I could not help her.

He was so powerful a monster that he could have torn me limb from limb.

As it was, to my death I carried an injured shoulder that ached and went lame in rainy weather and that was a mark of his handiwork.
The Swift One was sick at the time I received this injury.

It must have been a touch of the malaria from which we sometimes suffered; but whatever it was, it made her dull and heavy.

She did not have the accustomed spring to her muscles, and was indeed in poor shape for flight when Red-Eye cornered her near the lair of the wild dogs, several miles south from the caves.