Next to invite Adam’s cunning, were the ground squirrels, the trade rats, and the kangaroo rats. He lived off them for days. But they grew so wary that he had to dig them out of the ground, and they finally disappeared. At this juncture a pair of burros wandered into the oasis. They were exceedingly wild. Adam failed to trap one of them. He watched for hours from a steep place where he might have killed one by throwing down a large rock. But it was in vain. At last, in desperation, holding his naked knife in hand, he chased them over stones and through the willows and under the thorny mesquites, all to no avail. He dropped from exhaustion and weakness, and lay where he had fallen till the next morning.
The pangs of hunger now were maddening. He had suffered them, more or less, and then alleviated them with meat, and then felt them grow keener and stronger until the edge wore off. After a few more meatless days the pains gradually subsided. It was a relief. He began to force himself to go out and hunt. Then an exceedingly good stroke of fortune befell him in that he killed a rabbit. His strength revived, but also his pains.
Then he lost track of days, but many passed, and each one of them took something from him in effort, in wakefulness, in spirit. His aggressiveness diminished daily and lasted only a short while. The time came when he fell to eating rattlesnakes and any living creatures in the oasis that he could kill with a club.
But at length pain left him, and hunger, and then his peril revealed itself. He realized it. The desire to kill diminished. With the cessation of activity there returned a mental state in which he could think back and remember all that he had done there, and also look forward to the inevitable prospect. Every morning he dragged his weary body, now merely skin and bones, out to the stream to drink, and then around and around in a futile hunt. He chewed leaves and bark; he ate mesquite beans and cactus fruit. After a certain number of hours the longer he went without meat the less he cared for it, or for living. But when, now and then, he did kill something to eat, then his instinct to survive flashed up with revived hunger. The process of detachment from passion to live was one of agony, infinitely worse than starvation. He had come to learn that starvation would be the easiest and most painless of deaths. It would have been infinitely welcome but for the thought that always followed resignation—that he had sworn to fight. That kept him alive.
His skin turned brown and shriveled up like dried parchment wrinkling around bones. He did not recognize his hands, and when he lay flat on the stones to drink from the stream, he saw reflected there a mummified mask with awful eyes.
Longer and longer grew the hours wherein he slept by night and lay idle by day, watching, listening, feeling. Something came back to him or was born in him during these hours. But the truth of his state eluded him. It had to do with peace, with dream, with effacement. He seemed no longer real. The hot sun, the pleasant wind, the murmur of bees, the tinkle of water, the everlasting processional march of the heat veils across the oasis—with all these things his mind seemed happily concerned. At dawn when he awoke his old instinct predominated and he searched for meat. But unless he had some success this questing mood did not last. It departed as weakness and lassitude overbalanced the night’s rest. For the other hours of that day he lay in the sun, or the shade—it did not matter—and felt or dreamed as he starved.
As he watched thus one drowsy noon hour, seeing the honeybees darting to and fro, leaving the flowers to fly in straight line across the oasis, there occurred to him the significance of their toil. He watched these flying bees come and go; and suddenly it flashed over him that at the end of the bee line there must be a hive. Bees made nests in trees. If he could find the nest of the bees that were working here he would find honey. The idea stimulated him.
Adam had never heard how bee hunters lined bees to their hives, but in his dire necessity he instinctively adopted the correct method. He watched the bees fly away, keeping them in sight as long as possible, then he walked to the point he had marked as the last place he had seen them, and here he watched for others. In half an hour the straight bee flights led to a large dead cottonwood, hollow at top and bottom, a tree he had passed hundreds of times. The bees had a hive in the upper chamber of the trunk. Adam set fire to the tree and smoked the bees out. Then the problem consisted of felling the tree, for he had not the strength to climb it. The trunk was rotten inside and out. It burned easily, and he helped along the work by tearing out pieces of the soft wood. Nearly all the day was consumed in this toil, but at length the tree fell, splitting and breaking to pieces. The hollow chamber contained many pounds of honey.
Adam’s struggle then was to listen to an intelligence that warned him that if he made a glutton of himself it would cause him great distress and perhaps kill him. How desperately hard it was to eat sparingly of the delicious honey! He tried, but did not succeed. That restraint was beyond human nature. Nevertheless, he stopped far short of what he wanted. He stored the honey away in ollas left there by the Indians.
All night and next day he paid in severe illness for the honey of which he had partaken. The renewed exercise of internal organs that had ceased to function produced convulsions and retching that made him roll on the ground as a man poisoned. Life was tenacious in him and he recovered; and thereafter, while the honey lasted, he slowly gained strength enough to hunt once more for meat. But the fertile oasis was now as barren of living creatures as was the naked desert outside. Adam’s hope revived with his barely recovered strength. He pitied himself in his moments of deluded cheerfulness, of spirit that refused to die. Long ago his physical being had resigned itself, but his soul seemed beyond defeat. How strange the variations of his moods! His intelligence told him that sight of an animal would instantly revert him to the level of a beast of prey or a stalking, bloodthirsty savage.