How long I groped, learning nothing, I do not know, for when the mind forgets the body minutes may be long or short, and no count is taken of them.  But at last among the noises that knocked at my ear came a new note.  I heard a human voice.

And then, indeed, I pressed all my faculties into service.  I put my ear to the wet ground and strained it against tree trunks, trying to weed out the myriad tiny whisperings that assailed me and grasp that one sound that I wanted and hold it clear.  And at last I heard it unmistakably; there were voices, more than one it seemed.

My ears buzzed with my effort to listen.  I heard the sound, lost it, then heard it again.  It was like a child’s game.  I heard it, blundered after it, then it disappeared.  I turned to go back, and it came behind and mocked me.  It was everywhere and nowhere.  It came near, then faded into silence.  The fog suffocated me; I found myself pressing at it with my hands.

Yet on the whole I made progress.  In time the voices grew clearer.  There were several of them, perhaps many.  I heard shouting,—­orders, presumably,—­and once a clink of metal,—­an iron kettle it might have been.  But the sound was back of me, in front of me, at the sides of me, above me.  I could not hold it.  It reverberated like the drumming of a woodcock that comes to the ear from four quarters at once.  And all the time the fog pressed on my eyelids like a hand.

I had left my musket hidden under the canoe, for I could not have used it in the dampness, so I had only my knife for guard.  I carried it open, and made an occasional notch upon a tree.  Once I came to a notched tree a second time.  The old woodland madness was on me, and I was stepping in circles.  Yet the sounds were growing clearer.  They were approaching, though I could not tell from what quarter.  I stood still.

What followed was like a dream; like the dream that I had had the night after the storm when I woke with sweat cold on me.  The fog pinioned me like a clammy winding-sheet; I could see nothing; I was too chilled to feel; I was as alone and powerless as a lost canoe in the ocean; but somewhere on earth or in air I heard a company of men pass me by.  The sounds were unmistakable.  I heard the swish of wet leaves, the pad of feet, and even the creak of the damp leather of the carrying-straps.  Something cracked, pricking in my ears in a blur of sound, and I knew that the men had brushed a branch with the canoe that they were carrying on their heads.  They were near me; at any moment they might come within touch of my hand.  But where were they?  Whoever they were, whatever they were, the wish to see them became an obsession.  I knew no feeling but my tingling to get at them.  I pushed to right and left.  I knocked against trees.  The sounds were here, then there.  I could not reach them.  They taunted me as lost spirits tantalize a soul in purgatory.  Whichever way I turned they were just out of my grasp.  I clenched my hands and swore that I would not be beaten.