"Quonab, your face is frozen," he said.
"So is yours," was the reply.
Now they turned aside, followed a hollow until they reached a
spruce grove, where they camped and took an observation, to learn
that the compass and they held widely different views about the
direction of travel. It was obviously useless to face the storm.
They rubbed out their frozen features with dry snow and rested by
the fire.
No good scout seeks for hardship; he avoids the unnecessary trial
of strength and saves himself for the unavoidable. With zero
weather about them and twenty-four hours to wait in the storm,
the scouts set about making themselves thoroughly comfortable.
With their snowshoes they dug away the snow in a circle a dozen
feet across, piling it up on the outside so as to make that as
high as possible. When they were
down to the ground, the wall of snow around them was five feet
high. Now they went forth with the hatchets, cut many small
spruces, and piled them against the living spruces about the camp
till there was a dense mass of evergreen foliage ten feet high
around them, open only at the top, where was a space five feet
across.
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