l logs and limbs, but the
winds and draughts made scorn of this loose barrier. Her clothes were
fast falling from her body. She essayed crude patchwork with strips of
deerskin and pins of wood, but these efforts were rendered futile by
wear and tear and the rotting of the cloth itself. She began to be
embarrassed when her flesh showed through the rents in her garments;
but Haig, with a mingling of frankness and tact that might indeed have
been less easy in other circumstances, effectually helped her to
banish all false modesty from a situation in which they were reduced
to primitive habits and almost to primitive familiarities.

She was less able to accustom herself to the dirt, from which there
was no escape, but which irked her nevertheless more than all else.
She was no longer able to keep clean in any sense of cleanliness
associated with civilization. Washing with water melted from snow,
without soap or towels, had only the effect, as it seemed to her, to
fix the grime more deeply in her skin. And the hair that had been her
pride had now no more the golden lights in its tawny masses, and was
becoming dark and harsh and sheenless in spite of her most assiduous
attention.

"Don't worry!" said Haig one day, in a grim attempt at humor. "Just
imagine you are a belle of the Eskimos."

"Philip! How can you?" she cried.

"Washing," he went on, "is only another error of civilization. I have
seen whole tribes of most respectable aborigines that never bathed.
And they seemed to be quite happy. It saves a lot of time. But that's
another queer thing. The more time we need, the more we waste it on
matters that are really unimportant. Like most of our attempts to
improve on nature, it costs more than it's worth, and--"

"That will do, Philip!" she protested. "I can forget I'm hungry,
but--ugh! not this!"

But she spoke too bravely about her hunger. Their food by this time
had begun to pall. The good venison, of which they had eaten joyously
at first, became tasteless and then disgusting. They had no salt. The
bacon and the bread had long since been consumed, and the chocolate
also. There was left nothing but the flesh of deer and rabbits. Marion
stewed it, broiled it, baked it under hot ashes; and they even
nibbled at it raw; but the time came when only the relentless pangs of
hunger, the hunger of the animal, the sheer clamor of their stomachs
could force them to eat the nauseating food. In consequence of this
revulsion,