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West? thought Éomeléo, well, there is no way I'm going due west to South Mirkwood! This was smart thinking, and he decided to venture north. Whatever evils he would encounter up there would have to be less than the power in Dol Guldur, which Gondor was rather worried about.
He strode along, and was soon out of sight of the others, a ramshackle bunch if ever he had seen one! Let them take the straight and narrow. Éomeléo chuckled at the thought of what they were heading towards.
He was really having a lovely time of it. It was a beautiful, sunny day and the birds were singing. In the late afternoon he discovered the catch in the route he had chosen. He was faced with the Celduin, also known as the River Running; and it was running pretty fast today. Éomeléo stood there thinking.
He gazed east and saw little of note, so he followed the river westwards for a few miles in search of a bridge or any method of crossing. There was none. At times he played some melodies on his ocarina but all this brought were the beautiful responses of the larks. He was definitely alone in the wild. He realised that he needed to get back onto the path, and so decided to test the river, knowing that he'd have to get wet to earn this wondrous treasure.
Placing his pack and his weapons on the grass, Éomeléo walked to the river, but stopped. He didn't want to get his clothes wet, particularly his waistcoat. So off came that, his cloak and his shirt. He looked quite the picture: half-naked but still partly resplendent in his Gondorian feathered hat. He waded in, for though the river was fast, he had chosen a shallow section of the Celduin, and he was strong enough to walk slowly and heavily to the middle of the river. It reached up to his neck at the deepest point, and the far bank was but 30 feet away from here.
He returned to his belongings and rearranged them. Wrapping all of his clothes together in his pack with his ocarina, he waded back into the river. Realising that he needed an arm to balance with in the water, he decided to hurl the pack across from where the water was just above waist-high. Being a young nobleman and having little else to do with his time but participate in sports, he achieved this easily, for the bag was not especially heavy, and it cleared the bank by a safe distance.
The weapons were harder to transport. Lifting them high, one at a time, Éomeléo practically skipped across the river this time. Never had it been so useful to be tall, and even then the river dragged his twinkle-toed approach far downstream before he reached the bank. It was very laborious, and when he finally got across he lay panting on the ground. He was soaking wet, and the sun was sinking in the sky; but his food, water and ocarina had been protected well by his clothing. It seemed good to young Éomeléo at this point, and he laughed out loud.
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