Estraven looked at the white pelts. “There’s a week’s room and board for a pesthry-hunter,” he said. “Gone to waste.” He held out one for me to touch. The fur was so soft and deep that you could not be certain when your hand began to feel it. Our sleeping-bags, coats, and hoods were lined with that same fur, an unsurpassed insulator and very beautiful to see. “Hardly seems worth it,” I said, “for a stew.”
Estraven gave me his brief dark stare and said, “We need protein.” And tossed away the pelts, where overnight the russy, the fierce little rat-snakes, would devour them and the entrails and the bones, and lick clean the bloody snow.
He was right; he was generally right. There was a pound or two of edible meat on a pesthry. I ate my half of the stew that night and could have eaten his without noticing. Next morning, when we started up into the mountains, I was twice the sledge-engine I had been.
We went up that day. The beneficent snowfall and kroxet—windless weather between 0° F. and 20°—that had seen us through Tarrenpeth and out of range of probable pursuit, now dissolved wretchedly into above-freezing temperatures and rain. Now I began to understand why Gethenians complain when the temperature rises in winter, and cheer up when it falls. In the city, rain is an inconvenience; to a traveler it is a catastrophe. We hauled that sledge up the flanks of the Sembensyens all morning through a deep, cold porridge of rain-sodden snow. By afternoon on steep slopes the snow was mostly gone. Torrents of rain, miles of mud and gravel. We cased the runners, put the wheels on the sledge, and hauled on up. As a wheeled cart it was a bitch, sticking and tipping every moment. Dark fell before we found any shelter of cliff or cave to set up the tent in, so that despite all our care things got wet. Estraven had said that a tent such as ours would house us pretty comfortably in any weather at all, so long as we kept it dry inside. “Once you can’t dry out your bags, you lose too much body-heat all night, and you don’t sleep well. Our food-ration’s too short to allow us to afford that. We can’t count on any sunlight to dry things out, so we must not get them wet.” I had listened, and had been as scrupulous as he about keeping snow and wet out of the tent, so that there was only the unavoidable moisture from our cooking, and our lungs and pores, to be evaporated. But this night everything was wet through before we could get the tent up. We huddled steaming over the Chabe stove, and presently had a stew of pesthry meat to eat, hot and solid, good enough almost to compensate for everything else. The sledge-meter, ignoring the hard uphill work we had done all day, said we had come only nine miles.
“First day we’ve done less than our stint,” I said.
Estraven nodded, and neatly cracked a legbone for the marrow. He had stripped off his wet outer clothes and sat in shirt and breeches, barefoot, collar open. I was still too cold to take off my coat and hieb and boots. There he sat cracking marrowbones, neat, tough, durable, his sleek furlike hair shedding the water like a bird’s feathers: he dripped a little onto his shoulders, like house-eaves dripping, and never noticed it. He was not discouraged. He belonged here.
The first meat-ration had given me some intestinal cramps, and that night they got severe. I lay awake in the soggy darkness loud with rain.
At breakfast he said, “You had a bad night.”
“How did you know?” For he slept very deeply, scarcely moving, even when I left the tent.
He gave me that look again. “What’s wrong?”
“Diarrhea.”
He winced and said savagely, “It’s the meat.”
“I suppose so.”
“My fault. I should—”
“It’s all right.”
“Can you travel?”
“Yes.”
Rain fell and fell. A west wind off the sea kept the temperature in the thirties, even here at three or four thousand feet of altitude. We never saw more than a quarter-mile ahead through the gray mist and mass of rain. What slopes rose on above us I never looked up to see: nothing to see but rain falling. We went by compass, keeping as much to northward as the cut and veer of the great slopes allowed.
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