Maybe that’s why I didn’t argue when Tony suddenly decided on the fifth day that we had to have food. That he was going to find and kill us something to eat. We’d had no fire since the river despite our attempts the first two nights to start one with our hodgepodge of survival knowledge. But I said I would try again while it was daylight and he was out looking for something for us to eat.

It took four hours, but I actually got a fire started. I was so happy I sat there and cried a bit, the relief of seeing some sign of success and progress overwhelming me for a little while. I carefully tended the flames throughout the afternoon, listening carefully for signs of Tony’s return. But when darkness began to fall over the woods, my growing concern blossomed into worry and fear.

I stoked the fire to make it more visible and started calling out to him. I considered going to look for him, but I had no idea where he would have gone over such a long period of time, and I was afraid of leaving the fire unattended and knew of no way to make a long-lasting torch out of my surroundings. So I sat by the fire, dozing fitfully between calling for him and adding sticks to the flames.

At daylight, I spent some time building the fire up as best I could, and then I began looking for him. I had a cold certainty in my belly that I’d never see him again, but within twenty minutes I saw him walking toward me through the woods. I broke into a lurching run toward him, and when I hugged him, he weakly hugged me back. He was limping badly, and his left arm was bloody, but he wouldn’t talk much about it at first. After he was sitting down, I looked at his arm and saw it had a long jagged cut along his bicep. Ripping off part of my shirt, I tried to clean it and bandage it as best I could. As I was finishing, Tony finally began to tell me what happened.

He said he had walked for hours looking for something we could eat. A bird’s nest with eggs, a rabbit or fish, anything. He saw the occasional animal in the distance and heard signs of many more, but never anything he could reach with the large stick he was carrying as a makeshift club. Tony said he was close to turning back when he saw something in the distance through the trees.

It looked like a man.