To Build a Fire 10

From the short story by Jack London

LnR 109 from The Ten Questions ESL Podcast

Listen and Repeat to improve your English pronunciation and intonation.

The man sat up in the snow for a moment and struggled for calmness.  Then he pulled on his mittens, by means of his teeth, and got upon his feet.  He glanced down at first in order to assure himself that he was really standing up, for the absence of sensation in his feet left him unrelated to the earth.  His erect position in itself started to drive the webs of suspicion from the dog’s mind; and when he spoke peremptorily, with the sound of whip-lashes in his voice, the dog rendered its customary allegiance and came to him.  As it came within reaching distance, the man lost his control.  His arms flashed out to the dog, and he experienced genuine surprise when he discovered that his hands could not clutch, that there was neither bend nor feeling in the fingers.  He had forgotten for the moment that they were frozen and that they were freezing more and more.  All this happened quickly, and before the animal could get away, he encircled its body with his arms.  He sat down in the snow, and in this fashion held the dog, while it snarled and whined and struggled.

But it was all he could do, hold its body encircled in his arms and sit there.  He realized that he could not kill the dog.  There was no way to do it.  With his helpless hands he could neither draw nor hold his sheath-knife nor throttle the animal.  He released it, and it plunged wildly away, with tail between its legs, and still snarling.  It halted forty feet away and surveyed him curiously, with ears sharply pricked forward.  The man looked down at his hands in order to locate them, and found them hanging on the ends of his arms.  It struck him as curious that one should have to use his eyes in order to find out where his hands were.  He began threshing his arms back and forth, beating the mittened hands against his sides.  He did this for five minutes, violently, and his heart pumped enough blood up to the surface to put a stop to his shivering.  But no sensation was aroused in the hands.  He had an impression that they hung like weights on the ends of his arms, but when he tried to run the impression down, he could not find it.