Now he hated them, and ever after his fangs
gleamed white when one of them floated over his head.
He was badly hurt. There were ragged tears in his flank and back,
and a last stroke of Gargantua's talons had stabbed his shoulder
to the bone. Blood dripped from him, and one of his eyes was
closing, so that shapes and shadows were grotesquely dim in the
night. Instinct and caution, and the burning pains in his body,
urged him to lie down in a thicket and wait for the day. But
stronger than these were memory of the girl's urging voice, the
vague thrill of the cloth still about his neck, and the freshness
of Jolly Roger's trail as it kept straight on through the forest's
moonlit corridors and caverns of gloom.
It was in the first graying light of July dawn that Peter dragged
himself up the rough side of a ridge and looked down into a narrow
strip of plain on the other side. Just as Nada had given up in
weakness and despair, so now he was almost ready to quit. He had
traveled miles since the owl fight, and his wounds had stiffened,
and with every step gave him excruciating pain. His injured eye
was entirely closed, and there was a strange, dull ache in the
back of his head, where Gargantua had pounded him with his beak.
The strip of valley, half hidden in its silvery mist of dawn,
seemed a long distance away to Peter, and he dropped on his belly
and began to lick his raw shoulder with a feverish tongue.
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