he was for some time, panting in his distress. His flank had three deep slashes in it, each one bleeding and painful. He nosed at them with his beak, quivering, and huddled back in the burrow, frightened that the creature might come back.
It didn’t, but he barely slept for the next couple of days. His wounds eventually stopped bleeding and scabbed over, and he rested and ate the last few carcasses slowly, to give himself plenty of time to heal. One of the wounds became infected, but he nipped it open and let the muck drain out, and the swelling went down.
The last of the food was gone in a few days, but the wounds on his flank were deep and began bleeding again if he moved. He lay still on his side and felt hunger gnawing at him. If he went into the open now he would be slow and vulnerable. If he stayed here, he would starve.
The black chick was still young and his mind was still simple, but he was more than intelligent enough to understand the situation and how dire it was. But, as he lay there among the damp earth and listened to the sighing of the trees far above, determination hardened in his chest. He would not give up. He would survive. Nothing and nobody would ever take his life away from him. He promised himself this.
The black chick did not forget his resolution. He waited patiently in the burrow for as long as he dared, eating wet earth and insects to sustain himself, and then left it and struck out into the world once more.
And he survived. Against all the odds, he survived. He ate worms; he ate carrion. He taught himself how to hunt small animals, which he did mostly at night, given an advantage by his dark coat. He raided birds’ nests and dug mice out of their burrows. Once he even resorted to fishing, waiting patiently by a still pool to snag his prey. He took to climbing into trees to sleep, feeling safer up high, and from these perches he continued his attempts to fly. He only managed a brief unsteady glide at first, and his landings were painful, but he persisted and taught himself how to keep steady and turn by using his tail. After a while he was able to flit from tree to tree and could land neatly on a branch or a rock or on the ground. He began chasing birds on the wing and even started to unconsciously mimic the hunting methods of an adult griffin by dropping out of the sky to snatch up a fleeing animal.
He continued to grow steadily as the months and years went by, his body thickening and his wings becoming longer. From the size of a cat he grew to the size of a goat, then a horse, and he continued to grow until, at fifteen years old, he was the largest creature in the valley.
He was heavier in the shoulders and haunches than his mother had been, and the tufts of black feathers above his ears had become long and pointed to indicate his physical maturity and vitality to other griffins. But there were no other griffins in the valley, and his aggressive screeches every evening went unanswered. He would fly up to the mountains that marked the boundaries of his territory, hoping to see another griffin on the other side. He would look out over the huge plains to the north and scream a challenge at them, not liking their strangeness and the unfamiliar scents the wind carried from them. Nothing ever came to answer him, and he eventually lost interest.
As he grew older and larger, it became harder to find enough food, so he took to ranging further on his hunting trips. The neighbouring valleys were only a little better; he caught enough to avoid starvation, but was not tempted to move to a new territory. For now, the lure of his birthplace was strong enough to keep him coming back.
And that was how he lived from day to day, alone and unthinking, until he was nineteen years old and had reached his full size. He had chosen to live in a cave on the side of one of the three mountains. Less of a cave than an overhang, its semblance of a roof was only big enough to offer partial shelter for him, though the floor jutted out into a rocky ledge that was