At the sound of her voice an Indian woman came up beside her, looked down at Roscoe for a moment, and then went to the door of the wigwam, speaking in a low voice to some one who was outside.  When she returned a man followed in after her.  He was old and bent, and his face was thin.  His cheek-bones shone, so tightly was the skin drawn over them.  And behind him came a younger man, as straight as a tree, with strong shoulders, and a head set like a piece of bronze sculpture.  Roscoe thought of Ransom and of his words about old Rameses: 

“You will find something in his face which will recall what I have said, and make you think of the First People.”

The second man carried in his hand a frozen fish, which he gave to the woman.  And as he gave it to her he spoke words in Cree which Roscoe understood.

“It is the last fish.”

For a moment some terrible hand gripped at Roscoe’s heart and stopped its beating.  He saw the woman take the fish and cut it into two equal parts with a knife, and one of these parts he saw her drop into a pot of boiling water which hung over the stone fireplace built under the vent in the wall.  The girl went up and stood beside the older woman, with her back turned to him.  He opened his eyes wide, and stared.  The girl was tall and slender, as lithely and as beautifully formed as one of the northern lilies that thrust their slender stems from between the mountain rocks.  Her two heavy braids fell down her back almost to her knees.  And this girl, the woman, the two men were dividing with him their last fish!

He made an effort and sat up.  The younger man came to him, and put a bear skin at his back.  He had picked up some of the patois of half-blood French and English.

“You seek,” he said, “you hurt—­you hungr’.  You have eat soon.”

He motioned with his hand to the boiling pot.  There was not a ficker of animation in his splendid face.  There was something godlike in his immobility, something that was awesome in the way he moved and breathed.  His voice, too, it seemed to Roscoe, was filled with the old, old mystery of the beginning of things, of history that was long dead and lost for all time.  And it came upon Roscoe now, like a flood of rare knowledge descending from a mysterious source, that he had at last discovered the key to new life, and that through the blindness of reason, through starvation and death, fate had led him to the Great Truth that was dying with the last sons of the First People.  For the half of the last fish was brought to him, and he ate; and when the knowledge that he was eating life away from these people choked him, and he thrust a part of it back, the girl herself urged him to continue, and he finished, with her dark, glorious eyes fixed upon him and sending warm floods through his veins.  And after that the men bolstered him up with the bear skin, and the two went out again into the storm.  The woman sat hunched before the fire, and after a little the girl joined her and piled fresh fagots on the blaze.  Then she sat beside her, with her chin resting in the little brown palms of her hands, the fire lighting up a half profile of her face and painting rich colour in her deep-black hair.