In the minds of us both came a thought new to both--a desire for food.
Never before had we known how urgent is this desire. How few, indeed,
ever really know what hunger is! If our great men, those who shape the
destinies of a people, could know what hunger means, how different would
be their acts! The trail of the lodge poles of these departing savages
showed where they had gone farther in their own senseless pursuit of
food, food. We also must eat. After that might begin all the deeds of
the world. The surplus beyond the necessary provender of the hour is
what constitutes the world's progress, its philosophy, its art, all its
stored material gains. We who sat there under the shade of our ragged
hide, gaunt, browned by the sun, hatless, ill-clad, animals freed from
the yoke of society, none the less were not free from the yet more
perpetual yoke of savagery.
For myself, weakened by sickness, such food as we had was of little
service. I knew that I was starving, and feared that she was doing
little better. I looked at her that morning, after we had propped up our
little canopy of hide to break the sun. Her face was clean drawn now
into hard lines of muscle.
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