He was mistaken in this, however. The pain still sent its fearful messages to his brain, but in his growing stupor he was no longer aware of them. Even his hand didn't hurt him now. He wondered if it were frozen; yet it was still sensitive to the depressions in the drifts. It could still grope through the snow and find the tracks. "I can't go on!" his voice suddenly spoke aloud. "I can't go--any more." The words seemed to come from an inner man, without volition on his part. He was a little amazed to hear them. Yet the time had not yet come to stop and rest. The tracks still led him on. Always, it seemed to him, he had to grope longer to find the indentations in the snow. The simple reason was that the motor centers of his brain had begun to be impaired by cold and exhaustion, and he could no longer walk in a straight line. He found out, however, that the trail usually lay to the right rather than to his left. He was taking a shorter step with his left than with his right--the same tendency that often makes a tried woodsman walk in a great circle--and he thus bore constantly to the left. Soon it became necessary to drop his formula down to six, then to the original five. On and on, through the long hours. But the fight was almost done. Exhaustion and hunger, but cold most of all, were swiftly breaking him down. He advanced with staggering steps. The indentations were more shallow now. The point where he had begun to break through the snow crust, because of the softening snow, was passed long ago: only because he was in a valley sheltered from the wind were the tracks manifest at all. The time came at last when he could no longer get upon his feet. And now, like a Tithonus who could not die, he crawled along the snowshoe trail on is hands and knees. "I can't go on," he told himself. "I'm through!" Yet always his muscles made one movement more. Suddenly he missed the trail. His hand groped in vain over the white crust. He crept on a few more feet, then as ever, began to circle. Soon his hand found an indentation in the snow crust, and he started to creep forward again. But slowly the conviction grew upon him that he was crawling in a small circle,--the very circle he had just made. Some way, he had missed the snowshoe trail. He did not remember how on his journey out he had once been obliged to backtrack a hundred yards and start on at a new angle. He had merely come to that point from which he had turned back. He could not find the trail because he was at its end. He could not remember that it was his own trail. How he came here, his purpose and his destination, were all lost and forgotten in the intricate mazes of the past. He had but one purpose, one theme,--to keep to his trail an journey on. He would make a bigger circle. He started to creep forward in the snow.