"How do you get food?
Where are you going ?" he asked.
I answered boldly: "Food! I am nearly starving.

I am going to the village to see if the women have got any meat in the pot, and to tell Runi all I have done since I left him." He looked at me keenly, a little surprised at my confidence perhaps, then said that he was also going back and would accompany me One of the other men now advanced, blow-pipe in hand, to join us, and, leaving the wood, we started to walk across the savannah.
It was hateful to have to recross that savannah again, to leave the woodland shadows where I had hoped to find Rima; but I was powerless: I was a prisoner once more, the lost captive recovered and not yet pardoned, probably never to be pardoned.

Only by means of my own cunning could I be saved, and Nuflo, poor old man, must take his chance.
Again and again as we tramped over the barren ground, and when we climbed the ridge, I was compelled to stand still to recover breath, explaining to Piake that I had been travelling day and night, with no meat during the last three days, so that I was exhausted.

This was an exaggeration, but it was necessary to account in some way for the faintness I experienced during our walk, caused less by fatigue and want of food than by anguish of mind.
At intervals I talked to him, asking after all the other members of the community by name.

At last, thinking only of Rima, I asked him if any other person or persons besides his people came to the wood now or lived there.
He said no.