All that day was spent in bringing up fresh boughs and moss for their beds, and in making them against the wall of the cavern where draughts would be the least likely to sweep over them; in bestowing their meager belongings; in hanging the venison from sticks thrust into a crevice in the rock; in finding the best place for the fire that must never be allowed to go down, and in planning the storage of food and fuel.
Marion had no pressing anxiety about food, now that she had brought in her first deer; but fuel was a different matter. To her own appreciation of the problem Haig, that evening after dinner, added some calculations that revealed it to her in its baldest aspects. The morning, too, disclosed another layer of snow upon the valley. The winter was coming on without pity, and each succeeding day would see its lines drawn a little closer round them. There was not an hour, not a moment to be lost.
At dawn she began, with Tuesday and the rope, to haul dead limbs and logs, the largest she was able to handle, going far at first in order to leave the nearest supplies for the last harvesting in deep snow. Under Haig's instructions, she filled all the space in the caves that would not be actually needed for their living quarters. Then she built the logs into a square and solid pile on the platform at one side of the entrance. These were not logs in any formidable sense, being for the most part half-rotted fragments of tree trunks that had long been decaying in the mold. But they were dry now, after the summer, and they made excellent slow-burning fuel. The dead limbs she cut up into small sticks, and filled the interstices of the heap, and all the space between it and the wall of rock. And eventually the whole platform was covered, and the slope on each side, until there was no longer room for Tuesday to mount to it, and barely room for Marion herself.
In the meantime, varying her exertions, she made several trips into the woods for deer. After many disappointments, she succeeded, before the snow became too deep for further expeditions, in bringing back to the cave a splendid buck and three young does. Haig made for her a rabbit snare, and taught her how to set it, and with this device she had the luck to add a dozen rabbits to their store. And all this time she was piling up every stick of wood that she could find space for, even making a great heap at the foot of the slope to be drawn upon before the snow should cover it.
