"They seem too busy."
He let himself down into the water and swam noiselessly along the side of the pile, and she stood watching anxiously.
When he reached the outskirts of the whirling cloud he found a sodden crack, and drew himself in, and disappeared from her sight. Her heart kicked till it felt like choking her. Her face was strained, her eyes wide and fearful. She felt horribly alone.
Inside his niche, Wulf climbed cautiously, the curdling clamour very close. Now and again a feathery fiend with eyes like glass and reddened beak swooped past his hiding-place, with a shrill cry of warning to the rest at sight of him, or it might be of invitation.
He got his eyes above the top at last, in spite of pointed attentions from angry outsiders, scanned the spot where the shrieking crew centred most thickly, and dreamed of what he got a glimpse of there for weeks afterwards.
—— The remnants of what had been a man, all pecked and scratched and torn to shreds,—white, clean-picked bones showing through fragments of his clothing, myriads of squawking birds, of all shapes and sizes, clustered on it like bees on a comb, hustling and fighting one another with shrill screams and thrashing wings and red beaks. It was only when, through some unusually bitter struggle, the mass writhed and rose for a moment, only to settle more closely the next, that he could see. Not far from the body was a broached keg which the birds had overturned in their strife. It explained everything to him.
He dropped back down his cleft, sick at the sight, grateful for the clean feel of the water. He plunged his head under and spat out the feeling of it all. Then he made his way quietly back to The Girl, and she had no need to ask what he had found. He nodded, and climbed up on to the raft and pushed quickly away.
"You are sure he is dead?" she asked, after a time.
"Horribly dead," and told her no more till later, and then not very much. "It is strange to think of it all," he said, in conclusion. "He always feared the birds. In his delirium it was the birds he was fighting. And the birds got him at last."
The manner of his death shocked and horrified them. But the knowledge that the menace of him had passed out of their lives was untellable relief.