"I'll just have to stay here," thought Nero, "until it's safe to come out. Guess I might as well go to sleep."
So Nero curled up on the dried grass in the cave. He knew some other lion once must have used the same cave for a sleeping place, as the grass bed was made up just as Nero's was in the home cave.
"It's a good thing I found this place," thought Nero. "But I wish my father and mother and Chet and Boo were here with me. Yes, and I even wish Switchie were here. I wonder what he is doing!"
And so, wondering, Nero fell asleep in the jungle cave. How long he slept he did not know, for it was as dark as night in the cavern, no matter whether or not the sun shone outside, and Nero was far back from the front door of the cave. When Nero awakened he tried to stand up and walk.
But the moment he put his sore paw down on the stone floor of the cave, he felt such a pain that he let out a howl and then a roar. But as soon as he had done this he knew he had better keep quiet.
"For the hunters may be around the cave yet, outside, and may hear me," thought Nero. "But, oh, how my foot hurts!"
And indeed it did, for it was all swelled up because of the bullet that had gone in from the hunter's gun. Nero could not step on his paw, and he had to limp around on three legs.
"I can't go out of the cave while I'm this way," he thought. "I could not run very fast through the jungle, and if the hunters were to see me, lame as I am, they surely would catch me."
Nero knew something about the hunters in the African jungle, for he had often heard his father and the other lions talk about the men with guns. Some of the older lions had even been shot at, and one or two of them had scars on them, to show where the bullets had gone in. But the shot places had healed. And among the stories the older lions told when they came to the cave where Nero lived, were tales of lion friends who had gone out on jungle hunts and had never returned.
"What happened to them?" Nero asked one day.