stefansson-wrangel-09-34-021

17.

April 17 th.

"I was out to the traps today but nothing to
see but nice day. I guess knight is feel
worse he didn’t take tea this evening. He
said he was headach.”

What she had done twenty months ago was swallow
what she believed to be poison.

All the boys had been in the tent that day,
doing one thing or another but it had seemed to her they were
mostly cleaning their guns and sharpening their knives. She
had sat apart wrapped in silence, not working, not moving,
watching them and thinking her thoughts until she could bear
to watch no longer because she knew for certain what they were
intending to do. So she slipped out to the other tent and
there she had come upon a bottle of liniment. Its label may
have borne the words “Fatal If Swallowed” , there was not time
to read it through to make sure, but she tucked the bottle
under her coat before she sat down on a box and used another
box for a table to write a hasty farewell note to Crawford.

She wanted to explain what she was going to do,
and why she must do it, but what are the words to explain a
troubled heart? So what she wrote was that Crawford was to
keep her cherished pencil and also a ring which she had worn
for many years. She put both these articles on the box next
to her note, and left the camp, heading away from the water
toward the distant humps of snow-covered hills

But after walking and walking, the hills were
as distant as before and there behind her, following, came
Crawford and Knight. She had tried to run, but they came on
faster and so she gulped the liniment, but not all of it, not