So it was that he did not sit down under the banyan tree, but trotted along at the far rear of the tribe.
With his nose he read the narrative of the flight.

Only once did he encounter what advertised its terror.

It was an entire group annihilated by a shell.

There were: an old man of fifty, with a crutch because of the leg which had been slashed off by a shark when he was a young boy; a dead Mary with a dead babe at her breast and a dead child of three clutching her hand; and two dead pigs, huge and fat, which the woman had been herding to safety.
And Jerry's nose told him of how the stream of the fugitives had split and flooded past on each side and flowed together again beyond.

Incidents of the flight he did encounter: a part-chewed joint of sugar-cane some child had dropped; a clay pipe, the stem short from successive breakages; a single feather from some young man's hair, and a calabash, full of cooked yams and sweet potatoes, deposited carefully beside the trail by some Mary for whom its weight had proved too great.
The shell-fire ceased as Jerry trotted along; next he heard the rifle- fire from the landing-party, as it shot down the domestic pigs on Somo's streets.