He trapped some water between ugg boots on sale his bare shoulder and the trunk of the tree, and he twisted his head over and drank the trapped rainwater, sucking and slurping at it, and he drank more and he laughed, laughed with joy and delight, not madness, until he could laugh no more, until he hung there too exhausted to move.
     At the foot of the tree, on the ground, the rain had made the sheet partly transparent, and had lifted it and pushed it forward so that Shadow could see Wednesday's dead hand, waxy and pale, and the shape of his head, and he ugg boots discount outlet thought of the shroud of Turin and he remembered the open girl on Jacquel's table in Cairo, and then, as if to spite the cold, he observed that he was feeling warm and comfortable, and the bark of the tree felt soft, and he slept once more, and if he dreamed any dreams this time he could not remember them.
     By the following morning the pain was no longer local, not confined to the places where the ropes cut into his flesh, or where the bark scraped his skin. Now the pain discount uggs for women was everywhere.
     And he was hungry, with empty pangs down in the pit of him. His head was pounding. Sometimes he imagined that he had stopped breathing, that his heart had ceased to beat. Then he would hold his breath until he could hear his heart pounding an ocean in his ears and he was forced to suck air like a diver surfacing from the depths.
     It seemed to him that the tree reached from-hell to heaven, and that he had been hanging there forever. A brown hawk circled the tree, landed on uggs discount a broken branch near to him, and then took to the wing, flying west.
     The storm, which had abated at dawn, began to return as the day passed. Gray, roiling clouds stretched from horizon to horizon; a slow drizzle began to fall. The body at the base of the tree seemed to have become less, in its stained motel winding sheet, crumbling into itself like a sugar cake left in the rain.
     Sometimes Shadow burned, sometimes he froze.
     When the thunder started once more he imagined that he heard drums beating, kettledrums in the uggs discount thunder and the thump of his heart, inside his head or outside, it did not matter. He perceived the pain in colors: the red of a neon bar sign, the green of a traffic light on a wet night, the blue of an empty video screen.
     The squirrel dropped from the bark of the trunk onto Shadow's shoulder, sharp claws digging into his skin. "Ratatosk!" it chattered. The tip of its nose touched his lips. "Ratatosk." It sprang back onto the tree.