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.  Her limbs lay straight and clean before her as she sat, her hands lying in her lap as she looked out across the plains.  Her eyes were still brown and clear, her figure still was that of woman; she was still sweet to look upon, but her cheeks were growing hollow.  I said to myself that she suffered, that she needed food.  Upon us rested the fate of the earth, as it seemed to me.  Unless presently I could arise and kill meat for her, then must the world roll void through the ether, unpeopled ever more.

It was at that time useless for us to think of making our way to any settlements or any human aid.  The immediate burden of life was first to be supported.  And yet we were unable to go out in search of food.  I know not what thoughts came to her mind as we sat looking out on the pictures o; the mirage which the sun was painting on the desert landscape.  But, finally, as we gazed, there seemed, among these weird images, one colossal tragic shape which moved, advanced, changed definitely.  Now It stood in giant stature, and now dwindled, but always it came nearer.  At last it darkened and denned and so disappeared beyond a blue ridge not half a mile away from us.  We realized at last that it was a solitary buffalo bull, no doubt coming down to water at a little coulee just beyond us.  I turned to look at her, and saw her eyes growing fierce.  She reached back for my rifle, and I arose.

“Come,” I said, and so we started.  We dared not use the horse in stalking our game.

I could stand, I could walk a short way, but the weight of this great rifle, sixteen pounds or more, which I had never felt before, now seemed to crush me down.  I saw that I was starved, that the sap was gone from my muscles.  I could stagger but a few yards before I was obliged to stop and put down the rifle.  She came and put her arm about me firmly, her face frowning and eager.  But a tall man can ill be aided by a woman of her stature.