It was about three when we finished, and we drew off to a safe distance to watch the rabbit bound to his doom.  But no rabbits came along.

I was very empty and rather faint, but Tish said she had never been able to think so clearly, and that we were all overfed and stodgy and would be better for fasting.

Aggie came in at three-thirty with a hornet sting and no water.  She said there were no springs, but that she had found a place where a spring had existed before the dry spell, and there was a naked footprint in the mud, quite fresh!  We all went to look at it, and Tish was quite positive it was not a man’s footprint at all, but only a bear’s.

“A bear!” said Aggie.

“What of it?” Tish demanded.  “The ‘Young Woodsman’ says that no bear attacks a human unless he is hungry, and at this time of the year with the woods full of food—­”

“Humph!”—­I could not restrain myself—­“I wish you would show me a little of it.  If no rabbit with acute melancholia comes along to commit suicide by hanging on that gallows of yours, I think we’ll starve to death.”

“There will be a rabbit,” Tish said tersely; and we started back to the snare.

I was never so astonished in my life.  There was a rabbit!  It seems we had struck a runway without knowing it, although Tish said afterward that she had recognized it at once from the rabbit tracks.  Anyhow, whether it died of design or curiosity, our supper was kicking at the top of the sapling, and Tish pretended to be calm and to have known all along that we’d get one.  But it was not dead.

We got it down somehow or other and I held it by the ears while it kicked and scratched.  I was hungry enough to have eaten it alive, but Aggie began to cry.

“You’ll be murderers, nothing else,” she wailed.  “Look at his little white tail and pitiful baby eyes!”

“Good gracious, Aggie,” Tish snapped, “get a knife and cut its throat while I make a fire.  If it’s any help to you, we’re not going to eat either its little white tail or its pitiful baby eyes.”

As a matter of fact Aggie wouldn’t touch the rabbit and I did not care much about it myself.  I do not like to kill things.  My Aunt Sarah Mackintosh once killed a white hen that lived twenty minutes without its head; two weeks later she dreamed that that same hen, without a head, was sitting on the footboard of the bed, and the next day she got word that her cousin’s husband in Sacramento had died of the hiccoughs.

It ended with Tish giving me the fire-making materials and stalking off into the woods with the rabbit in one hand and the knife in the other.

[Illustration:  It ended with Tish stalking off into the woods with the rabbit in one hand and the knife in the other]

Tish is nothing if not thorough, but she seemed to me inconsistent.  She brought blankets and a canvas tepee and sandals and an aluminum kettle, but she disdained matches.  I rubbed with that silly drill and a sort of bow arrangement until my wrists ached, but I did not get even a spark of fire.  When Tish came back with the rabbit there was no fire, and Aggie had taken out her watch crystal and was holding it in the sun over a pile of leaves.