"We may not have a feast," he said. "But there's hot coffee, and a fire to take away the chill. Come on over closer to it."
Her happy exclamations of surprise and praise amply rewarded all his effort. He felt a slow surge of pride as he watched her crouch close to the fire, warming her hands and face and thin, shivering body. She drank too deeply of the coffee, scalding her tongue, but when she looked up at him, choking and smiling, her drawn face was flushed with color.
There were some things he could do, he thought with renewed determination. There would be other small animals he could trap, perhaps more of them nearer the mountains. There would be a fire each night to give them warmth and to cook their food. He would have to learn to strip the hides of any usefully covered animals so that the hides could be saved and warmer clothes eventually made from them. He would have to learn a lot of things. It would not be easy—but he had made a beginning.
"That was marvelous of you," Ann said, reaching for him with one slender hand, pulling him down beside her.
When he let the fire die later, the sun was well above the horizon and the air was warming.
He felt, at the last, a sense of being cheated.
They had reached the foothills ascending in steps to the great purple vastness of the mountains when Ann collapsed for the first time. Hendley was sure that water could not be far away. The last drop had been squeezed from their canteens two days before. Yet even this conviction of being so close to the desperately needed water did not affect him as much as the tracks on which they had stumbled.
They were human tracks—feet soled in what seemed to suggest smooth leather. The tracks had crossed their path a day before they reached the foothills. They had eagerly followed the apparently purposeful line of the footprints—not a single set of prints, but many, indicating that the trail was frequently used. Their own progress was slow all that day, held back by Ann's weakness. In his excitement over the discovery of the freshly made tracks Hendley had found an untapped core of strength and stamina, and not until Ann stumbled twice late in the afternoon did he become sharply aware of how weak and sick she was.
He had insisted on stopping immediately. Hurriedly he built a fire, before which he made her rest while he scoured the area for fresh roots. From these and the juice squeezed from green plants he made a kind of thick, stringy soup. During the night, in spite of his own deep fatigue, he slept little, watching over Ann anxiously. She kept waking, and what sleep she had was disturbed and restless. He waited several hours after dawn, putting down her objections, before they sat off again.