I was already beginning to see the great problem of mankind as indeed
nothing other than a magnification of the little problem of myself, as a
problem in escape from grooves, from preoccupations and suspicions,
precautions and ancient angers, a problem of escape from these spiritual
beasts that prowl and claw, to a new generosity and a new breadth of
view.
For all of us, little son, as for each of us, salvation is that. We have
to get away from ourselves to a greater thing, to a giant's desire and
an unending life, ours and yet not our own.
§ 6
It is a queer experience to be even for a moment in the grip of a great
beast. I had been put into the fork of a tree, so that I could shoot
with the big stem behind my back. The fork wasn't, I suppose, more than
a score of feet from the ground. It was a safe enough place from a
tiger, and that is what we expected. We had been misled by our tracker,
who had mistaken the pugs of a big leopard for a tiger's,--they were
over rocky ground for the most part and he had only the spoor of a
chance patch of half-dried mud to go upon. The beast had killed a goat
and was beaten out of a thicket near by me in which he had been lying
up. The probability had seemed that he would go away along a tempting
ravine to where Captain Crosby, who was my host, awaited him; I, as the
amateur, was intended to be little more than a spectator. But he broke
back towards the wing of the line of beaters and came across the sunlit
rocks within thirty yards of my post.
Seen going along in that way, flattened almost to the ground, he wasn't
a particularly impressive beast, and I shot at his shoulder as one might
blaze away at a rabbit,--perhaps just a little more carefully, feeling
as a Lord of Creation should who dispenses a merited death. I expected
him either to roll over or bolt.
Then instantly he was coming in huge bounds towards me....
He came so rapidly that he was covered by the big limb of the tree on
which I was standing until he was quite beneath me, and my second shot,
which I thought in the instant must have missed him, was taken rapidly
as he crouched to spring up the trunk.
Then you know came a sort of astonishment, and I think,--because
afterwards Crosby picked up a dropped cartridge at the foot of the
tree--that I tried to reload. I believe I was completely incredulous
that the beast was going to have me until he actually got me. The thing
was too completely out of my imaginative picture. I don't believe I
thought at all while he was coming up the tree. I merely noted how
astonishingly he resembled an angry cat. Then he'd got my leg, he was
hanging on to it first by two claws and then by one claw, and the whole
weight of him was pulling me down. It didn't seem to be my leg. I wasn't
frightened, I felt absolutely nothing, I was amazed. I slipped, tried to
get a hold on the tree trunk, felt myself being hauled down, and then
got my arm about the branch. I still clung to my unloaded gun as an
impoverished aristocrat might cling to his patent of nobility. That was,
I felt, my answer for him yet.
I suppose the situation lasted a fraction of a second, though it seemed
to me to last an interminable time. Then I could feel my leggings rip
and his claw go scoring deeply down my calf. That hurt in a kind of
painless, impersonal interesting way. Was my leg coming off? Boot? The
weight had gone, that enormous weight!
He'd missed his hold altogether! I heard his claws tear down the bark of
the tree and then his heavy, soft fall upon the ground.
I achieved a cat-like celerity. In another second I was back in my fork
reloading, my legs tucked up as tightly as possible.
I peered down through the branches ready for him. He wasn't there. Not
up the tree again?... Then I saw him making off, with a halting gait,
across the scorching rocks some thirty yards away, but I could not get
my gun into a comfortable position before he was out of sight behind a
ridge.... I wondered why the sunlight seemed to be flickering like an
electric light that fails, was somehow aware of blood streaming from my
leg down the tree-stem; it seemed a torrent of blood, and there was a
long, loose ribbon of flesh very sickening to see; and then I fainted
and fell out of the tree, bruising my arm and cheek badly and
dislocating my shoulder in the fall.... Some of the beaters saw me fall,
and brought Crosby in sufficient time to improvise a _torniquet_ and
save my life.