One more graz was wounded but luckily it hunched about, turning its formidable tusks on those that followed, thus keeping the path clear for its enemies. Jellico was making the journey, sure-footedly, with the Chief Ranger only one hillock behind. Tau sighed.
"Someday maybe this will be just another tall tale and we'll all be thought liars when we spout it," he observed. "That is if we survive to tell it. So now which way do we go? If I had my choice it would be up!"
When Dane pulled himself to his feet and surveyed their small refuge, he was ready to agree to that. For the space, packed with dead and dying vegetable matter until one sank calf deep, was a triangle with a narrow point running east into the swamp.
"They don't give up easily, do they?" Jellico looked back to the shore and the cliff. Though the wounded graz bull still held the heights against its fellows, there were others breaking from the jungle on the lower level, wandering back and forth to paw the earth, rip up soil with their tusks, and otherwise threaten anyone who would try to return to the strip they patrolled.
"They will not," Asaki answered bleakly. "Arouse a graz and it will trail you for days; kill any of the herd and you have little hope of escaping them on foot."
It would seem now that the swamp was a deterrent to pursuit. The two beasts that had fallen in the mire moaned in a pitiful rising note. They had ceased to struggle and several of their kind clustered on the shore near them, calling entreatingly. Asaki took careful aim with the needler and put one animal after another out of its misery. But the flash of those shots angered those on shore to a higher pitch of rage.
"No going back," he said. "At least not for several days."
Tau slapped a black, four-winged insect which had settled on his arm, its jaws wide open for a sampling bite. "We can't very well perch here until they forget all about us," he pointed out. "Not without water we can trust, and with the local wild life ready to test us for tasty eating."
Nymani had prowled along the swampward point of their island, and now he made his report.
"There is more high land to the east. Perhaps it will give us a bridge across."