In a way, this ability of theirs to destroy across space was an elongation of claw and fang.

Without pondering it, or being conscious of it, he accepted it as he accepted the rest of the mysterious world about him.
Once, even, had Jerry seen his _Mister_ Haggin deal death at a distance in another noise-way.

From the veranda he had seen him fling sticks of exploding dynamite into a screeching mass of blacks who had come raiding from the Beyond in the long war canoes, beaked and black, carved and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which they had left hauled up on the beach at the door of Meringe.
Many precautions by the white-gods had Jerry been aware of, and so, sensing it almost in intangible ways, as a matter of course he accepted this barbed-wire fence on the floating world as a mark of the persistence of danger.

Disaster and death hovered close about, waiting the chance to leap upon life and drag it down.

Life had to be very alive in order to live was the law Jerry had learned from the little of life he knew.
Watching the rigging up of the barbed wire, Jerry's next adventure was an encounter with Lerumie, the return boy from Meringe, who, only that morning, on the beach embarking, had been rolled by Biddy, along with his possessions into the surf.