"Now I feel better!" said Nero, after his meal. "I think it will be all right to stay out of the cave for a while. I can get along better than at first, and the hunters do not seem to be around here. I'll go to the home cave now, and I'll have a great story to tell the others."
But Nero was not going to find it as easy to get home through the jungle as he had hoped. In the first place, he did not know his way, and, in the second place, he had to go very slowly. For his paw, though it was getting better, was not well yet, and sometimes, when he knocked it against a stone or a tree, it pained him so that he would have to sit down and rumble and roar and howl. But he did not howl very loudly, for this might have brought the hunters, who, he feared, might try to shoot him again.
As I have said, Nero did not know his way back home through the jungle. It had been dark when he started out with his father on the night-hunt, and he had not noticed the way they had slunk along. Then, too, Nero expected his father would be with him to show him the way back. But something had happened, as you know, to make everything different. And when Nero ran away from the hunters, and hid in the cave, he had gone farther and farther away from his own folks and home, though, at the time, he did not know it.
"If only I can get back to my own cave I'll be all right," thought the lion boy. "I must try as hard as I can to find my cave. And how I do wish I could see my father and mother, and Boo and Chet!"
So Nero wandered to and fro in the jungle, now and then stopping to drink from a pool or a spring, and when he was hungry he hunted small animals, that he could easily catch. He did not dare to go after big animals when his paw was so sore.
"If I should see a buffalo now, I'd have to run away from him," thought Nero. "But when I get well, and bigger and stronger, I'll jump on a buffalo's back, just as my father did!"
So Nero wandered on and on in the jungle, but he did not find the home cave for which he was looking. Here and there wandered the boy lion, always hoping that he might find some animal path that would lead him home. But he did not. Day after day passed, and Nero was no nearer home than at first.
Then he began to know what had happened.
"I am lost!" he thought. "I have lost my way. I must ask some of the jungle animals how to get home."
But this was not easy. Most of the jungle animals were afraid of the lion, though he was not yet full grown, and when he roared at them, to ask where his cave was, they thought he was trying to scare them or catch them, and they ran away.