“I had been sent to Margrave, a world in the first stages of colonization. I was twenty minutes out of Triangle Lake and on my way to the Wiggly River logging region flying at an attitude of thousand feet. It seems the equipment needed some adjustments. The system had been harvesting trees that were too young and I was sent to investigate and to make changes to the program settings.
I was in the back seat of my transport when the roc swept down on me, wrapped ten huge talons around my transport and swallowed it. Everything went black and the transport flew blithely on, ignoring the roc. The ride became turbulent when the roc tried to fly away and couldn’t.
I tried the radio and got nothing. Either it couldn’t reach out beyond all that meat around me, or my antennas had been broken off while making the way down the rocs gullet. As the roc settled down on a ledge, there didn’t seem to be anything I could do. I knew that the power would last for some time as long as I used it sparingly and I had an emergency food maker and other supplies, so I just hunkered down and waited for the roc to decompose. It took six months for enough of the roc to decompose to allow me to squeeze out between a couple of the rocs ribs.”
Safe at any Speed, Tales of Known Space, Larry Niven
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