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.