But Feather cried out that I should not go. Very treacherous was the marsh, she said, and its sand and its black slime had sucked down to death many beasts which ventured into it. I must wait until the winter came, and the marsh was frozen, so that a man might walk upon it safely. True, there might not be any of the seeds left, for the birds would have taken most of them, but with the few she had she could raise a little crop, and the next year there would be an abundance for the planting. But I only laughed at her. I, Scar, was vain, and thought it an easy thing for me to do. Still, after I had left Feather, there was almost a little fear in me. I knew that many beasts had perished in the marsh, and that in past times more than one person who had hunted along its edges, and maybe ventured a little way into it after some wounded game, had never been seen in the village again; but I was proud, and would not give up the venture. I sought, however, one of the very old men, Three Tooth, who had been a great hunter and very daring in his youth, and who, I thought, might give me good advice as to the way I should take to get to the island safely. He was very old, and mumbled as he talked, but from him I learned that once he had reached the island in midsummer, though after a most perilous journey, leaping from tussock to tussock, where from the land to the east of the island they rose more closely than elsewhere; but he raised his thin arms, and shook his wrinkled hands, and warned me in his cracked voice against trying to make the journey. Barely had he come back from the island with his life. Once he slipped as he leaped, and the black ooze and sucking sand caught him; and had there not been on the tussock from which he slipped a deep-rooted overhanging willow, to a limb of which he clung, and by aid of which he at last pulled himself out, he would surely have been lost. He begged me not to go, but I told him that I had resolved, and so he told me again the way he had taken, but as I left him he was shaking his head and mumbling wildly.