To-morrow this will be a desolation of snow. There will be snow from
here to Hudson's Bay, from the Bay to the Arctic, and where now there is
all this fury and strife of wind and sleet there will be unending
quiet--the stillness which breeds our tongueless people of the North.
But this is small comfort for tonight. Yesterday I caught a little mouse
in my flour and killed him. I am sorry now, for surely all this trouble
and thunder in the night would have driven him out from his home in the
wall to keep me company.

It would not be so bad if it were not for the skull. Three times in the
last half-hour I have started to take it down from its shelf over my
crude stone fireplace, where pine logs are blazing. But each time I have
fallen back, shivering, into the bed-like chair I have made for myself
out of saplings and caribou skin. It is a human skull. Only a short time
ago it was a living man, with a voice, and eyes, and brain--and that is
what makes me uncomfortable. If it were an old skull, it would be
different. But it is a new skull. Almost I fancy at times that there is
life lurking in the eyeless sockets, where the red firelight from the
pitch-weighted logs plays in grewsome flashes; and I fancy, too, that in
the brainless cavities of the skull there must still be some of the old
passion, stirred into spirit life by the very madness of this night. A
hundred times I have been sorry that I kept the thing, but never more so
than now.

How the wind howls and the pines screech above me! A pailful of snow,
plunging down my chimney, sends the chills up my spine as if it were the
very devil himself, and the steam of it surges out and upward and hides
the skull. It is absurd to go to bed, to make an effort to sleep, for I
know what my dreams would be. To-night they would be filled with this