Part 23

The female genet, however, was past caring about risks. She had reached a stage of hunger when no risks can overshadow the risk of starvation, and she had the guinea-fowl by the throat, and was sucking its blood before the other had time to realize what she was at. Then, with fine discrimination, she ate the breast and thigh, and later might, or might not, have let him have a look in, if some blotched shape had not slid up, without sound, across the blue black night sky, and, halting in the tree, begun, apparently, to crack nuts very sharply and very quickly. Whereupon, without saying anything, the genets faded out.

It was nothing much, really--only the noise she makes when the giant eagle-owl is angry; but when you are a genet, with a body under two feet long, you may find it rather a bore, if nothing else, to remain cheek by jowl with an angry eagle-owl three feet or so across the wings, with the feline temper of an owl, and armed, owl-like, to the teeth, if I may so put it.

Now the question came as the two genets arrived at the ground--would she follow him, or would he have to follow her? He was determined, anyway, that nothing short of calamity should part them. Yet I don't see, since he never uttered a sound, how she understood him to say that if she would follow him he would find her food, even though she was still hungry, for she had not yet got to trusting him much more than she trusted any other beast, and seemed to think that he was half as likely to eat her as to get her something to eat. Such a thing as another creature finding her food for only just friendliness--love was out of the question yet, or out of her question--was an idea her suspicious nature could not yet grasp. However, she followed.

Twining and twisting, turning and tripping, in and out among the bush and the tree-trunks, soundless, and quite invisible, except when they crossed a moonbeam--and then nearly so, because the moon has a trick of, as it were, dissolving the colors of even fairly conspicuous creatures--they crept on their low way. There was not a sound that they did not crouch for, often flat as a whip-lash--and that wild is full of sounds by night, too--not a puff of air that they did not throw up their sharp little muzzles to test, not a movement or the hint of a movement which their eyes did not fix with a suspicious stare.

They passed a hippopotamus feeding--a sheaf at a mouthful--upon long 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.