Marguerite's hunger pains gradually reveal themselves as labor. On their meager bed, with Damienne attending, she endures wracking contractions, broken waters, and the conviction that she will not survive. Damienne guides the crowning head out with her hands and delivers a small but perfectly formed son. She cuts the cord with sewing scissors, wraps him in bearskin, and helps Marguerite expel the afterbirth. Marguerite names the boy Auguste for his father and vows to keep him warm.

Despite eating the last of their oats boiled into gruel, Marguerite produces almost no milk. Refusing to merely pray, she takes the arquebus and knife and goes out to hunt though still bleeding. Finding no game, she resolves to fish through cracks in the sea ice, using her child's afterbirth as bait. After hours on slick rocks, gashing her arm and losing one of their three precious hooks when her line snaps, she finally lands a cod, which Damienne roasts.

Marguerite fishes daily while Damienne keeps the baby swaddled against her body. Even so, the infant weakens, his cries fading until he scarcely cries at all. Marguerite speaks to him of the coming spring and begs him to live, recognizing his father's watchful eyes. One night his breathing stops and he grows cold in her arms.

Damienne calls him an angel not meant to live, but Marguerite insists he was flesh and blood who starved. She breaks Auguste's cittern, pries off its soundboard, and lays her son curled inside the instrument's bowl. She places this cradle in the second buried trunk, covers it with rocks, and stands armed vigil against animals. Afterward she sinks into grief, refusing food, drink, fishing, or even Damienne's comb, demanding to know why her child was born only to die.