He fought them off as well as he could, wielding his machete with his left hand, shooting when he could, carpeting the ground about him with dead or wounded birds.
But always they came on. There seemed no end of them. His flesh was scratched and torn in a dozen places where powerful wing or beak had raked him.
A hurried glance told him that his friends, the monkeys were suffering horribly. The dead were piled in heaps. Several vultures had seized upon living prey and were making their way toward their home fastnesses.
Raging, Bomba continued to shoot until the cartridges in the weapon were exhausted and the ominous click without a report told him the fire stick needed reloading. He dared not take time for this.
But he still had his bow and arrows and he dropped the revolver and machete and had recourse to those primitive weapons.
Primitive they might be, but in his hands they were deadly. Every time his bow twanged the arrow found its mark. At such close quarters the missile went clear through the body of his target, protruding from the farther side.
It was characteristic of the boy that he never thought of flight. At any moment he could have found refuge in one of the many dense thickets of the vicinity that no bird could penetrate. There he could have waited in perfect security until the fight was over and the raiders had dispersed.
But an ingrained sense of loyalty to his tree-living friends made even the thought impossible. They had come to him. They were fighting against terrible odds. They relied on him to help them. Would he desert them in their extremity, forfeit the confidence they had in him? Not while breath remained in his body.
It seemed as though that breath were not going to remain very much longer. He could scarcely draw air into his bursting lungs. His chest seemed bound with iron bands. His strength was deserting him. He was fairly trembling with fatigue.
But his indomitable will was as strong as ever. He had a wild Berserker rage against these fiendish, ferocious enemies from the air, these pirates of the ether. For every wound he got from beak or talon he was determined to exact a death in return.