grass; they came upon three wild dogs eating an antelope and gibbering
like gnomes; they beheld two striped zebras stampeding from a lion; they
got into the middle of a herd of elephants--but what must those giants
have seemed to them, almost at ground-level?--and did not know it, so
silent can the mighty ones be, till they heard the unmistakable digestive
rumblings; they happened on the tail of a leopard, observing a young
waterbuck antelope, and retired therefrom without his suspecting them;
they watched some bush-pigs rooting in a clearing, hoping they might turn
up some insects worth eating; they heard a mother-lion grunting among
some reeds, and were nearly run over by the stampede of zebras that
followed; they chased a rat that ran into a hole in which was a snake,
and it never came out again; they went up a tree after a weaver-bird's
nest, but, from the way the bottle-shaped structure was hung, could not
get at it; they investigated a hare's hole, and found a six-foot mamba
snake, with four-minute death-fangs, in possession; they risked the
thousand spikes of a thorn-bush to get at a red-necked pheasant roosting,
only to find the branch he was on too slender to hold their weight; they
were stalked by a wild cat, and hid in a hollow tree; and were pounced
upon by a civet cat--who was their big cousin--and dodged him most
wonderfully; and were chased by a jackal, whose nose they bit when it
followed them into a hollow log. Finally, they came to the wall, and
stopped.
Their noses told them it was not the wall of a native village, for no
one, not even a man, could possibly make any mistake about _that_. Also,
their noses may have told them other things. Anyway, the moon saw them,
in the form of two gray lines, slide over the wall and drop silently into
the shadow on the far side.
A wild cat was courting a domestic cat of the bungalow close by, at the
corner of the compound, but, flat as strips of tawny-spotted cloth, they
got past him all right.
A black-backed jackal was gnawing a bit of old hide at the angle of the
wall, and they were forced to make a detour up to the veranda of the
bungalow to avoid that sharp-eared, sharp-eyed one.
Here, on the veranda, they discovered a chair, and the male genet,
standing on hindlegs to see what was in the chair, found himself looking
straight into the electric-blue, purplish balls of light that betokened
another cat, which had been asleep, but was now very wide awake.
He went round that chair in the form of a hazy, wavy, streak, as the cat
shot out of it. The female genet faded from publicity behind a palm in a
pot. But the genet's tail was so long that, with the cat and himself
going round and round that chair like a living Catherine-wheel--both he
and the cat spitting no end--the cat was touching his tail, while he was
snapping at the cat's. Wherefore he moved across the veranda as an arrow
flies, and round the corner, and as he turned the corner he--leapt.
It was a beautiful leap, and it cleared the danger that he seemed bound
to run into, as it lifted in his path, by about an inch. As he sprang he
heard the cat's claws scraping loudly, as she madly endeavored to
stop--too late.
Then the head of the eight-foot python that had been creeping up round
that corner in the process of stalking that cat whizzed by beneath him
like a hurled poleax.
As he landed the genet heard the cat make one sound--only one--and it was
indescribable, and he dropped off the veranda into the shadow of a bush,
where the female genet presently joined him.
There was a small mongoose (my! what a lot of hunters do collect about
the bungalows at night, to be sure!) under the bush, engaged in eating
that precise reptilian form of poisoned death known as a night adder,
which it had just killed. But the genets had other and private business,
and they parted from the mongoose with no more than a snarl, the two
genets to appear next--or, rather, to be no more than guessed
at--crossing the last stretch of moonlight between them and the fowlhouse.
As they did so, a blurred, vast-winged, silent, dark shadow passed
overhead, and a peculiarly piercing whistle stabbed dagger-like through
the waiting, listening silence. Both genets jumped, as if the whistle
had really been a dagger and had stabbed them, and vanished into hiding
before the sound had ceased, almost. They knew that shadow--the owner of
the whistle; they had met her earlier that night--the giant eagle-owl.
But what the fangs and claws was she doing here? After rats, perhaps.
They hoped so, and tried to think she was not after them.
The people who are condemned to live in those parts know that deaths,
many and mysterious, go about there in the night, seeking victims, and
that fowls must, in consequence, be well penned. Yet they die; and it
has been said that where a snake can squeeze into a fowl-house, there a
genet can follow--perhaps dealing with the snake first, and the fowls
afterwards. Certainly, there seems to be no longer, and narrower, and
lower, and more sinuous little beast on this earth than the genet.
The male genet took the problem upon himself as his own special province
to find entrance into places; and the female, her suspicions of him
oozing away more and more every minute, "kept cave." And he found an
entrance, that little, long, low beggar; he found an entrance, a hole up
under the roof, that appeared small enough, in all conscience, to be
overlooked by anybody.
The moon knows how they climbed to it--I don't. And as the male genet
dropped down inside, the female took his place. But even as he landed he
wished he had not. Fear was there before him.
In the smelly, stifling, heated pitch-darkness a fowl squawked with pain,
and others burst into noise above his head.
Then he made a blunder. Surprised certainly, and angry perhaps, he
growled.
Instantly the confusion ceased and hushed to silence; and instantly, too,
round, large, amber-gold balls of light like lamps, to the number of two,
were switched on--fixed upon him, staring, so that he "froze" in his
tracks where he stood, and her crest stood up on the female genet, as it
does on a cat, as she peered through the hole. They had disturbed
something at its killing.
Very few graven images move less than those two pretty but small hunters
did in the nest half-minute, while the fowls settled down again, and the
genets tried--mainly with their noses--to find out what, in the
wilderness or out of it, they had run up against this time.
At the end of that period there fell upon their stupefied ears the sound
as if some one unseen were cracking nuts--nut after nut, very quickly--in
the blackness, and both genets very nearly had a fit--a motionless
one--on the spot.
Then they knew, most entirely did they know, and the knowledge gave them
no end of a fright. It was the giant eagle-owl. She--it was a she--had
beaten the robbers in hole-creeping, had outburgled the burglars, and
outcrept the creepers, though goodness alone knows how.
The only difficulty was, who was going out first, and who alive, and who
dead?
The male genet apparently knew about owls, and nothing of what he knew
had shown that they were cowards. Nor was he a coward; but the wild
hunters we not out to win the V.C., as a rule, I guess; and, if they
were, he was not one of them. He was out to feed, not fight.
Possibly, while he was considering this, standing there with arched
back--by reason of his long body and apologies for legs--in the darkness,
the owl was considering the same thing. Anyway, both seemed to make up
their minds in the same instant, and to act on it. Wherefore they
arrived at the hole under the roof in the same instant, too; and you can
take it from me that there are very few creatures indeed who can go into
a hole, or come out of it, with such an amazing rush as the genet.
The result naturally was war, and red-hot at that.
Grappling, spitting, hissing, growling, snorting, coughing, the two fell
in a heap to the ground--and an owl on the ground is one degree more of a
spiked handful than an owl in the air--where they continued the
discussion in a young whirlwind of their own, much to the perturbation of
the roosting fowls, who woke up and added to the riot.
The female genet had gone out of the other end of the hole, like a cork
out of a bottle, taking a scratch on the nose from the owl with her; but,
finding nothing further happen, she now crept back and peered in. What
she discovered did not give her any comfort, for, although upon her back,
it looked as if that she-owl had been specially designed to fight that
way. She had one fiend's claw gripped well home on the male genet's
shoulder, and another doing its best to skin him alive; while her beak
was hammering the gray top of his weasely-looking head. True, the male
genet's fangs were buried up to the socket in the owl's throat, but that
was no proof that he had found either her windpipe or the equally useful
jugular vein, and, if he did not pretty quick, it looked as if it would
never matter, so far as he was concerned.
I like to think of what that little, long, crippled female genet did
then, in that well-like blackness and that smelly heat, with the chance
of retreat open to her, and no one to say her nay. Without hesitation,
she dropped to the ground beside the scuffle, and flung herself into
it--into the winnowing, slapping radius of big pinions, that beat and
beat and beat, smothering all with feathers and dust. One wing caught
her squarely, and she fetched up against the wall, winded and dazed; but
she was back again in a flash, dancing on her toes, and, suddenly
flattening, shot in, level with the ground, like a snake.
She arrived. She felt feathers against her nose--she could not see. The
wings pounded her flatter. She laid hold, biting in as deep and as far
as she could get.
As a matter of fact, she had got the owl by the neck, but one would have
thought she had turned on a young volcano by the confusion that followed.
Both genets shut their precious eyes, and hung on, while that owl beat
herself round and round in one last wild flurry, coughing horribly and
humanly the while, and cracking nuts. Finally she collapsed as suddenly
as a pricked bladder, and lay still--a great, mixed-up feathery heap,
limp and pathetic, with her vast flung-out wings.
The two genets backed away, glad enough to be done with such a fiery,
feathered fury. The male genet stumbled a little, and sat down. He was
nearly as red as the sun on a stormy dawn, but all the blood was not his.
They did not seem to trouble further about the great foe lying beside
them. Certainly she pervaded the air with a musty smell that was not
attractive, or, at least, not attractive when fowls were by; and it was
to the fowls they turned, the female first, the male later, after he had
done some very necessary licking.
I fancy that, though dizzy, the male genet was rather proud of himself.
He had brought his lady-love to such a feast as she may have dreamed of,
and she had saved his life. That gave them a fellow-feeling that looked
well for his prospects in love. But I do not think he had quite realized
how hungry that beautiful velvet-skinned damsel of his choice was till
that minute, and then he was given no time to think about it.
The dark over his head burst like a mine, and feathers and noise
enveloped him whirling. That represented the female genet coming down,
fixed to the throat of a hapless fowl. She sucked the blood, and flew at
another. Ordinarily she would have removed that one and found it enough;
but men who have been "broke," when they got suddenly rich, seem to go
temporarily mad with the lust of spending, and so it was with her; only,
her madness was the lust of killing.
She killed, leaping and wrenching at the poor, screaming birds' throats,
blinded to the world with excitement, drunk with blood. That is an awful
intoxication, and makes even men, let alone wild, carnivorous beasts, do
unmentionable things. Also, the smell of blood was too much for the male
genet, and he presently rushed, with flying tail, into the crimson orgy
too.
They were some time at this craziness; and when they had finished, they
and the fowls that were still alive could only lie and pant together
among the contorted slain, the blood--you would never believe how a
cockerel will bleed--and the carmine-tinted feathers. You might not
believe me if I told you how many fowls they had killed, but it was a
most disgraceful number, and quite inexcusable.
And then, even as they lay there, dead-beat, they started suddenly and
together, for, almost like a blow, the fact dawned upon them that it was
day. Night had stolen away, and dawn discovered them at the killing; and
goodness alone knows how long they had been at it--ten minutes or hours.
Anyway, here it was, and they leapt to their feet together.
As they hurried out they had to pass the place where the carcass of the
owl _had been_! It was gone--mysteriously sauntered as a corpse into
nowhere. Owls are uncanny creatures at any time, but moving about when
dead is not usually a recognized habit of theirs. The genets sniffed
anxiously, and ran the trail to the hole under the roof, since it
happened to be on their way. Through the hole it went, and into the
air--literally into the air. In other words, that owl had simply
"bluffed" death when she realized that she was near death. The bluff had
come off; and at a later, and what she judged a proper, time, she had
just, and of course silently, flown off by the way she had come; and--as
I live!--a fowl had gone with her.
One minute later an unsuspected martial hawk-eagle precipitated himself
out of a big, hoary, old fig-tree, a hundred yards away from the
fowlhouse, on to one of the genets' disappearing tails. This is the
world's most general view of a genet, by the way--its disappearing tail;
and it is given to very few to see the beautiful, dark-blotched, creamy,
little, lithe, long beast that the ringed tail belongs to. Of course,
the eagle was too late.
Two minutes later, a late leopard, returning to his lair after a blank
night's hunt, saw the tail of the female genet, who was leading,
disappear into a hollow tree. The male had not time to get in as the
leopard sprang, so he shot up another tree close by, disturbing a mamba
cobra, whose color was green, and whose bite was death, as it lay asleep
among the twined vines. The legless terror fell to the ground and
streaked for its hole, and the following leopard only just managed to
bound out of its way as it did so.
Then, leaping light as thistle-down, coughing harshly, the leopard went
up the tree after the male genet, and appeared to have cut him off from
life and liberty for ever.
The genet climbed beautifully, and dodged round the tree-bole, and in and
out among the trails and the leaf-bunches of matted creepers, with
amazing speed; but the whole time the leopard's paw, all hooked claws
bared, was whip-whip-whipping the air, only just behind that lovely,
long, ringed tail of the genet, and more than once touched it.
Finally, hard driven, panting, at the end of his tether, it seemed, the
genet was forced out upon a branch, farther and farther, slowly and
more-slowly, the leopard creep, creep, creeping, almost flat, well spread
and craftily, his paw, well out in front, hooking at the luckless little
genet, till the twigs began to bend under the poor hunted creature, and
all hope seemed gone from him, for the ground was sixteen feet below, and
there was nothing between. And then--ah! but it was a fine effort!--just
when it seemed that he could go no farther, and that the next terrible
hooking round-arm stroke of the leopard must fish him into the
annihilating scrunch of the terrible jaws, whose foul, hot breath already
played upon him, the genet sprang.
It was a wonderful spring; the little beast had gathered every last ounce
of his strength for it, and he literally seemed to sail out upon the air.
Sixteen feet to the ground he bounded, and twenty-two feet out from the
bole of the tree he landed, and--well, what d'you think of that?
Quick was the leopard--to our eyes he seemed to come down almost on the
heels of the genet--but not quick enough, for he had first to gather
himself on an uncertain, swaying footing. Wherefore, by the time he got
to the ground, bounding like some great rubber ball, he had the pleasure
of seeing the male genet's tail vanishing also into the small hole in the
hollow tree.
And there he left them, because perforce he could do nothing else. And
there, too, we leave them, curled up side by side in the darkness and
safety, reconciled, and a happy couple at last.
X
THE KING'S SON
They found the king's son lying in a bed of reeds with his sister, the
king's daughter, and although the prince and princess fought royally,
as befitted their rank, they were smothered up roughly in sacks and
carried speedily--the queen might return at any moment and want the
captors--to the Governor of all the Provinces, and the Governor spake
thus:
"Oho! A royal pair, eh? They shall be sent to the capital, but first
we must put them in an inclosure while we knock up some kind of a cage."
And into "an inclosure" were they, therefore, cast, and it was small
and bare, but for one box with dried grass in it; and the walls of the
place were of corrugated iron nine feet high, so that escape looked
impossible. Ransom was out of the question, and rescue a wild, but
still faintly possible, dream--they could even then hear their father
speaking in a mighty voice very far away, but their mother, they knew,
would be following their trail in terrible silence.
Meantime they were king's children, and it behooved them to carry
themselves as such in the presence of the enemy. Wherefore did they
neither cry nor grieve (outwardly), nor sulk, nor cast themselves down
or about with despair or rage. They just sat down side by side, and
put their heads together, and stared with haughty insolence at the
common crowd, "the lesser breeds without the law," who gathered to
inspect them. It is not every day men get a chance to spit at and make
mock of a king's son, whose father, as like as not, killed one's mother
or little brother with no more thought than you or I would kill a
rabbit, and the crowd made the most of that chance.
But luckily night, who was their godfather, came stalking swiftly
westward, as he does in those wild parts, and flung his protecting
cloak over them, and the crowd melted to its fleshpots, and the magic
of the dark settled down over all.
One by one the little lights twinkled out in the huts and tents of
their captors, and the deep bass drone of men's voices within mingled
with the shrill cackle of women, and the high song of the mosquitoes
without; and the smell of cooking and tobacco together came to them, so
that they sniffed aloofly and stirred from their places.
A pariah dog, lean and yellow, came to eye them furtively through the
chinks of the corrugated iron, and the horses snorted and stamped in
their pickets, as the night breeze carried to them their scent.
Time passed, and the shrill voices of the women-folk ceased, the deep
mutter of the men died gradually down, the lights faded, the scene was
lit up only here and there by the sudden glow of a fire kicked into
blaze by a sentry, but the song of the mosquitoes never ceased.
Then arose and uprose the strange, uncanny voices of the night, which,
taken together, made up a background to the great silence which they
seemed to accentuate. And the king's son bounded again. They were to
him as a mighty call, those voices, from his own land--the land of the
wilderness.
The rumbling thunder of his father's rage, breathing of death and
destruction, had ceased now; but there were plenty more sounds, and the
king's son, listening, knew them all. The distant "Qua-ha-ha!" of a
troop of zebras going to drink; the peculiar snort of an impala
antelope, scenting danger; the far-away drumming of hoofs of a startled
herd of hartebeests; the bleat of an eland calf, pulled down by who
knows what; the "Hoot-toot!" of a hippopotamus, going out to grass; the
sudden shrill "Ya-ya-ya-ya!" of a black-backed jackal close at hand;
the yarly, snarly whines of a hunting leopard; the snap of a
crocodile's jaws, somewhere down in the nearby river; and, last, but by
no means least in ghostliness, the awful rising "Who-oo!" followed by a
sudden mad chorus of maniacal laughter, which told that somewhere a
gathering of hyenas were--at their work!
The king's son was moving about the prison now, examining what he could
see--especially of the walls--with his wonderful, proud eyes, and what
he could not with whiskers and nose. He made no sound, of course--not
so much as a whisper; and when his sister joined him, they were simply
intangible, half-guessed shapes, drifting--there is no other word for
it--through the gloom.
A man, even a colored one, might look long into that inclosure and,
unless he caught the sudden smolder at the back of their eyes, never
tell where they were. Indeed, the inclosure was in pitch-darkness
itself, by reason of its high "tin" walls; and even when a weird yellow
moon came and hung itself up to add to the general uncanniness of the
scene, the prison of the king's son showed only like a well of ink.
Suddenly the silence and the voices of the crickets were broken into by
the sound of scramblings by night. A nightjar fled from the tree
overhead to the accompaniment of strange noises; and an unseen jackal,
who had crept up to the very huts pessimistically, in search of
anything awful, or offal, fled with a startled scurry. Apparently
something with claws was trying to scrape away the corrugated iron.
Came then a scrawling scrape, and a thump. Then silence. But after a
bit the noises began again--a fresh lot, and more violent. The pariah
dog, who had come to investigate with his tail in the air, went away
again, and quickly, with his tail between his legs; and in the same
moment the king's son's head appeared over the top of the corrugated
iron wall in silhouette against the staring, surprised moon.
Of course, and quite naturally, every sentry was asleep, or else even
they could not have failed to realize that the sounds of desperate
scratchings that followed were no ordinary phenomena, and might bear
looking into.
Presently the king's son's body followed his head, and he sat for a
moment, balancing clumsily on that narrow top, before vanishing
suddenly, to the accompaniment of a heavy thump that was the last sound
he made in the place.
Further and even more frantic scratchings followed, and anon the king's
daughter, who certainly meant to die rather than be left alone in the
hands of the foe, eclipsed the moon. A pause, and she, too, vanished
downwards with a thump that was the last sound she made there in that
place also.
A minute later, and she had joined her brother under the thorny guard
of a mimosa.
For a moment or two the pair stood rigid as rock carvings, looking
back, crouched a little, and deadly silent. Then the king's son turned
and led the way to the river at a loping trot, and his sister followed
in his tracks. They shook the dust--literally and daintily as a cat
shakes dew from her feet--of the hated captors' fastness from their
feet in little momentary halts as they went, and the place knew them no
more.
But there is one point I should like to insert here. Go and try to
climb over a corrugated iron wall nine feet high, and with nothing but
the bare earth to take off from, and see how you succeed. Further,
when doing it, remember that these royal children were so young as to
be little more than babies. Then you may tell how they accomplished
the feat. I do not know exactly to this day.
It is to be hoped that by this time everybody will be aware that the
king's son and the king's daughter were lion cubs, the survivors,
therefore the strongest and the fittest, of three lion cubs in a
litter. It required, you will admit, some resource, courage, and
intelligence to do what they had already done, considering their age;
but the worst was to come. Having got out of the frying-pan, they must
now face the fire, and be quick about it, too, if they didn't want to
be traced and recaptured at dawn.
Arrived at the river's edge, they stopped and stared out across the
dark swirls and unknown, cold depths. Lion cubs, as also the young of
every other African animal, must assuredly be born with an instinctive
and a very lively dread of all rivers and their occupants. Any
horrible invention of death, they must have known, might be expected to
lurk there, ready waiting for them in that underworld of dark waters;
but if they felt fear, they never showed it, and the pride of their
birth held true. Their hesitation was only momentary. The terror had
to be faced, bravely or fearfully, as they would, but still faced, and
bravely it was done.