Nor from within the darkened chamber of himself could reality
recrudesce. His years were too heavy upon him, the debility of
disease and the lethargy and torpor of the silence and the cold
were too profound. Only from without could reality impact upon him
and reawake within him an awareness of reality. Otherwise he would
ooze down through the shadow-realm of the unconscious into the all-
darkness of extinction.

But it came, the smash of reality from without, crashing upon his
ear drums in a loud, explosive snort. For twenty days, in a
temperature that had never risen above fifty below, no breath of
wind had blown movement, no slightest sound had broken the silence.
Like the smoker on the opium couch refocusing his eyes from the
spacious walls of dream to the narrow confines of the mean little
room, so Old Tarwater stared vague-eyed before him across his dying
fire, at a huge moose that stared at him in startlement, dragging a
wounded leg, manifesting all signs of extreme exhaustion; it, too,
had been straying blindly in the shadow-land, and had wakened to
reality only just ere it stepped into Tarwater's fire.

He feebly slipped the large fur mitten lined with thickness of wool
from his right hand. Upon trial he found the trigger finger too
numb for movement. Carefully, slowly, through long minutes, he
worked the bare hand inside his blankets, up under his fur parka,
through the chest openings of his shirts, and into the slightly
warm hollow of his left arm-pit. Long minutes passed ere the
finger could move, when, with equal slowness of caution, he
gathered his rifle to his shoulder and drew bead upon the great
animal across the fire.