Whenever the Horned Serpent thought back on its life lately, it wanted to retch. If it did not eat, it would die, but eating that mutton made it wish it were dead. Yet it could not bear to actually die.
It had already eaten something that foul to stay alive. If it starved to death in the end, would it not have eaten it for nothing?
"But Walking with the Water Snake says the protagonist shared a Bighorn Sheep he hunted with a Horned Serpent..."
Kettleburn could not help defending himself when he heard that.
He had followed the book to the letter!
The book had only mentioned that one food for the serpent, and he had not even looked for anything else!
And... was the Horned Serpent so irritable because it thought the mutton tasted awful?
At the time, Kettleburn had assumed it had been mistreated by that Indian fellow and still had not recovered from the resulting stress. He had felt so sorry for it that he had fed it several extra meals!
Manus fell silent for a moment, then said helplessly:
"Professor, have you considered that Walking with the Water Snake is just a novel—and one written by a Briton at that? Bighorn Sheep live in the mountains of North America, in relatively dry habitats with steep rock faces. Horned Serpents may be found throughout the Americas, but they mainly inhabit the rainforests, swamps, and wetlands of South America."
The ranges of wild animals did not have such rigid boundaries, of course, but these two species were unlikely to cross paths.
The idea that Horned Serpents ate Bighorn Sheep was probably something a British wizard had made up after hearing that pythons ate sheep. Or perhaps that wizard had not even known that much and had simply