Never in his life did Fred feel so unwilling to move. He did not feel cold; he hardly felt anything. All he wanted was to stay as he was and be let alone.
But Macgregor insisted on rousing him, dragged him up, protesting, and rubbed snow on his ears. Fred was very angry, but the scuffle set his blood moving again. His ears were not badly frozen, but the skin came off as he rubbed them. They bled, and the blood froze on as it ran, and made him a rather ghastly spectacle.
DRAGGED HIM UP, PROTESTING, AND RUBBED SNOW ON HIS EARS
Maurice was awakened by the disturbance, and sat up stiffly. He declared that his neuralgia was much better.
They built up the fire again, and sat beside it, shivering. Fred felt utterly incapable either of action or of thought, and even his hunger had grown numbed. Maurice obviously felt no better, and Macgregor, who seemed to retain a little energy, looked at them both with a face of the gravest concern. Presently he rose, put on his snowshoes, took a long pole, and started away with an air of determination.
Maurice and Fred remained sitting by the fire in a sort of lethargy, and exchanged hardly a word. Macgregor was gone almost an hour; then he came back at a run, covered with snow, and carrying a dead hare. He skinned the animal, cleaned it, cut it into pieces, and set it to roast. At the odor of the roasting meat, the boys' appetites revived, and they began to take the fragments from the spits before they were half cooked. The scorched, unsalted meat was even more tasteless and nauseating than that of the grouse, but they all bolted it voraciously, and washed it down by eating snow.
Almost immediately afterward they were taken with distressing cramps and vomiting, which left both Maurice and Fred in a state of weak collapse. Macgregor suffered least, perhaps because he had eaten less incautiously. He alone bore the burden of the rest of that day. He brought wood, kept the fire up, and propped Fred and Maurice up on piles of hemlock branches. There were some small pieces of the hare remaining, and he finally made the boys chew them, and swallow the juice. It seemed to do them good; at any rate, the nausea did not return. Then the Scotchman spoke.
"Look here," he said, "we've got to do it this very night—get back into the cabin, I mean. We've gone almost too far now, and by another day we'll be too weak to move."