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Then she laughed, and he made sure that the foot was snug and warm before he went on. Twice in the nest half mile he stopped. The third time, a full mile from the cabin, was in a dense growth of spruce through the tops of which snow and wind did not penetrate. Here he made a nest of spruce-boughs for Celie, and they waited for the day.
He waved his hand to embrace its magnificence, which consisted of a fire, beds of spruce-boughs laid on top of the snow, flies of caribou skin, and wind-shields of twisted spruce and willow withes. "An' these are the bachelors." This time his hand indicated the young men, and he spat a few spoken gutturals in their own language that brought the white flash of acknowledgment from eyes and teeth.
Especially he loved his camp at the end of the day, and in it he saw a picture which he ever yearned to paint and which he knew he would never forget a beaten place in the snow, where burned his fire; his bed, a couple of rabbit-skin robes spread on fresh-chopped spruce-boughs; his shelter, a stretched strip of canvas that caught and threw back the heat of the fire; the blackened coffee-pot and pail resting on a length of log, the moccasins propped on sticks to dry, the snow-shoes up-ended in the snow; and across the fire the wolf-dogs snuggling to it for the warmth, wistful and eager, furry and frost-rimed, with bushy tails curled protectingly over their feet; and all about, pressed backward but a space, the wall of encircling darkness.
Outside a storm was wailing down across the Barrens from the North. He could hear the swish of the spruce-boughs overhead, and those moaning, half-shrieking sounds that always came with storm from out of the North, and sometimes fooled even him into thinking they were human cries. They had seemed more and more human to him during the past three days, and he was growing afraid.
Cutting a quantity of young spruce-boughs she fashioned them into a bed close beside where he lay, and filled all the interstices with springy moss, laying over all a blanket. That done, she turned once more to Stane, to find him with eyes wide open, watching her. "I have set your leg," she said, in a matter-of-fact voice.
Joe drove off around the bay, and Sam headed for Grier's Point, whistling. Next morning he awoke smiling at the sun. Somehow since yesterday the world was made over. As usual he had Grier's Point to himself. His bed was upon spruce-boughs at the edge of the stony beach. Stripping, he plunged into the icy lake, and emerged pink and gasping.
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