specter of starvation.

You will not think it strange that I should have but dim and misty
memories of this fainting time. Of all privations famine soonest blunts
the senses, making a man oblivious of all save that which drives him
onward. The happenings that I remember clearest are those which turned
upon some temporary bridging of the hunger gulf. One was Yeates's
killing of a milch doe which, with her fawn, ran across our path when we
had fasted two whole days. By this, a capital crime in any hunter's
code, you may guess how cruelly we were nipped in the hunger vise. Also,
I remember this: as if to mock us all the glades and openings on the
hillsides were thicketed with berry bushes, long past bearing. And,
being too late for these, we were as much too early for the nuts of the
hickory and chestnut and black walnut that pelted us in passing.

The doe's meat, coming at a time of sharpest need, set us two days
farther on the march; and when that was spent or spoiled we did as we
could, being never comfortably filled, I think, and oftener haggard and
enfeebled for the want of food. Since we dared not stop to go aside for
game, the Catawba would set over-night snares for rabbits; and for
another shift we cut knobbed sticks for throwing and ran keen-eyed along
the trace, alert to murder anything alive and fit to eat. In this
haphazard hunting nothing ever fell to Jennifer's skilless clubbing, or
to mine; but the old borderer and the Indian were better marksmen, and
now and then some bird or squirrel or rabbit sitting on its form came to
the pot, though never enough of all or any to more than sharpen the
famine edge of hunger.

For all the sharp privations of the forced march there was no hint on
any lip of turning back. With Margery's desperate need to key us to the