He was helpless. In his bewildered
state, seeing a squirrel cracking a nut on the branch of a hollow tree
near him, he made a half-frenzied dart at the frightened animal, which
ran away. But the same association of ideas in his torpid and confused
brain impelled him to search for the squirrel's hoard in the hollow
of the tree. He ate the few hazel-nuts he found there, ravenously. The
purely animal instinct satisfied, he seemed to have borrowed from it a
certain strength and intuition. He limped through the thicket not
unlike some awkward, shy quadrumane, stopping here and there to peer
out through the openings over the marshes that lay beyond. His sight,
hearing, and even the sense of smell had become preternaturally acute.
It was the latter which suddenly arrested his steps with the odor
of dried fish. It had a significance beyond the mere instincts of
hunger--it indicated the contiguity of some Indian encampment. And as
such--it meant danger, torture, and death.
He stopped, trembled violently, and tried to collect his scattered
senses. Redwood Camp had embroiled itself needlessly and brutally with
the surrounding Indians, and only held its own against them by reckless
courage and unerring marksmanship. The frequent use of a casual
wandering Indian as a target for the practising rifles of its members
had kept up an undying hatred in the heart of the aborigines and
stimulated them to terrible and isolated reprisals.
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