Explore "The Green Odyssey" by Philip José Farmer on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Two weeks of very hard work and little sleep passed as Green learned the duties of a topsailman. He hated to go aloft, but he found that being up so high had its advantages. It gave him a chance to catch a few winks now and then. There were many crow's nests where musketmen were stationed during a fight. Green would slip down into one of these and go to sleep at once. His foster son Grizquetr would stand watch for him, waking him if the foretop captain was coming through the rigging toward them. One afternoon Griz's whistle startled Green out of a sound sleep.
However, the captain stopped to give another sailor a lecture. Unable to go back to sleep, Green watched a herd of _hoobers_ take to their hoofs at the approach of the _Bird_. These diminutive equines, beautiful with their orange bodies and black or white manes and fetlocks, sometimes formed immense herds that must have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. So thick were they that they looked like a bobbing sea of flashing heads and gleaming hoofs stretching clear to the horizon.