When Bad Bone had slipped on Breister’s reed boots and padded away from Helga’s cottage, at first things went well. In the early going, the deep darkness shielded him. A faint glow at the horizon, however, promised a full moon would soon rise into the cloudless night sky, pressing the urgency of escape upon him. “What a miserable night to attempt escape,” he thought, nerves tingling with alert. Even keeping to the deepest shadows, he sometimes would be forced to step across moonlit gaps in the cover. “There is nothing to do but try,” he scolded himself softly. “I can beat this. I’ll not allow a gang of bungling cutthroats to catch me.”
Crawling on his belly along ditches for concealment, Bad Bone crept cautiously toward the forbidding mountains that rose just beyond the Bor Jeeves River. Flowing past the hamlet at O’Fallon’s Bluff, the river represented safety. “If I can just get across the river,” he thought, “they’ll never be able to track me in the mountains.” He hoped to cling to the side of the ferryboat at Thedford’s Crossing and, breathing through a reed, catch a ride across the river undetected. Once across the Bor Jeeves, escape into the wildest ranges of the Don’ot Stumb Mountains beckoned. The fugitive Lynx knew that time was short. Soon, fruitless search of the hamlet would turn the Royal Patrol to possible avenues of his escape. Each moment, the full moon rose more brightly into the sky.
Realizing that spies might be watching the normal river crossing, Bad Bone crept softly toward the crossing point. The Bor Jeeves River cascaded down from the mountains in a furious series of cataracts. These made the river impossible to cross upstream from the ferry dock operated by Stoke Thedford. Every hour, Stoke’s boats made a circuit across the Bor Jeeves. It was the only safe crossing in miles.
Bad Bone listened as the hourly bell rang, calling passengers to board the ferry. Except for the bell, however, he was puzzled by the unexpected silence at the crossing. Normally, he knew, the ferry dock would be packed at this time of the evening, as creatures hurried home or went to visit friends. “There should be lots of folk boarding the ferry,” Bad Bone thought. “Where is everyone?” Something was wrong at the ferry crossing. Straining his ears to pick up any sound that might give him information, he tingled with anxious suspense. The absence of any of the normal sounds of passenger traffic was so stark as to be sinister in its implications.
“There must be spies or soldiers watching the ferry,” he concluded. “The other beasts know there’s trouble and are staying away. It’s a trap. I’ll have to take my chances further downstream.” With this thought in mind, Bad Bone wormed his way, inch by inch, away through the brush where he had been hiding. “Haven’t been downstream from Thedford’s in years,” he reflected as he crawled along. “The river’s deep and swift through there...but no rapids as I recall. Perhaps I can swim it at some point...but that’ll have to wait for daylight,” he mused. By crawling a few dozen feet, then resting and listening for several minutes, then crawling another distance, he gradually moved down the river. He heard no signs that he was being pursued, and after about an hour of proceeding in this manner, Bad Bone stood up and began moving quietly from tree to tree.
He now moved quickly away from Thedford’s Crossing, although he stayed alert and watchful. Traveling into increasingly wild terrain, he kept moving in utmost stealth for several more hours. At last, judging that it must be the wee hours of the morning, and feeling a creeping sense of bone-weary exhaustion, he stopped to rest. He mounted a boulder-strewn slope, slumped behind a large rock, and was soon asleep.
Just as the first streaks of daybreak lightened the sky, a call awakened him. Instantly alert, Bad Bone leapt to a low, defensive crouch, eyes darting. Standing among the boulders on the slope above him, he saw three Borf scouts—instantly recognizable to him by their low, flattened hats. The two adult female Squirrels, and young male Coyote, wore the close-fitting hats which sloped down from the crown of the head with long flaps made of willow bark and grass woven together. Only their painted ears—notched in traditional Borf style—were not covered. Familiar with the clan of wandering nomads, he circled his arm above his head in the customary Borf greeting. One of the Borfs stepped toward him and repeated the sign of friendship.