had been wet, persistently, all of the time; he had travelled in ooze; his clothes had clung cold about his limbs, paralysing them; he had slept in puddles; and always, like a persecution with him, went the necessity of caring for his gun—of seeing that it be not wet, that it rust not, that it stay smoothly working, well-oiled, swiftly ready to kill.
He had borne these things with alacrity. A feeling of phenomenal endurance had exalted him. All the time, in want, in hunger, in thirst, in heat or cold, in pursuit or short respite, killing or hiding, he had felt that he could go on thus forever; that his nerves were steel, his muscles iron, that nobody, nothing, God Himself, now could ever bring him down. When he shot, it was by reflex, with utmost surety, his game looming large as a mountain against the bead of his rifle.
But the last few days, something insidious had attacked him—something that he felt but vaguely, that he could not name, but which he distrusted profoundly.
