Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank. The thermometer at Dawson had registered seventy-five degrees below zero that morning, but the man did not dwell on such figures. He was new to the land, a newcomer who had arrived that winter, and this was his first season in the far north. He had been warned by the old-timer at Sulphur Creek that no man should travel alone in the Klondike when the temperature dropped below fifty below, but he had laughed at the advice. He was confident in his own strength and judgment.
At his heels trotted a large native husky, grey-coated and without any visible temperament of difference from its brother the wild wolf. The dog knew the cold. Its instinct told it a deeper truth than the man's reasoning could grasp — that it was not a time for traveling, that the invisible threat of the frost demanded shelter and warmth, not this relentless march across the frozen emptiness.
By midday the man had made good progress along the frozen creek bed, stopping once to eat his lunch. He built a fire easily enough then, thawing the ice from his face and warming his fingers. But when he stepped through a hidden spring beneath the snow and soaked his feet to the shins, everything changed. Wet feet at seventy-five below meant danger, and he knew he must build another fire at once.
He gathered twigs and grasses from beneath a spruce tree, working carefully with numbing fingers. The fire caught, small flames licking upward through the kindling. But he had built it beneath the great boughs of the spruce, and the heat disturbed the snow layered in the branches above. A cascade of white came down, smothering the fire completely. He stared at the ruined flames in disbelief.
He tried again, this time in the open, but his fingers were nearly useless now. He pulled out his matches — the whole bundle — and struck them all at once against his thigh. The sulphur blazed and he held the burning cluster to the bark and twigs, but his deadened hands could not maintain their grip. The flame touched his flesh and he dropped the matches into the snow. The last hope of fire died with a quiet hiss.
Panic seized him then. He ran wildly along the creek trail, stumbling and falling, thinking he might run the nine miles to camp. But the cold was patient and absolute. His body could no longer obey his will. He fell for the last time and could not rise.
A strange warmth crept over him. He imagined himself with the boys at camp, warm and comfortable. He pictured them finding his body on the trail the next day. The old-timer at Sulphur Creek had been right after all — no one should travel alone in such cold.
The dog sat nearby, watching and waiting. When the scent of death reached its nostrils, it howled once into the frozen silence, then turned and trotted along the trail toward the camp, toward the other food-providers and fire-providers. The animal knew what the man had refused to learn: that nature does not negotiate, and that survival belongs not to the proud, but to the wise.