noon
Anyway , he made up his mind to put out the warning for others if they came that way , and over the dead Indian 's balsam shelter he planted a sapling , and at the end of the sapling he fastened a strip of red cotton cloth -- the plague signal of the north . Than he struck out through the deep snows and the twisting storm , knowing that there was no more than one chance in a thousand ahead of him , and that the one chance was to keep the wind at his back . At the end of his first day 's struggle Billy built himself a camp in a bit of scrub timber which was not much more than bush . He had observed that the timber and that every tree and bush he had passed since noon was stripped and dead on the side that faced the north . He cooked and ate his last food the following day , and went on . The small timber turned to scrub , and the scrub , in time , to vast snow wastes over which the storm swept mercilessly . All this day he looked for game , for a flutter of bird life ; he chewed bark , and in the afternoon got a mouthful of foxbite , which made his throat swell until he could scarcely breathe .