‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I said.
‘It was my fault. I should have known.’ She gazed dully round her at the snow-covered camp site. “There’s no sign of a fire,’ she said. ‘He hadn’t even a fire to keep him warm. Oh, God!’ she breathed. And then she was staring up at me, her eyes wide in the pallor of her face. ‘Why did Albert do it?’ she cried. ‘Why did he leave him here? And then to say he was dead!’ Speaking of Laroche seemed to remind her of what she’d done. ‘Have I killed him?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s still alive. But we’ve got to get a fire going and some bandages.’ And then, because she was looking down at the corpse of her father again, lost to everything but her own misery, I caught hold of her arm and dragged her roughly to her feet. ‘Pull yourself together, Paule,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing you can do here.’
‘No — nothing.’ And she seemed suddenly to collapse inside. ‘It’s all so terrible,’ she cried, and she began to sob, wildly and uncontrollably.
I shook her violently, but she didn’t stop, and because I didn’t know what else to do, I left her there and went up into the trees and began to hack down branches, building them into a great pile in the shelter of the rocks. And after a while Darcy came and helped me. ‘I’ve patched him up as best I can,’ he said.
‘Will he live?’ I asked.
‘How the hell do I know?’ he growled. ‘Will any of us live, if it comes to that?’ And he set a match to some dry twigs he’d gathered and nursed the little flicker of flame to life, kneeling in the snow and blowing on it gently till the branches of the jackpine steamed and finally smouldered into a crackling flame.
It was only then that I looked round to see what had happened to Paule. She had left her father and was kneeling beside Laroche in nothing but her bush shut. She had used her parka and her sweater to cover him and keep him warm, and the sight of her there reminded me of what she had said to me when we were alone beside that camp fire. She had half-killed the man, yet she still loved him. Whatever he had done, she still loved him, and the knowledge brought a lump to my throat, for it was such a terrible twist of fate.
As soon as the fire was blazing, we carried Laroche down to it and laid him on a bed of pine branches and dried moss close against the rocks so that the heat of the fire would be reflected to form a pocket of warmth. At least he wouldn’t die of shock through exposure to cold. But when I said this to Darcy, he gave me a hard, calculating look. ‘That’s a matter we’ve got to decide tonight,’ he said in an odd voice.
‘How do you mean?’
He glanced round quickly to see that Paule wasn’t listening. ‘We can’t carry him back and we’ve food for only one day. That’s all Paule and I brought with us. If we stay here with him, we all die.’
‘There’s the radio,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’ He gave a sceptical grunt. ‘It’d need a skilled operator to get that thing working. It’s been out in the open for days. Even when it was under cover, Briffe only managed to get that one message through.’ And he added, ‘The chances of being able to raise anyone on that set are about as remote as the chances of a plane happening to fly over and see us here. Still …’ He hesitated. ‘It’s a pity Paule didn’t do the job properly whilst she was about it.’ And with that he turned abruptly away and went over to where Paule was searching in the snow beside her father’s body.
She straightened up just as he reached her, and she had a rusted tin box in her hand. ‘I found it,’ she said. ‘I knew it must be here, because of that bandage round my father’s hand.’
It was the first-aid box she’d found, and though all the bandages had gone from it and the morphia had been used, there was still some lint and gauze left and a bottle of antiseptic. With these, and strips torn from a clean vest, she bandaged wounds, whilst Darcy and I brought the radio set up close to the fire. I cranked the handle of the generator, whilst he kept his fingers on the leads, but there was no sign of life. ‘It’s the damp,’ I said.
‘Sure it’s the damp.’
‘It’ll be all right when it’s had time to dry out.’
‘Think so?’ He stared at me. ‘It’ll dry outside. But it’s the inside we got to dry. Shut up in that tin box the works will just steam like they were in the tropics. Course, if you happen to have a screwdriver on you so that we can open it up — ?’
‘No, I haven’t got a screwdriver,” I said.
He laughed. ‘I didn’t think you had.’ He peered morosely at the generator. ‘Looks to me like it needs a whole work bench full of tools the condition it’s got into; certainly we’d need a spanner for those nuts.’
‘Isn’t that water ready yet?’ Paule asked.
Darcy lifted the lid of the smoke-blackened kettle he’d filled with snow and hung over the fire. ‘Just coming up,’ he said.
‘If we could find an old tin or something -1 want to get him warm.’ She had got Laroche’s boots off and was pulling her own down sleeping-bag up over his legs.
Darcy got to his feet. ‘I’ll see what I can find. There’ll be something around here that we can use.’
‘I was on the point of following him, but Paule stopped me. ‘Help me lift him, please.’
Between us we got Laroche into the sleeping-bag, and when it was done, she sat back on her haunches and stared at the white, bloodless face. ‘Ian — what are we to do?’ She was suddenly looking at me, her small face set in a tragic mask. ‘I couldn’t help myself,’ she murmured. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’
There was nothing I could say that would help her and I turned away and stared into the hot heart of the fire. We had warmth at least — so long as we had the energy to cut wood and keep the fire going. But it wouldn’t last. She knew that. Gradually we’d weaken through lack of food the way her father had and then the end would come in a blizzard of snow or in the cold of the night. I thought of Dumaine then and what he’d gone through. But he’d got out in the end and so had Pierre Laroche. There wasn’t much chance for us. ‘Maybe we’ll get the radio working,’ I said.
But she didn’t believe that either and she squatted there, quite still, watching Darcy picking over the pitiful remains of her father’s last camp like a tramp going over a refuse heap. ‘I shall stay here,’ she said at last in a small, tight voice. ‘Whatever happens I shall stay with him.’
‘Even though he left your father to die?’ I didn’t look at her as I said that.
‘Yes — even though he killed him,’ she breathed. ‘There is nothing else for me now.’ And after a moment she asked, ‘Do you think you and Ray could get back to the Tote Road — just the two of you?’
‘We could try.’ And I knew as I said it that I’d accepted the fact that she wouldn’t be coming with us.
‘If you started at dawn tomorrow… Per’aps, if the weather is good, you will make it in less time.’ But she said it without conviction. She was thinking of the muskeg and the weight of the canoe which we should have to carry if we were to cross those open stretches of water. ‘You must help him as much as you can.’ Her hand touched mine. ‘Ray is very tired, though he tries to hide it. He is not a young man like you, Ian.’ And she added, ‘I am not thinking of myself, or of Albert. For us, this is the end. But I would like to be sure that you two will get out alive. The knowledge that you will both be safe will make it — easier for me.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.
She gave my hand a little squeeze. ‘I wish my father had known you.’ She smiled, a barely perceptible movement of the lips that left her eyes still empty. She let go my hand then and went to her pack and took out a small tin of Bovril and a metal flask.
She was mixing the hot drink in her own tin mug when Darcy returned. ‘This do you?’ he said, and placed a rusted oil can beside her. She nodded and then she was bending over Laroche, lifting his head and trying to force a little of the hot liquid between his teeth.