On his hands and knees he began to work himself toward it slowly.  He found that the movement caused him pain, and that with this pain, if he persisted in movement, there was a synchronous rise of nausea.  The two seemed to work in a sort of unity.  But his medicine case was important now, and his blankets, and his rifle if he hoped to signal help that might chance to pass on the river.  A foot at a time, a yard at a time, he made his way down into the sand.  His fingers dug into the footprints of the mysterious gun-woman.  He approved of their size.  They were small and narrow, scarcely longer than the palm and fingers of his hand—­and they were made by shoes instead of moccasins.

It seemed an interminable time to him before he reached his pack.  When he got there, a pendulum seemed swinging back and forth inside his head, beating against his skull.  He lay down with his pack for a pillow, intending to rest for a spell.  But the minutes added themselves one on top of another.  The sun slipped behind clouds banking in the west.  It grew cooler, while within him he was consumed by a burning thirst.  He could hear the ripple of running water, the laughter of it among pebbles a few yards away.  And the river itself became even more desirable than his medicine case, or his blankets, or his rifle.  The song of it, inviting and tempting him, blotted thought of the other things out of his mind.  And he continued his journey, the swing of the pendulum in his head becoming harder, but the sound of the river growing nearer.  At last he came to the wet sand, and fell on his face, and drank.

After this he had no great desire to go back.  He rolled himself over, so that his face was turned up to the sky.  Under him the wet sand was soft, and it was comfortingly cool.  The fire in his head died out.  He could hear new sounds in the edge of the forest evening sounds.  Only weak little twitters came from the wood warblers, driven to silence by thickening gloom in the densely canopied balsams and cedars, and frightened by the first low hoots of the owls.  There was a crash not far distant, probably a porcupine waddling through brush on his way for a drink; or perhaps it was a thirsty deer, or a bear coming out in the hope of finding a dead fish.  Carrigan loved that sort of sound, even when a pendulum was beating back and forth in his head.  It was like medicine to him, and he lay with wide-open eyes, his ears picking up one after another the voices that marked the change from day to night.  He heard the cry of a loon, its softer, chuckling note of honeymoon days.  From across the river came a cry that was half howl, half bark.  Carrigan knew that it was coyote, and not wolf, a coyote whose breed had wandered hundreds of miles north of the prairie country.