She rose one morning about nine o’clock. The sky was leaden, as usual, and the wind moaned over the Valley of Arcana. It was cold and dreary in the cave, for she had slept for the past three hours and the fire had died down to a bed of coals. She glanced once at the huddled form under the blankets, then with the wooden shovel moved the drifted snow from the entrance and rebuilt the signal fire outside. Then she made acorn bread—how she hated it!—soaked and stewed jerked rabbit, and laid out on the stone table an array of dried grapes and huckleberries.
When the unappetizing meal was ready she tried to drag the inert man from his blankets, but he muttered and refused to move. So she ate, and afterward made an effort to feed him, but without avail.
She wondered if he was dying. She wondered, too, at her indifference. Surely he would be better dead. Her existence had become a primitive one, and primitive people are wont to look at such things as life and death in a most pragmatic light. But she hated herself again for not worrying over his fate. If he refused to eat, however, what could she do? Dr. Shonto had told her that she would know what to do if the tablets should run out before his return. She knew now what he had meant. She could feed Andy and keep him from freezing—and nothing more!
She left him wrapped in his blankets, breathing huskily, a motionless heap of animal matter. She waded through the snow that had drifted into the trail, which the previous day she had cleared, and sought the waterfall and her friend of the driving spray.
He was there before her, perched upon his stone, bowing and scraping, and bobbing about like a hard working auctioneer. This morning, however, his song failed to cheer her. She wondered if she were going mad. Strange thoughts had been in her mind since she had arisen. She somehow seemed indifferent to what might lie before her. She was dull and apathetic, and it seemed that she almost was as insensible to grief and fear as that vegetated man lying like a dying fish in the Cave of Hypocritical Frogs. She could not cry this morning. With dull eyes she gazed at the antics of the water ouzel, and her thoughts were taken up with a vague wonder of everything—life particularly. She wondered who she was, why she was, what she was—wondered if her past were all a dream—wondered if she had not lived in this deserted valley always, and only dreamed of civilization and a girl called Charmian Reemy.
She must fight this off. She was growing afraid—afraid of herself! She twisted her fingers together in a sudden agony of realization of her plight, as when an unannounced wave of understanding sweeps across the befuddled mind of a drunken man and he knows that he is drunk, and for a moment suffers deep remorse. She rose to her feet to walk about for warmth—
And then the water ouzel bobbed to the surface and flew to his perch; and near the place where he had risen she saw a shining object tossing about in the writhing current.
It was such an unfamiliar object that she stood and looked at it uncomprehendingly. It was about a foot in length, seemed cylindrical, and was unaccountably bright. This brightness had attracted her. It was so out of place in that dull-coloured land.
It was a length of tree limb, she told herself. Some piece of driftwood twelve inches long by three inches in diameter, with the bark slipped off. But what had made the under bark so bright? Was it river slime?
Certainly—it could be nothing else.