The Long Cosmos by Terry Pratchett

the very middle of the mound, where the central chambers with their comparatively thin roofs were to be found, and once there you had to wait a long time, still as a statue, while the rabbits, alarmed by the fall of your footsteps, returned from the deeper tunnels where they would have fled, and got back to whatever business they conducted in the shallower chambers. Then all you had to do was smash open the thin roof – Joshua augmented his small human fists with a rock for that – and dive in among the wriggling packets of meat before they could all run away again.
    So, after three successful hunts with Sancho, here was Joshua alone, scouting a suspicious-looking area not far from a forest clump. The faintest of circles on the ground – check. The shallowest of domes, barely visible in the dry drifting dust – check. Joshua spent a tough half-hour standing there in the sun, motionless, still as a statue, holding a rock the size of his head.
    It was just as he raised his rock that the baby elephant came bursting from the forest clump.
    Joshua could barely believe his eyes. He hadn’t even known the elephants used the forests, though there was no reason why the hell they shouldn’t. It took a heartbeat for him to take in the fact that the calf, fleeing whatever had alarmed it, was heading straight for his precious rabbit warren. Worse, its mother was coming out of the forest after her calf, trumpeting shrilly.
    And Joshua himself, the thoughts in his old brain flowing as slowly as jelly sucked through a straw, was standing right in the way of the parade. The baby elephant was fast, faster than he’d expected.
    Suddenly it was on him.
    He dropped the rock and, at the very last moment, rolled out of the way. The calf’s tusk-armour was immature but still hard as steel and bristling with sharp points; it missed him by inches. Now here came the mother, intent on catching her calf, barely giving Joshua a second glance.
    It was sheer bad luck that, as he crawled through the dirt, desperately scrambling to get away, she brought her heavy back foot down on Joshua’s leg.
    He felt the bone break. He heard it, like a twig snapping. And as he rolled away, he felt the raw faces of bone scraping across each other.
    â€˜Stupid!’ he yelled. How could he have been so slow? Plus he was Joshua Valienté, the world’s most famous stepper. Why had he not just stepped away to safety? Because he’d been distracted by wanting to hold on to his prize rabbit-mole warren?
    Because you’re too old , he heard Sister Agnes whisper in his ear.
    And then the pain hit him, and he roared, and blacked out.
    When he came to, the pain in his leg seemed to have subsided to a kind of dull throb.
    He lay in the dirt where he had fallen. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t so much as rolled over. On the ground, vivid before his face, he could see the scuff marks where the elephants’ huge flat feet had passed, and a little trail of dry shit, a panic evacuation by the calf, probably, as it had run from whatever had spooked it in the forest. Strange, he thought, that elephant dung didn’t smell so bad. A benefit of a vegetarian diet, he supposed.
    And strange, or just dumb luck, that he was still alive, given he was lying here, inert, unprotected, a sack of meat bleeding into the High Meggers ground.
    He ran through his options. He’d thought through scenarios like this many times. He could step away in an emergency, if some set of teeth backed by an empty stomach came for him. Otherwise he would be horribly vulnerable to attack.
    But if he could manage it, it was best for him to stay in this world. This was where his gear was, in his barely begun stockade – his food stash, his water, his medical kit. If he could get back to his hollow in the rock, it wasn’t so far, maybe even get up into the refuge of his tree, he could try to weather it out until the injury had healed enough for it to be