"London, Jack - TO BUILD A FIRE" - читать интересную книгу автора (London Jack)

whether the toes were warm or numb. He moved them inside the
moccasins and decided that they were numb.

He pulled the mitten on hurriedly and stood up. He was a bit
frightened. He stamped up and down until the stinging returned to
his feet. It certainly was cold, was his thought. That man from
Sulpher Creek had spoken the truth when telling how cold it
sometimes got in the country. And he had laughed at him at the
time! That showed one must not be too sure of things. There was
no mistake about it, it *was* cold. He strode up and down,
stamping his feet and threshing his arms, until reassured by the
returning warmth. Then he got out matches and proceeded to make a
fire. >From the undergrowth, where high water of the previous
spring had lodged a supply of seasoned twigs, he got his
firewood. Working carefully from a small beginning, he soon had a
roaring fire, over which he thawed the ice from his face and in
the protection of which he ate his biscuits. For the moment the
cold of space was outwitted. The dog took satisfaction in the
fire, stretching out close enough for warmth and far enough away
to escape being singed.

When the man had finished, he filled his pipe and took his
comfortable time over a smoke. Then he pulled on his mittens,
settled the ear flaps of his cap firmly about his ears, and took
the creek trail up the left fork. The dog was disappointed and
yearned back toward the fire. The man did not know cold. Possibly
all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of
real cold, of cold one hundred and seven degrees below freezing
point. But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had
inherited the knowledge. And it knew that it was not good to walk
abroad in such fearful cold. It was the time to lie snug in a
hole in the snow and wait for a curtain of cloud to be drawn
across the face of outer space whence this cold came. On the
other hand, there was no keen intimacy between the dog and the
man. The one was the toil slave of the other, and the only
caresses it had ever received were the caresses of the whip lash
and of harsh and menacing throat sounds that threatened the whip
lash. So the dog made no effort to communicate its apprehension
to the man. It was not concerned in the welfare of the man; it
was for its own sake that it yearned back toward the fire. But
the man whistled, and spoke to it with the sound of whip lashes,
and the dog swung in at the man's heels and followed after.

The man took a chew of tobacco and proceeded to start a new
amber beard. Also, his moist breath quickly powdered with white
his mustache, eyebrows, and lashes. There did not seem to be so
many springs on the left fork of the Henderson, and for half an
hour the man saw no signs of any. And then it happened. At a
place where there were no signs, where the soft, unbroken snow
seemed to advertise solidity beneath, the man broke through. It