He continued to drink.  He drank until his sun-shrunken sides stood out like the walls of a balloon, although longer were the intervals from the drinking in which, with his tongue of gratefulness, he spoke against the black skin of Lamai’s hand.  And all went well, and would have continued to go well, had not Lamai’s mother, Lenerengo, just awakened, stepped across her black litter of progeny and raised her voice in shrill protest against her eldest born’s introducing of one more mouth and much more nuisance into the household.

A squabble of human speech followed, of which Jerry knew no word but of which he sensed the significance.  Lamai was with him and for him.  Lamai’s mother was against him.  She shrilled and shrewed her firm conviction that her son was a fool and worse because he had neither the consideration nor the silly sense of a fool’s solicitude for a hard-worked mother.  She appealed to the sleeping Lumai, who awoke heavily and fatly, who muttered and mumbled easy terms of Somo dialect to the effect that it was a most decent world, that all puppy dogs and eldest-born sons were right delightful things to possess, that he had never yet starved to death, and that peace and sleep were the finest things that ever befell the lot of mortal man—­and, in token thereof, back into the peace of sleep, he snuggled his nose into the biceps of his arm for a pillow and proceeded to snore.

But Lamai, eyes stubbornly sullen, with mutinous foot-stampings and a perfect knowledge that all was clear behind him to leap and flee away if his mother rushed upon him, persisted in retaining his puppy dog.  In the end, after an harangue upon the worthlessness of Lamai’s father, she went back to sleep.

Ideas beget ideas.  Lamai had learned how astonishingly thirsty Jerry had been.  This engendered the idea that he might be equally hungry.  So he applied dry branches of wood to the smouldering coals he dug out of the ashes of the cooking-fire, and builded a large fire.  Into this, as it gained strength, he placed many stones from a convenient pile, each fire-blackened in token that it had been similarly used many times.  Next, hidden under the water of the brook in a netted hand-bag, he brought to light the carcass of a fat wood-pigeon he had snared the previous day.  He wrapped the pigeon in green leaves, and, surrounding it with the hot stones from the fire, covered pigeon and stones with earth.

When, after a time, he removed the pigeon and stripped from it the scorched wrappings of leaves, it gave forth a scent so savoury as to prick up Jerry’s ears and set his nostrils to quivering.  When the boy had torn the steaming carcass across and cooled it, Jerry’s meal began; nor did the meal cease till the last sliver of meat had been stripped and tongued from the bones and the bones crunched and crackled to fragments and swallowed.  And throughout the meal Lamai made love to Jerry, crooning over and over his little song, and patting and caressing him.