Limping one-sandalled across the little hills, I was well away by morning. Between these mountains and the snow mountains of the Southern capital the plain lay wide to welcome me in among her copses and marshes, rivers and streams, trees and woods. I am now within reason impossible to trace.

To be safely away seemed at first a miracle, although by the law of averages I supposed luck must sometimes be good.

Dawn arrived in the world as I arrived in the plain.

The grass was damp and in it my hurrying footsteps squelched; the trees ahead were a black, tangled witchery against the nakedly cloudless, yellow sky.

I can hardly weep for the loss of Urns. The bird was beginning to have a strange hold over me, body and soul, which is apparent to me now that I have lost him. I was grief-stricken by Narra’s death, but, I now realize, hardly appalled. His hideous rush at the bright animal I later called a puma should have opened my eyes. It only cast a greater pall over them. I thought he was nobly defending me from the bright animal’s insidious night-attack. Was he! He would have done anything to get his beak deep in the bright breast. But at least he succeeded in sending it away. The animal’s cry of pain as I stayed with Urns I shall never forget.

There is plenty of water to drink—springs and streams. Ice-cold, they go, rippling, wimpling, the streams flowing with each liquid layer laving the liquid-loved, liquid-shaped pebbles, the falls eternal shiny white comets.

I eat well.

White roots, wild fruit, many of them quite large, mushrooms, eggs—probably reptiles’ eggs as I always find them on the ground. I pierce them at either end and put my lips to one hole and suck the raw stuff through. Very nourishing. Makes me feel strong. Not unattractive, either.

The shining puma wanted me to go North.

Why?

I would have run into the town’s searchmen if I’d gone back that way.

Or I would if I’d been alone.

But the puma ain’t with me now.

What am I supposed to do?

North, or South?

If I go forward I shall find my life hard and maybe short.

I can’t go back the exact way I came, I mean I can’t, and if I go off at a tangent Northwards—there are higher mountains I could endeavour.

Behind me, to the distant right of me.