Some moments elapsed before the stunning effects of this loss had worn
off enough to permit Adam’s mind to connect the cause of it with the
disappearance of Jinny.
After careful scrutiny of tracks near where the pack had lain, Adam
became convinced that Jinny was to blame for his destitution. His
proofs cumulated in a handful of unburnt matches that manifestly had
been flung and scattered away from the pack. The tricky burro, taking
advantage of Adam’s absence, had pulled the canvas off the pack, and in
tearing around in the boxes for morsels to eat she had bitten into the
box of matches and set them on fire.
“I didn’t think--I didn’t think!” cried Adam, remembering the advice of
Dismukes.
Overcome by the shock, he sank upon the ground and fell prey to gloomy
and hopeless forebodings.
“I’ll lie down and die,” he muttered. But he could not so much as lie
down. He seemed possessed by a devil who would not admit the idea of
surrender or death. And this spirit likewise seemed to take him by the
hair of his head and lift him up to scatter the tears from his eyes.
“Why can’t I cuss the luck like a man--then look round to see what’s
got to be done?”
Jinny had made good her escape. When Adam gave up all hope of finding
the burro the hour was near sunset and it was high time that he should
decide what to do.
“Go on--to the Indian camp,” he declared, tersely.
He decided to start at once and walk in the cool of night, keeping
close to the mountain wall so as not to lose his way. His spirits
rallied. Going back to the camp scene, he carefully gathered up all
the unburnt matches and placed them with others he carried in his
pocket. He found his bag of salt only partly consumed, and he made
haste to secure it. His canteen lay beside the spring.
The ruddy sunset and the stealing down of twilight and the encroaching
blackness of night had no charms for Adam now. His weariness increased
as the hours prolonged themselves. Short, frequent rests were more
advisable than long ones. The canopy of stars seemed in procession
westward; and many a bright one he watched sink behind the black slope
of mountain toward which he was bound. There were times when his eyes
closed involuntarily and all his body succumbed to sleep as he toiled
on. These drowsy spells always came to a painful end, for he would walk
into a thorny mesquite. Adam saw a weird, misshapen moon rise late
over a dark range to blanch the desert with wan light. He walked all
night, and when dawn showed him landmarks now grown familiar he had a
moment of exhilaration. The long, low-reaching ridge of mountain loomed
right before him. When he rounded the sharp, blunt corner his eyes were
greeted by sight of a deep-mouthed canyon yawning out of the range, and
full of palms and other green trees. He saw a white stream bed and the
shine of water, and what he took to be the roofs of palm-thatched huts.
“I’ve got there. This is the Indian canyon--where Dismukes told me
to stay,” said Adam, with pride in his achievement. A first sight
of what he took to be habitations cheered him. Again that gloomy
companion of his mind was put to rout. It looked worth striving and
suffering for--this haven. The barrenness of the desert all around made
this green canyon mouth an oasis. It appeared well hidden, too. Few
travelers passing along the valley would have suspected its presence.
The long, low ridge had to be rounded before the canyon could be
detected.
With steps that no longer dragged Adam began his descent of the canyon
slope. It was a long, gradual incline, rough toward the bottom, and
the bottom was a good deal farther down than it had seemed. At length
he reached the wide bed of white boulders, strewn about in profusion,
where some flood had rolled them. In the center of this bed trickled a
tiny stream of water, slightly alkaline, Adam decided, judging from the
white stain on the margin of sand. Following the stream bed, he made
his way up into the zone of green growths, a most welcome change from
the open glare of the desert. He plodded on perhaps a mile, without
reaching the yellow thatch of palms.
“Will I--never--get there?” panted Adam, almost spent.
Finally Adam reached a well-defined trail leading up out of the
stream bed. He followed it to a level flat covered with willows and
cottonwoods, all full foliaged and luxuriantly green, and among which
stately palms, swaddled in huge straw sheaths of their own making,
towered with lofty tufted crowns. The dust in the trail showed no
imprints of feet. Adam regarded that as strange. Still, he might be
far from the camp or village that had looked so close from the slope
above. Suddenly he emerged from the green covert into an open glade
that contained palm-thatched huts, and he uttered a little cry of joy.
But it took only a second glance to convince him that the huts were
deserted, and his joy was short lived. Hastily he roamed from one
hut to another. He found ollas, great, clay water jars, and pieces
of broken pottery, and beds of palm leaves through which the lizards
rustled, but no Indians, nor any signs of recent habitation.
“Gone! Gone!” he whispered, hoarsely. “Now--I’ll starve--to death!”
His accents of despair contained a note of hardness, of indifference
born of his extreme fatigue. His eyes refused to stay open, and sleep
glued them shut. When he opened them again it was to the light of
another day. Stiff and lame, with a gnawing at the pit of his stomach
and an oppressed mind, Adam found himself in sad plight. Limping down
to the stream, he bathed his face and quenched his thirst, and then,
removing his boots, he saw that his feet were badly blistered. He
decided to go barefoot, to save his boots as well as to give the raw
places a chance to heal.
Then without any more reflection he wrought himself into a supreme
effort of will, and it was so passionate and strong that he believed it
would hold as long as intelligence governed his actions.
“My one chance is to live here until the Indians come back,” he
decided. There’s water here and green growths. It’s an oasis where
animals, birds, living creatures come to drink.... I must eat.”
His first move was to make slow and careful examination of the trails.
One which led toward the mountain bore faint traces of footprints
that a recent rain had mostly obliterated. He lost this trail on the
smooth rock slope. The others petered out in the stones and sage. Then
he searched along the sand bars of the stream for tracks of living
creatures; and he found many, from cat tracks to the delicate ones of
tiny birds. After all, then, the desert was an abode for living things.
The fact stimulated Adam, and he returned to the glade to exercise
every faculty he possessed in the invention of instruments or traps or
snares.
He had a knife and a pair of long leather boot strings. With these,
and a bundle of arrowweed sticks, and a tough elastic bow of ironwood,
and strips of bark, and sharp bits of flinty rock Adam set to work
under the strong, inventive guiding spirit of necessity. As a boy he
had been an adept at constructing figure-four traps. How marvelous the
accuracy of memory! He had been the one to build traps for his brother
Guerd, who had not patience or skill, but who loved to set traps in
the brier patches for redbirds. Adam’s nimble fingers slacked a little
as his mind surveyed that best part of his life. To what extremity a
man could be reduced! The dexterity of his idle youth to serve him
thus in his terrible hour of need! He remembered then his skill at
making slings; and following this came the inspired thought of the
possibility of constructing one. He had a strong rubber band doubled
round his pocketbook. Sight of it thrilled him. He immediately left off
experimenting with the bow and went to making a sling. His difficulty
was to find cords to make connections between the rubbers and a forked
prong, and also between the rubbers and a carrier of some sort. For the
latter he cut a triangular piece out of the top of his boot. Always in
the old days he had utilized leather from cast-off shoes, and had even
made a collection of old footgear for this purpose. But where to get
the cords? Bark would not be pliable and strong enough. Somewhere from
the clothes he wore he must extract cords. The problem proved easy. His
suspenders were almost new and they were made of linen threads woven
together. When he began to ravel them he made the discovery that there
was enough rubber in them to serve for a second sling.
When the instrument was finished he surveyed it with satisfaction. He
had no doubt that the deadly accuracy he had once been master of with
this boyish engine of destruction would readily return to him. Then he
went back to work on the other contrivances he had planned.
A failing of the daylight amazed him. For an instant he imagined a
cloud had crossed the sun. But the sun had set and darkness was at hand.
“If days fly like this one, life will soon be over,” he soliloquized,
with a sigh.
In one of the thatched huts he made a comfortable bed of palm leaves.
They seemed to retain the heat of the day. When Adam lay down to go
to sleep he experienced a vague, inexplicable sense that the very
strangeness of the present circumstance was familiar to him. But he
could not hold the sensation, so did not understand it. He was very
tired and very sleepy, and there was an uncomfortable empty feeling
within him. He looked out and listened, slowly aware of a great, soft,
silent black enveloping of his environment by the desert night.
There seemed to be an aloofness in the immensity of this approach and
insulation--a nature that, once comprehended, would be appalling. This
thought just flashed by. His mind seemed concerned with something
between worry and fear which persisted till he fell asleep.
In the dim, gray dawn he awoke and realized that it was hunger which
had awakened him. And he stole out on his imperative quest. He did not
see the sunrise nor the broadening day. His instinct was to hunt. Doves
and blackbirds visited the stream, and a covey of desert quail seemed
tame; but, owing to overeagerness and clumsiness, he did not succeed in
killing a single one. He followed them from place to place, all over
the oasis, until he lost sight of them. He baited his two traps with
cactus fruit and set them, and he prowled into every nook and cranny of
the canyon oasis. Lizards, rattlesnakes, rats, ground squirrels rustled
from his stealthy steps. It amazed him how wary they were. He might
have caught the rattlesnakes, but the idea of eating them was repugnant
and impossible to him. The day passed more swiftly than had yesterday.
Its close found him so tired he could scarcely stand, and with gnawing
hunger growing worse. The moment he lay down sleep claimed him.
Next day he had more and better opportunities to secure meat, but he
failed through haste and poor judgment and inaccuracy. His lessons were
severe and they taught him the stern need of perfection. That day he
saw a hawk poise high over a spot, dart down swiftly, to rise with a
squealing rat in its claws. Again he saw a shrike, marked dull gray
and black, sail down from a tree, fly very low along an open space of
ground to avoid detection, and pounce upon a lizard. Likewise he saw
a horned toad shoot out an extraordinarily long and almost invisible
tongue, to snatch a bee from a flower. In these actions Adam divined
his first proof of the perfection of desert hunters. They did not fail.
But he was not thus equipped.
All during the hot period of the day, when birds and animals rested,
Adam practiced with his crude weapons. His grave, serious eagerness
began to give way to instinctive force, a something of fierceness that
began to come out in him. It seemed every moment had its consciousness
of self, of plight, of presaged agony, but only in flashes of thought,
only fleeting ideas instantly repudiated by the physical. He had given
a tremendous direction to his mind and it spent its force that way.
The following morning, just at sunrise, he located the covey of desert
quail. They had sailed down from the sage slopes to alight among the
willows bordering the stream. Adam crawled on the sand, noiseless as
a snake, his sling held in readiness. He was breathless and hot. His
blood gushed and beat in his veins. The very pursuit of meat made the
saliva drip from his mouth and made his stomach roll with pangs of
emptiness. Then the strain, the passion of the moment, were beyond
his will to control, even if there had not been a strange, savage joy
in them. He glided through the willows, never rustling a branch. The
plaintive notes of the quail guided him. Then through an opening he
saw them--gray, sleek, plump birds, some of them with tiny plumes.
They were picking in the damp sand near the water. Adam, lying flat,
stretched his sling and waited for a number of the quail to bunch. Then
he shot. The heavy pebble sped true, making the gray feathers fly. One
quail lay dead. Another fluttered wildly. The others ran off through
the willows. Adam rushed upon the crippled quail, plunging down swift
and hard; and catching it, he wrung its neck. Then he picked up the
other.
“I got ’em! I got ’em!” he cried, elated, as he felt the warm plump
bodies. It was a moment of strange sensation. Breathless, hot, wet with
sweat, shaking all over, he seemed to have reverted to the triumph of
the boy hunter. But there was more, and it had to do with the physical
reactions inside his body. It had to do with hunger.
Picking the feathers off these birds required too much time. Adam
skinned them and cleaned them, and then washed them in the stream.
That done, he hurried back to his camp to make a fire and cook them. A
quick method would be to broil them. He had learned how to do this with
strips of meat. His hunger prevented him from waiting until the fire
was right, and it also made him hurry the broiling. The salt that he
had rescued from his pack now found its use, and it was not long before
he had picked clean the bones of these two quail.
Adam found that this pound or so of meat augmented his hunger. It
changed the gnawing sensations, in fact modified them, but it induced
a greedy, hot hunger for more. An hour after he had eaten, as far as
appetite was concerned, he seemed worse off. Then he set out again in
quest of meat.
The hours flew, the day ended, night intervened, and another dawn
broke. Success again crowned his hunt. He feasted on doves. Thereafter,
day by day, he decimated the covey of tame quail and the flock of tame
doves until the few that were left grew wary and finally departed. Then
he hunted other birds. Quickly they learned the peril of the white man;
and the day came when few birds visited the oasis.
Next to invite Adam’s cunning, were the ground squirrels, the trade
rats, and the kangaroo rats. He lived off them for days. But they grew
so wary that he had to dig them out of the ground, and they finally
disappeared. At this juncture a pair of burros wandered into the oasis.
They were exceedingly wild. Adam failed to trap one of them. He watched
for hours from a steep place where he might have killed one by throwing
down a large rock. But it was in vain. At last, in desperation, holding
his naked knife in hand, he chased them over stones and through the
willows and under the thorny mesquites, all to no avail. He dropped
from exhaustion and weakness, and lay where he had fallen till the next
morning.
The pangs of hunger now were maddening. He had suffered them, more
or less, and then alleviated them with meat, and then felt them grow
keener and stronger until the edge wore off. After a few more meatless
days the pains gradually subsided. It was a relief. He began to force
himself to go out and hunt. Then an exceedingly good stroke of fortune
befell him in that he killed a rabbit. His strength revived, but also
his pains.
Then he lost track of days, but many passed, and each one of them
took something from him in effort, in wakefulness, in spirit. His
aggressiveness diminished daily and lasted only a short while. The time
came when he fell to eating rattlesnakes and any living creatures in
the oasis that he could kill with a club.
But at length pain left him, and hunger, and then his peril revealed
itself. He realized it. The desire to kill diminished. With the
cessation of activity there returned a mental state in which he could
think back and remember all that he had done there, and also look
forward to the inevitable prospect. Every morning he dragged his weary
body, now merely skin and bones, out to the stream to drink, and then
around and around in a futile hunt. He chewed leaves and bark; he
ate mesquite beans and cactus fruit. After a certain number of hours
the longer he went without meat the less he cared for it, or for
living. But when, now and then, he did kill something to eat, then his
instinct to survive flashed up with revived hunger. The process of
detachment from passion to live was one of agony, infinitely worse than
starvation. He had come to learn that starvation would be the easiest
and most painless of deaths. It would have been infinitely welcome but
for the thought that always followed resignation--that he had sworn to
fight. That kept him alive.
His skin turned brown and shriveled up like dried parchment wrinkling
around bones. He did not recognize his hands, and when he lay flat on
the stones to drink from the stream, he saw reflected there a mummified
mask with awful eyes.
Longer and longer grew the hours wherein he slept by night and lay
idle by day, watching, listening, feeling. Something came back to him
or was born in him during these hours. But the truth of his state
eluded him. It had to do with peace, with dream, with effacement. He
seemed no longer real. The hot sun, the pleasant wind, the murmur of
bees, the tinkle of water, the everlasting processional march of the
heat veils across the oasis--with all these things his mind seemed
happily concerned. At dawn when he awoke his old instinct predominated
and he searched for meat. But unless he had some success this questing
mood did not last. It departed as weakness and lassitude overbalanced
the night’s rest. For the other hours of that day he lay in the sun, or
the shade--it did not matter--and felt or dreamed as he starved.
As he watched thus one drowsy noon hour, seeing the honeybees darting
to and fro, leaving the flowers to fly in straight line across the
oasis, there occurred to him the significance of their toil. He watched
these flying bees come and go; and suddenly it flashed over him that at
the end of the bee line there must be a hive. Bees made nests in trees.
If he could find the nest of the bees that were working here he would
find honey. The idea stimulated him.
Adam had never heard how bee hunters lined bees to their hives, but
in his dire necessity he instinctively adopted the correct method. He
watched the bees fly away, keeping them in sight as long as possible,
then he walked to the point he had marked as the last place he had seen
them, and here he watched for others. In half an hour the straight bee
flights led to a large dead cottonwood, hollow at top and bottom, a
tree he had passed hundreds of times. The bees had a hive in the upper
chamber of the trunk. Adam set fire to the tree and smoked the bees
out. Then the problem consisted of felling the tree, for he had not the
strength to climb it. The trunk was rotten inside and out. It burned
easily, and he helped along the work by tearing out pieces of the soft
wood. Nearly all the day was consumed in this toil, but at length
the tree fell, splitting and breaking to pieces. The hollow chamber
contained many pounds of honey.
Adam’s struggle then was to listen to an intelligence that warned him
that if he made a glutton of himself it would cause him great distress
and perhaps kill him. How desperately hard it was to eat sparingly of
the delicious honey! He tried, but did not succeed. That restraint was
beyond human nature. Nevertheless, he stopped far short of what he
wanted. He stored the honey away in ollas left there by the Indians.
All night and next day he paid in severe illness for the honey of
which he had partaken. The renewed exercise of internal organs that
had ceased to function produced convulsions and retching that made him
roll on the ground as a man poisoned. Life was tenacious in him and he
recovered; and thereafter, while the honey lasted, he slowly gained
strength enough to hunt once more for meat. But the fertile oasis was
now as barren of living creatures as was the naked desert outside.
Adam’s hope revived with his barely recovered strength. He pitied
himself in his moments of deluded cheerfulness, of spirit that refused
to die. Long ago his physical being had resigned itself, but his soul
seemed beyond defeat. How strange the variations of his moods! His
intelligence told him that sight of an animal would instantly revert
him to the level of a beast of prey or a stalking, bloodthirsty savage.
During these days his eyes scanned the bronze slope of mountain where
the tracks of the Indians had faded. They might return in time to
save his life. He hoped in spite of himself. In the early time of his
imprisonment there he had prayed for succor, but he had long since
ceased that. The desert had locked him in. Every moment, every hour
that had passed, the ceaseless hunts and then the dreaming spells, held
their clear-cut niches in his memory. Looked back at, they seemed far
away in the past, even those as close as yesterday; and every sensation
was invested by a pang. At night he slept the slumber of weakness, and
so the mockery of the dark hours did not make their terrible mark upon
his mind. But the solemn days! They sped swiftly by, yet, remembered,
they seemed eternities. Desert-bound days--immeasurably silent--periods
of the dominance of the blasting sun; days of infinite space, beyond
time, beyond life, as they might have been upon the burned-out moon!
The stones that blistered unprotected flesh, the sand and the dust, the
rock-ribbed ranges of bronze and rust--these tangible evidences of the
earth seemed part of those endless days. There were sky and wind, the
domain of the open and its master; but these existed for the eagles,
and perhaps for the spirits that wailed down the naked shingles of the
desert. A man was nothing. Nature filled this universe and had its
inscrutable and ruthless laws.
How little the human body required to subsist on! Adam lived long on
that honey; and he gained so much from it that after it was gone the
hunger pangs revived a hundred times more fiercely than ever. They
had been deadened, which fact left him peace; revived by a windfall
of food, they brought him agony. It drove him out to hunt for meat.
He became a stalking specter whose keen eye an insect could not have
escaped. Hunger now beset him with all its terrors magnified. To starve
was nothing, but to eat while starving was hell! The pangs were as if
made by a serpent with teeth of fire tearing at his vitals. Tighter and
tighter he buckled his belt until he could squeeze his waist in his
long, skinny hands so that his fingers met. Whenever his pains began
to subside, like worms growing quiet, then a rat or a stray bird or
a lizard or a scaly little side-winder rattlesnake would fall to his
cunning, as if in mockery of the death that ever eluded him; and next
day the old starving pains would convulse his bowels again.
So that he was driven, a gaunt and ever gaunter shadow of a man, up
and down the beaten trails of the oasis. Soon he would fall and die,
be sun-dried and blow away like powdered leather on the desert wind.
By his agonies he measured the inhospitableness and inevitableness
of the wasteland. Every thought had some connection with his torture
or some relation to his physical being in its fight for existence. In
this desert oasis were living things, creatures grown too wary for him
now, and willows, cacti, sages, that had conquered over the barrenness
of the desert. On his brain had been etched by words of steel the fact
that no power to fight was so great and unquenchable as that of man’s.
He lived on, he staggered on through the solemn, glaring days.
* * * * *
One morning huge columnar clouds, white as fleece, with dark-gray
shades along their lower borders, blotted out the sun. How strangely
they shaded the high lights! Usually when clouds formed on the desert
they lodged round the peaks and hung there. But these were looming
across the wasteland, promising rain. A fresh breeze blew the leaves.
Adam was making his weary round of the oasis, dragging one foot like a
dead weight after the other. Once he thought he heard an unusual sound,
and with lips wide and with bated breath he listened. Only the mocking,
solemn silence! Often he was haunted by the memory of sounds. Seldom
indeed did he hear his own voice any more. Then he plodded on again
with the eyes of a ferret, roving everywhere.
He had proceeded a few rods when a distant but shrill whistle brought
him to a startled and thrilling halt. It sounded like the neigh of a
horse. Often he had heard the brays of wild burros. In the intense
silence, as he strained his ears, he heard only the labored, muffled
throbs of his heart. Gradually his hopes, so new and strange, subsided.
Only another mockery of his memory! Or perhaps it was a whistle of the
wind in a crevice, or of an eagle in flight.
Parting the willows before him as he walked, he went through the
thicket out into the open where the stream flowed. It was very low,
just a tiny rill of crystal-clear water. He was about to step forward
toward the flat rock where he always knelt to drink, when another sound
checked him. A loud, high buzz, somehow startling! It had life.
Suddenly he espied a huge rattlesnake coiled in the sand, with head
erect and its rattles quivering like the wings of a poised humming
bird. The snake had just shed an ugly, brown, scaly skin, and now shone
forth resplendent, a beautiful clean gray with markings of black. It
did not show any fear. The flat triangular head, sleek and cunning,
with its deadly jewel-like eyes, was raised half a foot above the plump
coils.
Adam’s weary, hopeless hunting instinct sustained a vivifying,
galvanizing shock. Like a flash he changed, beginning to tremble. He
dropped his sling as an ineffective weapon against so large a snake.
His staring eyes quivered like the vibrating point of a compass needle
as he tried to keep them on the snake and at the same time sight
a stone or club with which to attack his quarry. A bursting gush
of blood, hot in its tearing pangs, flooded out all over his skin,
starting the sweat. His heart lifted high in his breast, almost choking
him. A terrible excitement animated him and it was paralleled by a cold
and sickening dread that the snake would escape and pounds of meat be
lost to him.
Never taking eyes off the snake, Adam stooped down to raise a large
rock in his hand. He poised it aloft and, aiming with intense keenness,
he flung the missile. It struck the rattlesnake a glancing blow,
tearing its flesh and bringing blood. With the buzz of a huge bee
caught in a trap the snake lunged at Adam, stretching its mutilated
length on the sand.
It was long, thick, fat. Adam smelled the exuding blood and it inflamed
him. Almost he became a beast. The savage urge in him then was to fall
upon his prey and clutch it with his bare hands and choke and tear
and kill. But reason still restrained such limit as that. Stone after
stone he flung, missing every time. Then the rattlesnake began to drag
itself over the sand. Its injury did not retard a swift progress. Adam
tried to bound after it, but he was so weak that swift action seemed
beyond him. Still, he headed off the snake and turned it back. Stones
were of no avail. He could not hit with them, and every time he bent
over to pick one up he got so dizzy that he could scarcely rise.
“Club! Club! Got--have club!” he panted, hoarsely. And espying one
along the edge of the stream, he plunged to secure it. This moment gave
the rattlesnake time to get ahead. Wildly Adam rushed back, brandishing
the club. His tall gaunt form, bent forward, grew overbalanced as he
moved, and he made a long fall, halfway across the stream. He got up
and reached the snake in time to prevent it from escaping under some
brush.
Then he swung the club. It was not easy to hit the snake crawling
between stones. And the club was of rotten wood. It broke. With the
blunt end Adam managed to give his victim a blow that retarded its
progress.
Adam let out a hoarse yell. Something burst in him--a consummation
of the instinct to kill and the instinct to survive. There was no
difference between them. Hot and mad and weak, he staggered after the
crippled snake. The chase had transformed the whole internal order of
him. He was starving to death, and he smelled the blood of fresh meat.
The action infuriated him and the odor maddened him. Not far indeed
was he then from the actual seizing of that deadly serpent in his bare
hands.
But he tripped and fell again in a long forward plunge. It brought
him to the sand almost on top of the snake. And here the rattlesnake
stopped to coil, scarcely two feet from Adam’s face.
Adam tried to rise on his hands. But his strength had left him. And
simultaneously there left him the blood madness of that chase to kill
and eat. He realized his peril. The rattlesnake would strike him.
Adam had one flashing thought of the justice of it--one sight of the
strange, cold, deadly jewel eyes, one swift sense of the beauty and
magnificent spirit of this reptile of the desert, and then horror
possessed him. He froze to his marrow. The icy mace of terror had
stunned him. And with it had passed the flashing of his intelligence.
He was only a fearful animal, fascinated by another, dreading death by
instinct. And as he collapsed, sagging forward, the rattlesnake struck
him in the face with the stinging blow of a red-hot iron. Then Adam
fainted.