Colqhoun: I suppose I owe you gentlemen a story. We left in April. Six of us in all. Mr. MacCready and his wife, from Ireland. Mr. Janus, from Virginia, I believe... with his servant, Jones. Myself - I'm from Scotland. And our guide... a military man, coincidently. Colonel Ives. A detestable man... and a most disastrous guide. He professed to know a new, shorter route through the Nevada's.
[scoffs]
Colqhoun: Quite a route that was. Longer than the known one... and impossible to travel. We worked... very, very hard. By the time of the first snowfall we were still a hundred miles from this place. That was November. Proceeding in the snow was futile. We took shelter in a cave; decided to wait until the storm had passed. But the storm did not pass. The trails soon became impassable... and we had run out of food. We ate the oxen... all the horses... even my own dog. And that lasted us about a month. After that we turned to out belts... shoes... any roots we could dig up but you know there's no real nourishment in those. We remained famished. The day that Jones died I was out collecting wood. He had expired from malnourishment. And when I returned, the others were cooking his legs for dinner. Would I have stopped it had I been there? I don't know. But I must say... when I stepped inside that cave... the smell of meat cooking... I thanked the Lord. I thanked the Lord. And then things got out of hand. I ate sparingly; others did not. The meat did not last us a week and we were soon hungry again only, this time our hunger was different. More... severe... savage. And Colonel Ives, particularly, could not be satisfied. Janus was the first to be killed. And then Mr. MacCready. That left Colonel Ives, MacCready's wife, and I alone and I knew in that company that my days were numbered. I'm ashamed to say that I acted in the most cowardly manner. It would have been nobler, I know to have stayed and protected Mrs. MacCready from Ives, but... I was weak. I fled. It was nothing less than pure providence that I arrived here.
