The Fist of the First Men is a great hill in the haunted forest, ringed by an ancient ringwall of tumbled stone that the First Men are said to have raised in the Dawn Age as a redoubt against their enemies. When Lord Commander Jeor Mormont led the Great Ranging north out of Castle Black in search of the missing First Ranger, Benjen Stark, and to learn the truth of the gathering wildlings, he made his camp upon the Fist and set his men to shoring up the old defenses. For a time the high ground and the ancient stones seemed a soldier's blessing. The Old Bear caution that no ranging in living memory had gone so far north with so many swords, three hundred men of the Watch in all, yet still he felt the cold pressing in, and ordered dragonglass daggers unearthed from a buried cache within the ring.
The blow, when it fell, came not by day but in the dead of a snow-blind night. The Others and their risen dead came up the slopes in silence out of a storm, and the horns of the watchmen sounded two blasts and then three, the ancient call that men had not heard in eight thousand years. What followed was less a battle than a slaughter in the dark. Wights that had once been sworn brothers rose again to fall upon the living, and the cold slew as surely as any blade. The brotherhood was scattered, its order broken, its dead uncountable in the confusion of drifts and darkness.
Those who lived through that night fought their way clear in ragged bands and turned south with the enemy at their heels. Of the three hundred who had ridden out, barely a third would win back to the Wall, and many of those only after further trials in the wilderness. The maesters reckon the disaster at the Fist the worst calamity to befall the Night's Watch beyond the Wall since the days of the Long Night, and the first clear proof, to those who would believe it, that the Others had woken again in the lands of always winter.