He worked until he was panting for breath, the wind driving the snow harder and harder against him until the cold seemed to have penetrated to the bone. He worked until the monument was too high for his numb hands to lift any more boulders to its top. By then it was tall enough that it should serve its purpose.

He went back to look for Tip, the ground already four inches deep in snow and the darkness almost complete.

“Tip,” he called. “Tip⁠—Tip⁠—” He walked back and forth across the hillside in the area where he thought he had left him, stumbling over rocks buried in the snow and invisible in the darkness, calling against the wind and thinking, I can’t leave him to die alone here.

Then, from a bulge he had not seen in the snow under him, there came a frightened, lonely wail:

“ Tip cold⁠—Tip cold⁠— ”