To Build a Fire

what clues helped predict that the man will not make it to camp?

/////

Asked by
Last updated by jill d #170087
Answers 1
Add Yours

"He was a newcomer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter."

_______________________________________________________________

"Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe."

________________________________________________________________

"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 was not deep. He wet himself halfway to the knees before he floundered out to the firm crust."

________________________________________________________________

"He should not have built the fire under the spruce tree."

________________________________________________________________

"...he could not feel it with his fingers, he could hear its crisp rustling as he fumbled for it. Try as he would, he could not clutch hold of it."

________________________________________________________________

"The blazing matches fell sizzling into the snow..."