The winds blew irregularly, sometimes roaring through the cave, and filling it with a whirl of smoke and snow, and sometimes creeping along the floor with the malevolence and stealthiness of a serpent. Marion had blocked up the entrance with small 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."
"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, they were always hungry; and sometimes, in spite of their resolution, they descended to torturing each other with talk of the good things there were in the world to eat.