When at last the wolfish cold of the Labrador night had come, it found
Trafford and Marjorie seated almost warmly on a bed of pine boughs
between the sheltering dark rock behind and a big but well-husbanded
fire in front, drinking a queer-tasting but not unsavory soup of
lynx-flesh, which she had fortified with the remainder of the brandy.
Then they tried roast lynx and ate a little, and finished with some
scraps of cheese and deep draughts of hot water.
The snowstorm poured incessantly out of the darkness to become flakes of
burning fire in the light of the flames, flakes that vanished magically,
but it only reached them and wetted them in occasional gusts. What did
it matter for the moment if the dim snowheaps rose and rose about them?
A glorious fatigue, an immense self-satisfaction, possessed Marjorie;
she felt that they had both done well.
"I am not afraid of to-morrow now," she said at last.
Trafford was smoking his pipe and did not speak for a moment. "Nor I,"
he said at last. "Very likely we'll get through with it." He added after
a pause: "I thought I was done for. A man--loses heart--after a loss of
blood."
"The leg's better?"
"Hot as fire." His humor hadn't left him. "It's a treat," he said. "The
hottest thing in Labrador."
Later Marjorie slept, but on a spring as it were, lest the fire should
fall. She replenished it with boughs, tucked in the half-burnt logs, and
went to sleep again. Then it seemed to her that some invisible hand was
pouring a thin spirit on the flames that made them leap and crackle and
spread north and south until they filled the heavens with a gorgeous
glow. The snowstorm was overpast, leaving the sky clear and all the
westward heaven alight with the trailing, crackling, leaping curtains of
the [v]aurora, brighter than she had ever seen them before. Quite
clearly visible beyond the smolder of the fire, a wintry waste of rock
and snow, boulder beyond boulder, passed into a [v]dun obscurity. The
mountain to the right of them lay long and white and stiff, a shrouded
death. All earth was dead and waste, and the sky alive and coldly
marvelous, signalling and astir. She watched the changing, shifting
colors, and they made her think of the gathering banners of inhuman
hosts, the stir and marshaling of icy giants for ends stupendous and
indifferent to all the trivial impertinence of man's existence! Marjorie
felt a passionate desire to pray.
The bleak, slow dawn found Marjorie intently busy. She had made up the
fire, boiled water and washed and dressed Trafford's wounds, and made
another soup of lynx. But Trafford had weakened in the night; the soup
nauseated him; he refused it and tried to smoke and was sick, and then
sat back rather despairfully after a second attempt to persuade her to
leave him there to die. This failure of his spirit distressed her and a
little astonished her, but it only made her more resolute to go through
with her work. She had awakened cold, stiff and weary, but her fatigue
vanished with movement; she toiled for an hour replenishing her pile of
fuel, made up the fire, put his gun ready to his hand, kissed him,
abused him lovingly for the trouble he gave her until his poor torn face
lit in response, and then parting on a note of cheerful confidence, set
out to return to the hut. She found the way not altogether easy to make
out; wind and snow had left scarcely a trace of their tracks, and her
mind was full of the stores she must bring and the possibility of moving
Trafford nearer to the hut. She was startled to see by the fresh, deep
spoor along the ridge how near the wolf had dared approach them in the
darkness.
Ever and again Marjorie had to halt and look back to get her direction
right. As it was, she came through the willow scrub nearly half a mile
above the hut, and had to follow the steep bank of the frozen river.
Once she nearly slipped upon an icy slope of rock.
One possibility she did not dare to think of during that time--a
blizzard now would cut her off absolutely from any return to Trafford.
Short of that, she believed she could get through.
Her quick mind was full of all she had to do. At first she had thought
chiefly of Trafford's immediate necessities, of food and some sort of
shelter. She had got a list of things in her head--meat extract,
bandages, [v]corrosive sublimate by way of antiseptic, brandy, a tin of
beef, some bread, and so forth; she went over it several times to be
sure of it, and then for a time she puzzled about a tent. She thought
she could manage a bale of blankets on her back, and that she could rig
a sleeping tent for herself and Trafford out of them and some bent
sticks. The big tent would be too much to strike and shift. And then her
mind went on to a bolder enterprise, which was to get him home. The
nearer she could bring him to the log hut, the nearer they would be to
supplies.
She cast about for some sort of sledge. The snow was too soft and broken
for runners, especially among the trees, but if she could get a flat of
smooth wood, she thought she might be able to drag him. She decided to
try the side of her bunk, which she could easily get off. She would
have, of course, to run it edgewise through the thickets and across the
ravine, but after that she would have almost clear going up to the steep
place of broken rocks within two hundred yards of him. The idea of a
sledge grew upon her, and she planned to nail a rope along the edge and
make a kind of harness for herself.
Marjorie found the camping-place piled high with drifted snow, which had
invaded tent and hut, and that some beast, a wolverine she guessed, had
been into the hut, devoured every candle-end and the uppers of
Trafford's well-greased second boots, and had then gone to the corner of
the store-shed and clambered up to the stores. She took no account of
its [v]depredations there, but set herself to make a sledge and get her
supplies together. There was a gleam of sunshine, though she did not
like the look of the sky and she was horribly afraid of what might be
happening to Trafford. She carried her stuff through the wood and across
the ravine, and returned for her improvised sledge. She was still
struggling with that among the trees when it began to snow again.
It was hard then not to be frantic in her efforts. As it was, she packed
her stuff so loosely on the planking that she had to repack it, and she
started without putting on her snowshoes, and floundered fifty yards
before she discovered that omission. The snow was now falling fast,
darkling the sky and hiding everything but objects close at hand, and
she had to use all of her wits to determine her direction: she knew she
must go down a long slope and then up to the ridge, and it came to her
as a happy inspiration that if she bore to the left she might strike
some recognizable vestige of her morning's trail. She had read of people
walking in circles when they have no light or guidance, and that
troubled her until she bethought herself of the little compass on her
watch chain. By that she kept her direction. She wished very much she
had timed herself across the waste, so that she could tell when she
approached the ridge.
Soon her back and shoulders were aching violently, and the rope across
her chest was tugging like some evil-tempered thing. But she did not
dare to rest. The snow was now falling thick and fast; the flakes traced
white spirals and made her head spin, so that she was constantly falling
away to the southwestward and then correcting herself by the compass.
She tried to think how this zig-zagging might affect her course, but the
snow whirls confused her mind and a growing anxiety would not let her
pause to think.
Marjorie felt blinded; it seemed to be snowing inside her eyes so that
she wanted to rub them. Soon the ground must rise to the ridge, she told
herself; it must surely rise. Then the sledge came bumping at her heels
and she perceived that she was going down hill. She consulted the
compass and found she was facing south. She turned sharply to the right
again. The snowfall became a noiseless, pitiless torture to sight and
mind.
The sledge behind her struggled to hold her back, and the snow balled
under her snowshoes. She wanted to stop and rest, take thought, sit for
a moment. She struggled with herself and kept on. She tried walking with
shut eyes, and tripped and came near sprawling. "Oh God!" she cried, "Oh
God!" too stupefied for more [v]articulate prayers. She was leaden with
fatigue.
Would the rise of the ground to the ribs of rock never come?
A figure, black and erect, stood in front of her suddenly, and beyond
appeared a group of black, straight antagonists. She staggered on toward
them, gripping her rifle with some muddled idea of defense, and in
another moment she was brushing against the branches of a stunted fir,
which shed thick lumps of snow upon her feet. What trees were these? Had
she ever passed any trees? No! There were no trees on her way to
Trafford.
At that Marjorie began whimpering like a tormented child. But even as
she wept, she turned her sledge about to follow the edge of the wood.
She was too much downhill, she thought, and must bear up again.
She left the trees behind, made an angle uphill to the right, and was
presently among trees again. Again she left them and again came back to
them. She screamed with anger and twitched her sledge along. She wiped
at the snowstorm with her arm as though to wipe it away; she wanted to
stamp on the universe.
And she ached, she ached.
Suddenly something caught her eye ahead, something that gleamed; it was
exactly like a long, bare, rather pinkish bone standing erect on the
ground. Just because it was strange and queer she ran forward to it. As
she came nearer, she perceived that it was a streak of barked trunk; a
branch had been torn off a pine tree and the bark stripped down to the
root. And then came another, poking its pinkish wounds above the snow.
And there were chips! This filled her with wonder. Some one had been
cutting wood! There must be Indians or trappers near, she thought, and
of a sudden realized that the wood-cutter could be none other than
herself.
She turned to the right and saw the rocks rising steeply, close at hand.
"Oh Ragg!" she cried, and fired her rifle in the air.
Ten seconds, twenty seconds, and then so loud and near it amazed her,
came his answering shot.
In another moment Marjorie had discovered the trail she had made
overnight and that morning by dragging firewood. It was now a shallow,
soft white trench. Instantly her despair and fatigue had gone from her.
Should she take a load of wood with her? she asked herself, in addition
to the weight behind her, and immediately had a better idea. She would
unload and pile her stuff here, and bring him down on the sledge closer
to the wood. The woman looked about and saw two rocks that diverged,
with a space between. She flashed schemes. She would trample the snow
hard and flat, put her sledge on it, pile boughs and make a canopy of
blanket overhead and behind. Finally there would be a fine, roaring
fire in front.
She tossed her provisions down and ran up the broad windings of her
pine-tree trail to Trafford, with the sledge bumping behind her.
Marjorie ran as lightly as though she had done nothing that day.
She found Trafford markedly recovered, weak and quiet, with snow
drifting over his feet, his rifle across his knees, and his pipe alight.
"Back already"--