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Exposition: setting
Tom Vincent was traveling alone on a "bleak January day". He left Calumet Camp on the Yukon with a light pack on his back on his back, to go up Paul Creek to the divide between it and Cherry Creek, where his party was prospecting and hunting moose.It was sixty -degrees below zero and he had thirty more miles to go, but he didn't mind much. -
Exposition: characterization
Tom Vincent is a "strapping young fellow, big-boned and big-muscled, with faith in himself and in the strength of his head and hands". -
Rising Action
He began eating his biscuit and realized that his hands were freezing from frost bite. -
Rising Action
He sat in the freezing snow. The spirit thermometer at Calumet had registered sixty below when he left, but he was certain it had grown much colder, how much colder he could not imagine. He ate only some of his biscuit. Unlike most other men, Tom did not wear a chin strap to keep warm because it was "feminine"; he never felt the need for one until now. -
Climax
He fell into the freezing cold water. He felt the cold water strike his feet and ankles, and with half a dozen lunges he made the bank. He was quite cool and collected. The only thing he could do was build a fire. -
Falling Action
Along wit htraveling alone, a precept of the North was "travel with wet socks down to twenty below zero; after that build a fire." And it was three times twenty below and colder. -
Falling Action
He knew that great care must be exercised; that with failure at the first attempt, the chance was made greater for failure at the second attempt. In short, he knew that there must be no failure. The moment before a strong, exulting man, boastful of his mastery of the elements, he was now fighting for his life against those same elementssuch was the difference caused by the injection of a quart of water into a northland traveller's calculations. -
Resolution
He sat down and lit a fire. He knew that if he could stand the pain he was saved. He choked with the sulphur fumes, and the blue flame licked the flesh of his hands. Due to the numbness, he could not feel the heat at first, but it burned quickly in through the frosted surface. The odor of his burning flesh was strong in his nostrils. He writhed about in his torment, yet held on. He set his teeth and swayed back and forth, until the clear white flame of the burning match shot up, and he had appli -
Resolution
After a month, he was up on his feet again, although the toes were destined always after that to be very sensitive to frost. But the scars on his hands he knows he will carry to the grave. And he now believes in the precept of the North, "Never Travel Alone."