,
a faint sound of moaning mounted to my father's ears.

While he thus looked, an old man got staggering to his feet, unwound his
blanket, and laid it, with great gentleness, on a young girl who sat
hard by propped against a rock. The girl did not seem to be conscious of
the act; and the old man, after having looked upon her with the most
engaging pity, returned to his former bed and lay down again uncovered
on the turf. But the scene had not passed without observation even in
that starving camp. From the very outskirts of the party, a man with a
white beard and seemingly of venerable years, rose up on his knees and
came crawling stealthily among the sleepers towards the girl; and judge
of my father's indignation, when he beheld this cowardly miscreant strip
from her both the coverings and return with them to his original
position. Here he lay down for a while below his spoils, and, as my
father imagined, feigned to be asleep; but presently he had raised
himself again upon one elbow, looked with sharp scrutiny at his
companions, and then swiftly carried his hand into his bosom and thence
to his mouth. By the movement of his jaws he must be eating; in that
camp of famine he had reserved a store of nourishment; and, while his
companions lay in the stupor of approaching death, secretly restored his
powers.

My father was so incensed at what he saw that he raised his rifle; and
but for an accident, he has often declared, he would have shot the
fellow dead upon the spot. How different would then have been my
history! But it was not to be: even as he raised the barrel, his eye
lighted on the bear, as it crawled along a ledge some way below him; and
ceding to the hunter's instinct, it was at the brute, not at the man,
that he discharged his piece. The bear leaped and fell into a pool of
the river; the canon re-echoed the report; and in a moment the camp was
afoot. With cries that were scarce human, stumbling, falling, and
throwing each other down, these starving people rushed upon the quarry;
and before my father, climbing down by the ledge, had time to reach the
level of the stream, many were already satisfying their hunger on the
raw flesh, and a fire was being built by the more dainty.

His arrival was for some time unremarked. He stood in the midst of these
tottering and clay-faced marionettes; he was surrounded by their cries;
but their whole soul was fixed on the dead carcase; even those who were
too weak to move, lay