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.

I found empty sacks where they'd dragged them a quarter of a mile away." Nobody spoke for a long minute.

It was nothing less than a catastrophe, in the dead of an Arctic winter and in a game-abandoned land, to lose their grub.