Moreover, he spread such terror among the beasts that they did not venture to resist or oppose him, and none dared to come near him except his roe which had suckled him and brought him up; and he never separated from her nor she from him. And when she became old and weakly, he led her to those places where there was the best food to be found, gathering the sweetest fruits and giving them to her to eat.
[Hayy is grief-stricken at the death of the Roe.]
Yet in spite of all the care he bestowed upon her, she grew more lean and feeble every day, and in the end death overtook her, when all her motions stopped and her actions ceased.
When the boy noticed this, sad grief overcame him, and he was stricken with the greatest sorrow. He called her with the same voice she used to answer; and though he shouted at the top of his voice, he could not perceive any movement or alteration in her. Thereupon he began to look closer into her eyes and ears, but could not find any visible defect. In equal manner, when he examined all the other parts of the body, he could find nothing amiss. He therefore earnestly desired to find out where the defect lay hidden, so that he might be able to remove it and make her return to her former state of vigorous life. But he was quite at a loss and utterly unable to find by what means to attain his ends. . . .
[Hayy takes an aversion to the dead Body.]
In the meantime the dead body of the roe began to putrefy and to exhale noisome vapours, which tended to increase his aversion to it and made him unwilling to look upon it.
Not long after this he chanced to see two ravens fighting together, and one of them struck the other down dead. After that it began to scrape the earth with its claws, till it had dug up a pit wherein it buried the carcase of its adversary. When Hayy observed this, he said to himself: “How well has this raven done in covering the body of his companion, though he did ill in killing him. How much greater reason was there for me to have performed this good office to my mother.”
[Hayy buries the body of the Roe.]
Thereupon he digged a grave, in which he laid his mother’s body, throwing earth upon it. Then he went on meditating on the thing which had governed the body, but could not apprehend what sort of thing it was. But when he looked on the rest of the roes, and saw that they all had the same figure and form as his mother had had, he gathered there was in every one of them something that governed and actuated them, like that which had actuated and governed his mother. And on account of that likeness he continued to follow them, and liked to be in their company.