Despite the interlude, my body was exhausted. I relied on the cooling wind to ease my fever as I pushed through the tangled weeds, fallen twigs, and the sickly chills tingling in my back and neck. The pain in my arm intensified but I carried on into the late afternoon, finally stopping to rest on a flat boulder to sip the last few drops of water and futilely hunt through my backpack for a cracker to go with the canned liver. I tucked the empty canteen into my bag, stood up on weary legs, and merged into the dusk. The path near the stream had opened into a narrow dirt road and walking had become easier. From time to time, I saw tire marks in the cracked muddy earth, a clue that the road had been used recently.
Just as the sun was setting, the trees thinned and the trail curved to reveal on
