Spotted Eagle Mountain little voice

Fine to fade here if it's okay with you, Emma~ ty both very much for the thread!

And now, with their desperation and determination, there was a blackness and whiteness and dark green-grey. For they had plunged themselves away from the cougar and into the water. They thrashed and struggled, swam and gasped, and after what felt like almost an hour of pain they somehow made it to the surface.

As he looked at Spring, a friend he loved and his ultimate saviour, the boy found a moment of clarity and finally found his voice. It was sweet and high and soft like the voice of Ishi, but it lacked every scrap of the confidence and joy he'd once had. You were right, he whispered. Spring had always warned him about cougars, but he hadn't listened. Now he'd paid the price for that and for his terrifying ambitions.

And this was all Shardul's latest victim would say for the entire journey.