His hands were cold.
“Haa....”
Even when he blew on them, it lasted only a moment. His fingertips were still frozen solid and bright red.
“Haa.”
The boy, who had been blowing on his hands one after another without rest, unknowingly put on a tearful face. If only he didn’t have something on his back, he could have cupped both hands together and thawed them with his breath... But then, thawing his hands would not make things better.
Once this pain, like a knife stabbing him, faded, hunger would then stab at his guts.
“Haa....”
After blowing on his numb hands, the boy pushed aside a screen loosely woven from reeds and entered the hut. Inside, one man and boys a head shorter than him were gathered around a fire burning in the center. Every one of them was thin as a twig.
The man sitting in the center, perhaps because of his age, looked especially gaunt and irritable.
Blub blub.
A pot was set over the fire. Seeing the watery gruel boiling, the boy instinctively swallowed his saliva.
“You’re back?”
“...Yes.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Well....”
The boy’s whole body stiffened with tension.
“Nothing... there wasn’t really anything to find....”
“What? That many died, and there was nothing to find?”
“...Yes. They must have already taken it all by now. There wasn’t even any food, and the clothes had all been stripped off.”
“Damn it all....”