I reminded myself that not in three years had a hunter been killed in this way. I asked myself if it was plausible that I should die so young, on my first hunt, when there were others like my father who had hunted for thirty seasons and gone unscathed. I demanded to know why I felt this overwhelming fear, when all my tutors had labored to teach me that the self is a void and concern for one’s person a wicked sin. Was not my father in equal jeopardy, far across the sun- smitten plain? And had he not much more than I to lose, being a septarch and a prime septarch at that, while I was only a boy? In this way I cudgeled the fear from my damp soul, and studied the sky without regard for the spear that might be aimed at my back, and in minutes my former fretting seemed an absurdity to me. I would stand here for days, if need be, unafraid. At once I had the reward of this triumph over self: against the shimmering fierceness of the sky I made out a dark floating form, a notch in the heavens, and this time it was no illusion, for my youthful eyes spied wings and horn. Did the others see it? Was the bird mine to attempt? If I made the kill, would the septarch pound my back and call me his best son? All was silence from the other hunters.

“One cries claim!” I shouted jubilantly, and lifted my weapon, and eyed the sight, remembering what I had been taught, to let the inner mind make the calculations, to aim and fire in one swift impulse before the intellect, by quibbling, could spoil the intuition’s command.

And in the instant before I sent my bolt aloft there came a ghastly outcry from my left, and I fired without aiming at all, turning in the same instant toward my father’s place, and seeing him half hidden beneath the madly flapping form of another hornfowl that had gored him from spine to belly. The air about them was clouded with red sand as the monster’s wings furiously slapped the ground; the bird was struggling to take off, but a hornfowl cannot lift a man’s weight, though this does not prevent them from attacking us.