“Oh, that’s okay,” Pangaea said, politely declining Rebecca's offer, “I can just glide down.”
Actually, it would have been just as easy for him to simply jump out of the nest and parachute to the ground, but he figured that the young flyers would enjoy watching him glide. It was more fun, anyway.
Fluffing his feathers in preparation for the glide, Pangaea stepped out to the ledge in front of the flyers’ nest. Spreading his wings, he took a small running start, and leapt off the edge, splaying his feathered hind legs out as he became airborne. It took a moment for his wings to catch the air properly, but he only dropped a few feet before quickly leveling out into a smooth, almost completely horizontal glide.
“There ya have it!” he called out to Petrie’s siblings as he passed a few who were hovering in mid-air, “That’s basically the same thing I had to do to get away from that fast biteróWHOA!”
At that moment, Pangaea realized that he had miscalculated his flight plan. He had intended to glide until gravity caused him to drop all the way to the ground, but instead he found himself gliding directly towards a large conifer tree (somewhat resembling a fir or spruce) a few hundred feet in front of the flyers’ nest. Oh, drat, he thought to himself.
With not enough time to change direction before he hit the tree, Pangaea did the same thing he had tried the last time he was faced with this situation, pulling his hind legs and tail forward to angle his body vertically and slow down as much as possible. Still, he couldn’t help but utter a reflexive “GAWWWK!” as his collision was cushioned by the thick, needly branches surrounding the trunk.
Fortunately for him, the tree’s needles weren’t very sharp, and in any case his feathers prevented most of them from reaching his skin. But Pangaea had squeezed his eyes shut to prevent getting any of needles from getting in them, and as he flailed around blindly, he failed to get an effective grip on any of the branches. As a result, he tumbled down through the layers of foliage on the tree, crashing ingloriously to the ground in a shower of dead needles and collected rainwater.
Pangaea was a little dazed, but hadn’t had far to fall, and was uninjured. However, he worried that the flyers would think he was hurt, so he quickly stood up and called to them to allay their concerns.
“I’m all right! I’m all right!” he shouted hastily, “This happens all the time!“ As was usual when he experienced one of his slapstick mishaps, Pangaea found himself grinning sheepishly and suppressing his own laughter at himself.
He plucked a small twig out of the feathers on his head, and began brushing off the dozens of loose needles that had been caught in his plumage. Ironically, he had reenacted his first glide even more accurately than he had intended.
