“O Lord,” Hi thought, “what on earth were those things? I’ve never heard anything so awful. Thank God, we got away when we did. A very little more, and they would have been on us. I think I should go mad if they were coming after me. Listen.”
There was no sound of any pack in cry coming after them. They had come to a part of the wilderness which was silent, save for the rustle of the reeds and the splash of the leaping fish. “I suppose it’s going to rain again,” Hi muttered with chattering teeth; “that is why the fish are leaping. I wish I’d brought my coat and the saddle.”
But they were left behind with the bags in a place which Hi was little likely to find again. “Lord, I do feel wretched,” he said, shivering. “I’ll get away from this water. There may be alligators in it. I never thought of them before. Come up, old Bingo; we’ll find a place for you.”
They moved away through a thicket into a space which had been burnt the year before. From the cold and from the colour of the sky, Hi judged that it was about an hour from the dawn. The horse stopped from exhaustion. “You’re sicker than I am,” Hi said. “I’ll do my best to warm you.”
He pulled grass: the horse would not touch it, but it served to rub him: he was trembling, his coat was staring, and his head was down. “I’d give something for a bucket of warm beer for him,” Hi said. “It’s hateful having nothing: even the bread is gone. Well, I must hope for the sun to come soon to warm him.”
The cold was so painful that he had to move away, to dance and flog his arms. The dawn seemed to take hours to bring any colour to the sky, yet it came at last.
“Thank God, here it comes at last,” he said. “If only I could hear a bell with it: even a cow-bell.”
It came with no sound of bells, but with a clapping of wings from all the near-by trees, as the multitudes of the birds awoke. Their cries were not sweet like the cries of so many English birds: only one seemed to have a sweetness in his voice. This was a biggish bird with black wings and orange breast. He had a sweet droning note which said, “Woe,” then, after an interval, “Woe” again. All the other birds seemed to be saying, “Damn it”: or so Hi thought.
As the light grew, the clamour of the birds rose to a roaring, for many of them, after trying their wings, took flight, wheeled, and sped away in their companies, to seek for food. Some of those who cried “Woe” settled on a tree which was covered with great white waxy flowers, intolerably sweet. Wafts of the sweetness came to Hi on the gusts of the wind. He saw them tear at the flowers and eat the petals. Hi, going to the tree, tasted a petal, thinking that what fed the birds could not harm himself. It was like sweetened church candle or much what he had imagined manna to have been. He ate of this manna with the knowledge that he, too, had been fed in the wilderness. When he returned to his horse, he found him stretched out dead.
It was the first time that he had lost a friend by death: he sat down beside him and wept. He was not a lad given to weeping: he had not wept for years, but he was shaken by the last four days, and in an extreme of loneliness, which made him know what a friend the horse had been in hours of danger and beastliness. Now that he was gone, Hi was alone indeed. The horse lay dead on his off side: his near crupper was scored with a bullet-mark. “So he was hit after all,” Hi said, “I thought he was. And the poor old Bingo saved me twice last night, and now he is dead.”