No one could tell.

The danger of starvation or of death from exhaustion was more imminent, more pressing, and the five resolved to let scouting alone for the rest of the day and seek game.
"There's bound to be a lot of it in these woods," said Shif'less Sol, "though it's frightened out of the path by our big crowd, but we ought to find it." Henry and Shif'less Sol went in one direction, and Paul, Tom, and Long Jim in another.

But with all their hunting they succeeded in finding only one little deer, which fell to the rifle of Silent Tom.

It made small enough portions for the supper and breakfast of nearly a hundred people, but it helped wonderfully, and so did the fires which Henry and his comrades would now have built, even had they not been needed for the cooking.

They saw that light and warmth, the light and warmth of glowing coals, would alone rouse life in this desolate band.
They slept the second night on the ground among the trees, and the next morning they entered that gloomy region of terrible memory, the Great Dismal Swamp of the North, known sometimes, to this day, as "The Shades of Death.".