Now she was near enough to catch an occasional word, but not discern their thoughts.  It was evident, however, that their conversation was of Ben and herself,—­the same topic they had discussed nights without end.  She caught her own name; once Chan used an obscene epithet as he spoke of their enemy.

Her instincts were true and infallible to-night; and she was ever more convinced of their deadly intentions toward Ben.  It was not wise to announce herself yet.  Perhaps she would have to rely upon a course other than a direct appeal for aid.  Now her keen eyes could see the whole camp:  the three seated figures of the men, their rifles leaning near them, their supplies spread out about the fire.

At one side, quite to the edge of the firelight, she saw a kyack—­one of those square boxes that are hung on a pack saddle—­which seemed to be heaped with jerked caribou or moose flesh.  For the time of a breath she could not take her eyes from it.  It was food—­food in plenty to sustain Ben through his illness and the remaining weeks of their exile—­and her eyes moistened and her hands trembled at the sight.  She had been taught the meaning of famine, these last, bitter days.  In reality she was now in the first stage of starvation, experiencing the first, vague hallucinations, the sense of incorporeality, the ever-declining strength, the constant yearning that is nothing but the vitals’ submerged demand for food.  The contents of the kyack meant life to herself and to Ben,—­deliverance and safety when all seemed lost.

A daughter of the cities far to the south—­even a child of poverty—­rarely could have understood the unutterable craving that overswept her at the sight of this simple food.  It was unadorned, unaccompanied by the delicacies that most human beings have come to look upon as essentials and to expect with every meal:  it was only animal flesh dried in the smoke and the sun.  It not only attracted her physically; but in that moment it possessed real objective beauty for her; as it would have possessed for the most cultivated esthete that might be standing in her place.  This girl was down to the most stern realities, and life and death hung in the balance.

She went on her hands and knees, creeping nearer.  Still she did not make the slightest false motion, creeping with an uncanny silence in the under shrubbery.  And now the words came plain.

“But we must be near,” Chan was saying.  “They can’t be more than a mile or so from here.  We’ll find ’em in the morning—­”

“If he doesn’t find us first and shoot up our camp,” Ray replied.  “I wish we’d built our fire further into the woods.  Here we’ve looked all day without even finding a track except those tracks in the mud.”

“They might be beyond the marsh,” Neilson suggested.

“But Chan went over that way and didn’t find a trace,” Ray objected.  “But just the same—­we’ll make a real search to-morrow.  I believe we’ll find the devil.  And then—­we can leave this hellish country and go back in peace—­if we don’t want to wait for the flood.”