Labrador (N.L.) -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Love stories, English
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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