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The weather greorse The te thetheir saliva if they spat Often when they woke in the lued their eyelashes together, so they had to warm their eyes before they could open them Snow fell day after day, and when it stopped several weeks into their stay, it was three feet deep and crunching underfoot

That firstwithout blizzard, Jack wasto cook and eat He and Merritt went farther than they had before, staying out longer, and they returned pastand skinning it, Jim asked why he was so cheerful

"I’ve spent another year living in this a world," Jack said quietly He could hardly feel his fingers, and the knife slipped from his hand several times

"It’s your birthday," Merritt said

Jack nodded and shty" He looked up fro sadly at hiain and knew He was the only one of the three of them who, in the depths of their despair and more and more convinced that this winter would be their last, could still find wonder in their surroundings The otherdeath Jack saw beauty

"Happy birthday, Jack," he whispered to hiainst his own earlier advice, and the other two objected vehemently, but Jack would have his way He always carried a rifle, ready to shoot any gah There were snow rabbits and squirrels, but they always avoided his sight once the barrel was pointed their way In truth, though, Jack did not venture out fro was happening to him, and the more it happened, thein love with this wilderness The cold hurt his bones and made his muscles slow and heavy, but inside him a nearmth sparked to life

The landscape was incredible He careat white silence, because if he stood still out in the snowfield, all he could hear was his own breathing and the thudding of his own heart There was not a breath of wind out there, as if the air itself were frozen into immobility The land slept beneath the thick carpet of snow Sometimes it snowed some more, but other tih the sun didn’t rise so high above the horizon, he could see a long way Closing his eyes, standing out in the snow, he always knew from which direction his watcher observed

Because it was still there Jack had grown used to its presence, though never comfortable with it He had not seen the wolf since that incident on the river But here in the wild it felt like an echo of the land, a manifest wildness that observed him perhaps as an invader, and certainly not as an equal He felt exaotten breath exhaled by this place And for so mind, the sensation was curiously welco to take him away The end was ever closer; he understood that as well as his two friends back in the cabin The chances of their surviving were beco starker by the day And he remembered what that vision of his reat white silence, and the spirits will bear witness He watched for this spirit watching hi its eyes

Yet in some ways, Jack was more contented than he had ever been before This is where I belong, he would think as the weeks and ht that perhaps his spirit had always dwelled here in the wild, watched over by the wolf and whatever it represented, and that it had taken eighteen years for his body to find its way here Perhaps that explained his constant wanderlust, and the way he had always felt unsettled, until now He felt whole for the first tireatness of this place, that pleased hiht be one snowflake in a billion, but he was starting to know himself at last

CHAPTER FIVE

AWAKENINGS

ON THE DAY JACK LONDON died for the first ti

He was out on one of his walks Al in the cabin, and they had fallen into a routine Ji while Jack prepared the cabin for the coht nothing, he would prepare asupplies Then they would talk for a while, sometimes over a coffee, and Jack would venture out for his daily walk The two men rarely questioned him about where he went or what he did, and Jack would never tell the co to die The supplies would not last for ht nothing to eat, they’d start groeak The weaker they beca The cold would bite in e in his friends’ eyes when he looked at theether

He struggled to fight off the feeling, but his acknowledge him from the wilderness much closer He looked for prints in the snow and listened for distant howls A cry of death in the great white silence

He had walked up the hillside Far up, with the cabin out of sight below, he had spent so out over the great river valley and trying to iine a world without people It was not a difficult scene to conjure, and the sense of loneliness unsettled hiht of Eliza back at hoht of his mother and wondered whether the house was still hers

And then the blizzard ca its tender prey, the storm broke silently over the head of the hillside and started shedding its load into the valley The first flake drifted down in front of Jack and he glanced up, expecting to see a s the snow-laden branches of the tree above him Another flake landed on his cheek, another on his nose, and then it was snoildly

He was unconcerned at first The way to get back to the cabin was to continue downhill as far as he could, so he was not worried about beco lost They’d had a decent breakfast that day, so his body ar the rabbit meat He carried a rifle

And then he saw the shadow in the snow, passing froht above hi downhill The snow fell more heavily, completely silent and unflustered by even the hint of a breeze He glanced back, but already he could barely seeback every few steps toon him under cover of the snowfall, Jack did not see the hollow scooped froround disappeared beneath him, and for a while he was held in space There was no sensation of falling It was as if the snow bore hi the ied his head against a buried stone

Looking directly up at the lip of the hollow as he blacked out, Jack saw a gray shape leaning over and staring down upon hi from the cold

Yet still you’ll die in the snow, cold…and almost alone

No! he tried to say, but his lips were frozen together

He tried to move, but his arms would not obey his commands He looked down across his body, and it was buried He blinked quickly to clear snow from his eyes His lashes were heavy with ice