With their return to the hut, Marjorie had found herself encountering a
new set of urgencies. In their absence that wretched little wolverine
had found great plenty and happiness in the tent and store-shed; its
traces were manifest nearly everywhere, and it had particularly assailed
the candles, after a destructive time among the frozen caribou beef. It
had clambered up on the packages of sardines and jumped thence on to a
sloping pole that it could claw along into the frame of the roof. She
rearranged the packages, but that was no good. She could not leave
Trafford in order to track the brute down, and for a night or so she
could not think of any way of checking its depredations. It came each
night.... Trafford kept her close at home. She had expected that when he
was back in his bunk, secure and warm, he would heal rapidly, but
instead he suddenly developed all the symptoms of a severe feverish
cold, and his scars, which had seemed healing, became flushed and
ugly-looking. Moreover, there was something wrong with his leg, an
ominous ache that troubled her mind. Every woman, she decided, ought to
know how to set a bone. He was unable to sleep by reason of these
miseries, though very desirous of doing so. He became distressingly weak
and inert, he ceased to care for food, and presently he began ta talk to
himself with a complete disregard of her presence. Hourly she regretted
her ignorance of medicine that left her with no conceivable remedy for
all the aching and gnawing that worried and weakened him, except bathing
with antiseptics and a liberal use of quinine.
And his face became strange to her, for over his flushed and sunken
cheeks, under the raw spaces of the scar a blond beard bristled and
grew. Presently, Trafford was a bearded man.
Incidentally, however, she killed the wolverine by means of a trap of
her own contrivance, a loaded rifle with a bait of what was nearly her
last candles, rigged to the trigger.
But this loss of the candles brought home to them the steady lengthening
of the nights. Scarcely seven hours of day remained now in the black,
cold grip of the darkness. And through those seventeen hours of chill
aggression they had no light but the red glow of the stove. She had to
close the door of the hut and bar every chink and cranny against the icy
air, that became at last a murderous, freezing wind. Not only did she
line the hut with every scrap of skin and paper she could obtain, but
she went out with the spade toiling for three laborious afternoons in
piling and beating snow against the outer frame. And now it was that
Trafford talked at last, talked with something of the persistence of
delirium, and she sat and listened hour by hour, silently, for he gave
no heed to her or to anything she might say. He talked, it seemed, to
God....