I read one of the short stories in this collection, The Vagrants of the Barren. In this tale, the protagonist awakens suddenly two hours before dawn in midwinter to find his cabin ablaze. He escapes with his blanket, his coat, his rifle, his larrigans (footwear), and the clothes on his back, not too bad as he slept almost fully clothed. So that's the setup for a survival tale. The description of the cabin fire sounds like he overloaded the stove instead of starting an overnight fire. Tenderfoot trick. Never explained. All through the story I kept thinking, the author seems to know about woodcraft and survival... but what about that fire... he describes Pete as awakening every hour to build up his bivouack campfire... we do that with our woodstove on the cold winter nights when it's minus 25, but how could Pete have not done that in his cabin... And then he didn't notice a blizzard coming either. The fellow is seriously obtuse.

By the time Pete secures his survival in extremity by spending a day and part of a blizzardly night tracking a herd of caribou, slitting the throat of a collapsed animal only slightly more exhausted than himself, and drinking its blood, I was tired of the whole scenario.