A long thorn of palo-verde served him for a knife in dressing them, and he cooked them in the earth, with hot stones, laying each fish between the split halves of broad lobes of the prickly pear. They were insipid, and full of bones, but they served to satisfy his hunger.
He decided to keep a record of the days that he should spend in this place; by sticking palo-verde thorns into an out-reaching branch of willow, near the pool. He would stick in a thorn for each day. He cursed the first one, as he thrust it against the wood; because he felt powerless to do anything else.
Following, half sullenly, a mere human instinct to be busy about something, he set about making a knife from the smallest plate of the buggy-spring. He heated it in his fire till the paint came off, broke it in two and spent the day working one thin end down to a cutting edge, on a big, rough boulder. By night he had six inches of blade with one rounded, sharp end.
He used this, next day, to cut ocotilla-stalks, to make a bed, scraping away the thorns with sharp stones. He worked all day; less because he wanted a bed than because he dimly realized that sanity lay in occupation. That night he set a snare, and before morning managed to catch a cotton-tail which he dressed and roasted for his breakfast.
He was getting over the feeling of being hunted. They would not search for him now, he reasoned; they must feel satisfied that he had died in the cloudburst. He bathed in the pool that day, when the sun was high, and set about constructing a fireplace against the big boulder. This would make fire-keeping easier.
The days slipped into weeks. Little by little the man was adapting himself to his environment. He learned to dry the mesquite beans and grind them between stones into a coarse flour. This he made into little cakes, which he baked upon a flat stone before the fire. Later, he turned over a patch of earth, watered it, and sowed it with the oats he had saved from the storm. Now, however, his food was the mesquite, the prickly pear, the century plant, and the fish and small game that he managed to catch.
As he grew stronger he fashioned himself a bow of oak, shaping and smoothing it with his rough knife, and stringing it with fibres from the century plant. His shafts were those of the desert Indians, the arrow weeds growing close at hand, and he tipped them with the cruel, steel-hard dagger-points of the yucca.
With this primitive weapon he gradually grew skilful; and at last he shot a buck, as the creature came down to the pool one night, to drink. He dried the meat, and used the skin, when he had made it ready, as a covering for his bed.
Twice, during the winter, the camel came back to the pool. The creature went as it came, silent, inscrutable. Whither it went Gard did not know; the pool was evidently one of its ports of call while going to and fro on the mysterious business of being a camel. It accepted the man as a matter of course, and left him, when ready, with the indifference of fate, though Gard could have begged it on bended knees, to remain.
He was horribly lonely, with nothing but his hate, and a sick longing for vengeance upon life, to bear him company. There were days when he cursed the chance that had kept his worthless hulk alive, while sending Arnold, in all his strength, down to death. He had no doubt but that the deputy had perished. Nothing could ever have come, alive, through the rush of water into which he had been flung.