Standing there now in the presence of the old campground and these relics of tragic days, each minute detail of my parting from Hubbard rose before my vision and stalked past me in gaunt and horrid procession.  The morning, wet and cold and bleak; the monotonous undertone of the rapids, sounding a warning of impending calamity; the tree tops, droning a mournful requiem; the northeast wind, driving the rain in silent sheets across the open spaces; the dank, dark forest, harboring indefinable mystery—I heard and saw it all again.

I was sitting on this side, Hubbard on that, when I read aloud to him the fourteenth of John and the thirteenth of First Corinthians.  The very testament from which I read that morning was now in my pack, down by the riverbank.  And he was still sitting over there when we passed our arms around each others shoulders, and kissed each others cheeks, and he bade me his last farewell:

“Good bye, and God be with you.”

Then in my fancy I see the Indian and myself taking up our light bundles and turning away, down the valley, he in hope of finding trappers at Grand Lake to send to our relief, I to search for a few pounds of wet flour, abandoned in early summer, with which I am to return to the tent and wait with Hubbard.  Just below there, where the woods close in dark and thick, I turned for a last glimpse of the tent, the rock and the fire burning between; but Hubbard was in the tent and I did not see him.

What followed is recalled as a confused, horrible nightmare.  There is the parting with the Indian in a driving snowstorm as I turn back to rejoin Hubbard; of snow falling day and night, sometimes gently sometimes blindingly, but always falling; of stumbling on and on through deepening drifts; of vainly searching for the tent which I could never find; of voices shouting to me out of the depths of the storm, and of shouting back at these creations of my imagination; of gathering at night with my bare hands such bits of wood as I could find, and with my piece of blanket drawn about my shoulders, huddling by my meager fire through the long hours of darkness; of gentle voices speaking words of hope and encouragement to me; of morning when I fell dizzy and faint in the snow, and could walk no farther; of  the coming of Gilbert and his companions; of men telling me later that Hubbard was dead.

Finally I called to the Judge and Gilbert to join me, and when they joined me we three stood for a little while silently contemplating the spot which we had traveled so far to visit.  Then we looked over the ground more carefully, and near the fire discovered remnants of the caribou bones, so often boiled and reboiled in vain endeavor to extract nutriment from them; and not far away, one of the cowhide mittens which Hubbard, in his last entry in his diary, said he might eat if need be; and near the mitten his other moccasin, carried away from its mate doubtless by an animal.

Next: Chapter XXXIV: Marking Hubbard's Boulder