"I'll make you comfortable first," she answered, "anyhow."
He made an enormous effort, and then with her quick help and with his
back to her knee, had raised himself on his elbows.
"And afterwards?" he asked.
"Build a fire."
"Wood?"
"Down there."
"Two bits of wood tied on my leg--splints. Then I can drag myself. See?
Like a blessed old walrus."
He smiled, and she kissed his bandaged face again.
"Else it hurts," he apologized, "more than I can stand."
She stood up again, thought, put his rifle and knife to his hand for
fear of that lurking wolf, abandoning her own rifle with an effort, and
went striding and leaping from rock to rock towards the trees below. She
made the chips fly, and was presently towing three venerable pine
dwarfs, bumping over rock and crevice, back to Trafford. She flung them
down, stood for a moment bright and breathless, then set herself to hack
off the splints he needed from the biggest stem. "Now," she said, coming
to him.
"A fool," he remarked, "would have made the splints down there.
You're--_good_, Marjorie."
She lugged his leg out straight, put it into the natural and least
painful pose, padded it with moss and her torn handkerchief, and bound
it up. As she did so a handful of snowflakes came whirling about them.
She was now braced up to every possibility. "It never rains," she said
grimly, "but it pours," and went on with her bone-setting. He was badly
weakened by pain and shock, and once he swore at her sharply. "Sorry,"
he said.
She rolled him over on his chest, and left him to struggle to the
shelter of the rock while she went for more wood.
The sky alarmed her. The mountains up the valley were already hidden by
driven rags of slaty snowstorms. This time she found a longer but easier
path for dragging her boughs and trees; she determined she would not
start the fire until nightfall, nor waste any time in preparing food
until then. There were dead boughs for kindling--more than enough. It
was snowing quite fast by the time she got up to him with her second
load, and a premature twilight already obscured and exaggerated the
rocks and mounds about her. She gave some of her cheese to Trafford, and
gnawed some herself on her way down to the wood again. She regretted
that she had brought neither candles nor lantern, because then she might
have kept on until the cold of night stopped her, and she reproached
herself bitterly because she had brought no tea. She could forgive
herself the lantern, she had never expected to be out after dark, but
the tea was inexcusable. She muttered self-reproaches while she worked
like two men among the trees, panting puffs of mist that froze upon her
lips and iced the knitted wool that covered her chin. Why don't they
teach a girl to handle an axe?...
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, that 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. Then--oh Tyburnia and
Chelsea and all that is becoming!--they smoked Trafford's pipe for
alternate minutes, and Marjorie found great comfort in it.
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 snow-heaps 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--a thought matured.
"_No!_"
Trafford had the 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 humour hadn't left him. "It's a treat," he said. "The
hottest thing in Labrador."
"I've been a good squaw this time, old man?" she asked suddenly.
He seemed not to hear her; then his lips twitched and he made a feeble
movement for her hand. "I cursed you," he said....
She 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. Her eyes were open and
the snowstorm overpast, leaving the sky clear, and all the westward
heaven alight with the trailing, crackling, leaping curtains of the
Aurora, brighter than she had ever seen them before. Quite clearly
visible beyond the smoulder of the fire, a wintry waste of rock and
snow, boulder beyond boulder, passed into a 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 nothing, and the sky alive and coldly
marvellous, signalling and astir. She watched the changing, shifting
colours, and they made her think of the gathering banners of inhuman
hosts, the stir and marshalling of icy giants for ends stupendous and
indifferent to all the trivial impertinence of man's existence....
That night the whole world of man seemed small and shallow and insecure
to her, beyond comparison. One came, she thought, but just a little way
out of its warm and sociable cities hither, and found this homeless
wilderness; one pricked the thin appearances of life with microscope or
telescope and came to an equal strangeness. All the pride and hope of
human life goes to and fro in a little shell of air between this ancient
globe of rusty nickel-steel and the void of space; faint specks we are
within a film; we quiver between the atom and the infinite, being hardly
more substantial than the glow within an oily skin that drifts upon the
water. The wonder and the riddle of it! Here she and Trafford were!
Phantasmal shapes of unsubstantial fluid thinly skinned against
evaporation and wrapped about with woven wool and the skins of beasts,
that yet reflected and perceived, suffered and sought to understand;
that held a million memories, framed thoughts that plumbed the deeps of
space and time,--and another day of snow or icy wind might leave them
just scattered bones and torn rags gnawed by a famishing wolf!...
She felt a passionate desire to pray....
She glanced at Trafford beside her, and found him awake and staring. His
face was very pale and strange in that livid, flickering light. She
would have spoken, and then she saw his lips were moving, and something,
something she did not understand, held her back from doing so.