To Build a Fire

Spitting into the air, the man hears a sharp crackle and realizes that his saliva has frozen before hitting the snow.

This means that it must be colder than fifty degrees below zero.

When he finally reaches Henderson Creek, the man starts walking along the ice.

The creek is frozen to the bottom, but there are some underground hot springs that make little pockets of water in the ice, and it’s very dangerous to get your feet wet when it’s so cold out. 

The man has more trouble this time around because his fingers are so numb he can’t pull a single match away from his pack of seventy. He tears one out with his teeth, but when he tries to hold the lit match to a piece of birch bark, the smoke goes up his nose and almost makes him cough up a lung. For his next attempt, he lights all of his matches at once and just holds them to the kindling by using his hands as stumps.

The fire kindles, but when the man tries to load some more fuel onto it, he breaks up the fire with his clumsy hands and scatters the pieces in all directions. They all go up in smoke, and now the man knows he’s in really big trouble. He starts to wonder if the old-timer from Sulphur Creek might have been right about this never-travel-alone business

He starts to wonder if the old-timer from Sulphur Creek might have been right about this never-travel-alone business.When it seems like he’s out of options, the man gets a crazy idea and starts to look at his dog as if it were a giant mitten. He thinks that if he can kill the dog, he can plunge his hands into its body and warm them until the feeling comes back.Next thing you know, he tackles the dog, only to realize that there’s no way he can kill the animal. He can’t use his hands to grab a knife or strangle the thing, so he gives up and the insulted dog runs forty feet away and stops there to watch the man.The man realizes that there’s a pretty good chance he’s going to die, so he starts running as fast as he can in the direction of the mining camp.

He feels his body heat up at first and grows optimistic. But then he runs out of gas and realizes that he’ll never make it. He feels ashamed for running around like some shmuck, so he decides to meet death with dignity.Lying down in the snow, the man drifts off into sleep.As he dies, he has a vision of himself with his crowd of buddies discovering his own body the next day. Then he thinks of the old timer who warned him against traveling alone, and admits that he was world-class idiot to do so.The man dies.

The dog doesn’t know what’s going on at first, but after it catches the smell of death, it howls for a while and then trots off toward the camp, where it knows it can get food and have a nice fire. And bacon.