struck him as curious that one
should have to use his eyes in order to find out where his hands were. He
began threshing his arms back and forth, beating the mittened hands
against his sides. He did this for five minutes, violently, and his
heart pumped enough blood up to the surface to put a stop to his
shivering. But no sensation was aroused in the hands. He had an
impression that they hung like weights on the ends of his arms, but when
he tried to run the impression down, he could not find it.

A certain fear of death, dull and oppressive, came to him. This fear
quickly became poignant as he realized that it was no longer a mere
matter of freezing his fingers and toes, or of losing his hands and feet,
but that it was a matter of life and death with the chances against him.
This threw him into a panic, and he turned and ran up the creek-bed along
the old, dim trail. The dog joined in behind and kept up with him. He
ran blindly, without intention, in fear such as he had never known in his
life. Slowly, as he ploughed and floundered through the snow, he began
to see things again--the banks of the creek, the old timber-jams, the
leafless aspens, and the sky. The running made him feel better. He did