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.