But there was no way to regulate these chances. A match could only wait and hope, and the thin match waited and hoped with a good courage, resolved to light quickly and burn as clearly and steadily as she possibly could, if ever her chance should come.
Pete, it seemed, had no particular use for the remaining matches in this box. He had, in fact, quite forgotten them. For the box, very weak and wobbly now, had been packed inside the pocket of a jacket which Pete had replaced with a sweater a day out from New York and placed inside a gripsack. Pete was on board a ship now, a ship bound to Labrador, and he was using old-fashioned sulfur matches to light his pipe against the wind up on deck.
It occurred to the thin match that she might never get her chance, even though the box should be resurrected, because she was quite out of sight. Even if someone opened the box again, she was wedged in so tightly that she might not even be seen. Well, there was no use in borrowing trouble! She knew she could not regulate the universe. She could only wait, and so she waited, and waited. . .
It was more than four months before the crushed and battered old box, so worn and greasy now that the printing on the cover could hardly have been read by even the most learned Scandinavian, was brought to light again in Pete's cabin on the upper reaches of the Nasquapee.
It was a desperate day of still cold. The thermometer had sunk and sunk for the past several weeks. It was too cold now for any more snow to fall, but Pete was snowed in.
That sound behind him was the scratching of a lynx's claws, a lynx which had dug down through the snow to the lean-to, braced in with river-bottom rocks—great, flat rocks, outside the hut—the lean-to where Pete kept his spare provisions against this commonest of sub-Arctic set-backs: being snowed in. Pete had plenty of provisions, both inside the hut and out there in the handy lean-to, covered in. The lynx had besieged him now for two daysand nights.
He had plenty of food, and he might have shot the lynx at any time. But he dared not shoot the lynx. He dared not shoot the lynx because he had one cartridge left, and one only. The great ravenous animal, with the deadly hunger-courage of the far North, had utterly put aside all his natural fear of Man. Pete could thrust his rifle against the satiny black fur which showed through the chinks of the hut and blow it to pieces at any time.
But he dared not. He dared not because he had no matches. By a stroke of the wildest ill-fortune he had destroyed a full box, the last box in his store, by omitting to close it before striking one on its side. He had struck it toward the end where the heads were, and they had flared up and burned off to cinders in precisely two seconds. He was relying on that cartridge, that last cartridge, to light the fire. He would have to light it soon. There had not been a live ember since early yesterday morning when the snow that had accumulated above his stone chimney, far above at the outlet, had come pouring down and doused his fire.
He could not kill the lynx and light the fire too. He must choose. And now, crouched on the floor before the cold embers, his back to the lynx, which scratched and scratched, the man, bundled like a great ball in his parka and seal leggings and with his heavy furs about his chilled body, was dully trying to decide what to do.
It was death either way, it seemed. He could only choose between the bloody, riving death at the lynx's claws, or the slower but perhaps no
