midway to his pursuit, losing the trail for him and losing himself.
There were but several hours of daylight each day between the
twenty hours of intervening darkness, and his efforts in the grey
light and continually falling snow succeeded only in losing him
more thoroughly. Fortunately, when winter snow falls in the
Northland the thermometer invariably rises; so, instead of the
customary forty and fifty and even sixty degrees below zero, the
temperature remained fifteen below. Also, he was warmly clad and
had a full matchbox. Further to mitigate his predicament, on the
fifth day he killed a wounded moose that weighed over half a ton.
Making his camp beside it on a spruce-bottom, he was prepared to
last out the winter, unless a searching party found him or his
scurvy grew worse.

But at the end of two weeks there had been no sign of search, while
his scurvy had undeniably grown worse. Against his fire, banked
from outer cold by a shelter-wall of spruce-boughs, he crouched
long hours in sleep and long hours in waking. But the waking hours
grew less, becoming semi-waking or half-dreaming hours as the
process of hibernation worked their way with him. Slowly the
sparkle point of consciousness and identity that was John Tarwater
sank, deeper and deeper, into the profounds of his being that had
been compounded ere man was man, and while he was becoming man,
when he, first of all animals, regarded himself with an
introspective eye and laid the beginnings of morality in
foundations of nightmare peopled by the monsters of his own ethic-
thwarted desires.

Like a man in fever, waking to intervals of consciousness, so Old
Tarwater awoke, cooked his moose-meat, and fed the fire; but more