Joe Hines threw wood on the fire, and the three men, wrapped in
their robes, huddled up close to the warmth. Elijah's whiskered
face was matted with ice, as were his eyebrows, so that, what of
his fur garb, he looked like a New England caricature of Father
Christmas.
"You recollect that big spruce that held up the corner of the
cache next to the river?" Elijah began.
The disaster was quickly told. The big tree, with all the
seeming of hardihood, promising to stand for centuries to come,
had suffered from a hidden decay. In some way its rooted grip on
the earth had weakened. The added burden of the cache and the
winter snow had been too much for it; the balance it had so long
maintained with the forces of its environment had been
overthrown; it had toppled and crashed to the ground, wrecking
the cache and, in turn, overthrowing the balance with environment
that the four men and eleven dogs had been maintaining. Their
supply of grub was gone. The wolverines had got into the wrecked
cache, and what they had not eaten they had destroyed.
"They plumb e't all the bacon and prunes and sugar and dog-food,"
Elijah reported, "and gosh darn my buttons, if they didn't gnaw
open the sacks and scatter the flour and beans and rice from Dan
to Beersheba.
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