stefansson-wrangel-09-34-022

18.

much of it at all. Then the boys had come up to her and she
could do nothing except scream and weep, and struggle as they
took her back to the camp, not hurting her, not even touching
her more than was necessary.

A short time afterward that moon cycle was
finished. None since had been quite so bad. But in all
these months, not one of the boys understood more what it
was like to be a woman than he had understood that first
month on the island.

"April 18th.
I saw wood this morning first and then I went
out to the traps but there is nothing and then
this afternoon I clean three foxes skins and I
took four more in so I can clean them tomorrow.
Cloudy and snowing today.”

Like the sick man in the tent, she had been
losing weight these past weeks. It was not for want of food,
there was food enough, rice and sugar, dried vegetables,
canned foods and jam, boxes of biscuits, yeast, and flour
for baking baneks. Even so, she weighed barely a hundred
pounds now, and the weakness that came over her sometimes
was very like Knight’s weakness, not so bad but bad enough.
And yet she was not sick as Knight was sick. The pain and
swelling in her eye, for instance, had been something altogether
different from what Knight had, and was maybe perhaps caused by the
snow glasses she had found, wearing them too much or not often
enough, because looking back in her diary she saw that the
trouble had come upon her only a few days after she discovered
the snow glasses.

Well, of course it was good that there was no