Part 29

THE FURTIVE FEUD

There was a sun. You could not see it much because of burning, dancing haze, but you could not get anywhere without feeling it. Almost everything you touched--sand, rock, and such like--blistered you; and the vegetation, where it wasn't four-inch thorns and six-inch spikes and bloated cacti, was shriveled yellow-brown, like the color of a lion. Perhaps it was a lion, some of it. How could one tell?

Lizards, which were bad; and scorpions, which were worse; and snakes, which were worse than worse, lay about in the sun, as if they were pieces of leather drying. You could not see them--which was awkward, for some of them held a five-minute death up their sleeve--partly because they matched their surroundings, partly because they were still. They were colored burnt to hide in a burnt land.

Yet it was possible to be bright and gay and unobtrusive in this place, too--if you were cold-blooded enough not to boil dry and explode before getting a drink--for under some trees lay, in the old-gold, yellow, black-shade-streaked, tawny-red grass, a sleek and glistening, banded, blotched, and spotted, newly painted python. Yes, sirs, a python snake; and you couldn't see it in its new levee uniform--the old one lay not fifty yards away--any more than you could see the other, and plainly attired, bad dreams--so long as it did not move. Its length was not apparent, because it was coiled up; but it would have uncoiled out into something most alarming if stretched, I fancy.

The jackal made no sound as he came, tripping daintily, graceful and light as a rubber ball, into the scene, blissfully oblivious, apparently, of the fact that any other next step might awake a volcano under his feet.

He was a black-backed jackal; red-tawny sides, fading to nearly white under-parts; black back, grizzled with white hairs, neatly ruled off from the rest of him, like a big saddle; large, wide-awake ears; long, thin legs; bushy tail; very knowing eyes, and all complete--part wolf, part fox, and yet neither and something of both. No one living could, perhaps, have been agile enough to measure him, but he looked over two and a half feet from nose-tip to tail-root; and you can add, possibly, a third of that for the tail. But he was all there, whatever his length, every short hair of him, and none of the swarms of buzzing flies around seemed anxious to settle upon him.

He picked his way across to the shade of the trees, slouching quite casually, apparently; though how he avoided treading upon any of the sudden deaths variously thrown about seems a mystery. And just short of the shade of the trees he stopped. He had spotted, or scented--the latter is most likely, for the smell beat a chemical-works, a slaughter-house, and a whaleship rolled into one--the big snake.

The big snake remained motionless, and made no sign. Goodness knows whether it was asleep, if snakes ever do sleep. It certainly had its horrible eyes open, fixed in an evil stare at anything, or nothing, after the fashion of snakes, who are cursed in that they cannot shut their eyes to things. (Imagine the position of some people in this world if they were afflicted like the snakes!)

For about a minute that jackal stood like a carved beast in wood, with the original bark left on his back. Then he began to sink, slowly, gradually, till he lay as flat as a punctured bladder. And the picture of that little black-backed fellow--that Canis mesomelas, if you like official terms--all alone there, and surrounded by a dozen deaths at least, and all nasty, doing the stalking act upon that python was great. He stalked. My! how he stalked! And with reason, for he was taking on, perhaps, the biggest thing in the hunting line that he had ever tackled, and it was a million to one that, if he did not win, he died, and horribly, too; and he knew it. Ordinarily he would have been the python's prey.

There was a little snicker, as it were, in the air as his fangs closed, and the python, waking one-twentieth of a second too late, lifted its head. Then, short and crisp--snap!

Talk about tweaking a lightning-flash by its tail! It would have been a wake to what followed then.

The jackal knew what to expect--by instinct, I suppose. Anyway, he did not wait longer than it takes to scrunch as hard as possible with canine teeth as sharp as knives, and leap clear.

Ho did it, however, and stood well back, with his ears cocked and his head on one side. It was as if he were panting, "Now, let her rip"--and she did.

A hurricane in a cage, a volcano in an eligible house-lot, a geyser in a water-jug--what you will; but they were all tame alongside that python, after the little black-back had got his fangs home.

You know the size of pythons? 'Bout the biggest things in snakes there are going, bar two; and this one was not a baby. But nobody can properly measure their strength. This one unwrapped itself in one awful swiftness, and wrapped itself up again more awfully swiftly and in worse knots. Then things became hazy, and one could only tell by the dust, and the sand, and the grass, and the leaves, and the other things flying around that something was happening.

But the jackal did not seem to care. He only sat well back, with jaws open and very red tongue lolling, obviously doing a dog-laugh to himself. Perhaps it touched his sense of humor to think that so small a beast as he, with just one scientific bite, should create such a deal of disturbance. But the--er--aroma could not have amused even him, and he was, as you might say, salted to stenches; for, though he was on the up-wind side, even there it was enough to knock flat anything that the python's tail could not reach. It was a most stupendous stench--a sort of weapon of defense, or danger-signal, that these big snakes have.

Now, perhaps it was the reek that drew the purr. Purring is generally looked upon as a nice and comfy sort of a sound, but this was not.

The jackal just heard it intruding upon the confusion of the python's last contortions, as if suddenly, and it seemed to come from the ground, and the sky, and the surrounding scenery all at the same time. There was nothing nice and comfy about it at all. The jackal removed himself, at sound of it, about four yards in as many bounds, and every grizzled scrap of fur along his black back stood on end. If we had heard it, we should have reached for our rifle, and felt tingly all down our spine, for that was the sort of purr it was--a horrible, hungry, suggestive, cruel, and blood-curdling sound of ghoulish pleasure.

The jackal ceased to dog-laugh, and his tail was between his legs, for he knew that purr, and its name was death. Death angry is bad enough, but death pleased--

Louder and louder the purr became, till it seemed, as the python began to lash out the very last of its life, apparently, to fill the whole place. Finally, it became real, and--a shape walked slowly out of a thorn-bush.

It would be blatant exaggeration to call that shape a lion. It--he--had been one. He was now a walking hat-rack. Never have you seen such a lion. Never had the jackal seen such a lion, even; and he had done business--of the snatch-and-run order--with lions all his life.

However many years that lion had lived, to kill mercilessly, Heaven alone knows; but how on earth he had contrived to avoid for some time being equally mercilessly killed by hyenas, or wild hogs, Heaven and himself alone knew, too. He was a very, very old lion, a derelict of a lion, a shadow of a ghost of one, mangy, tottering, toothless--come down to eat snakes killed by others, even by jackals.

Then the jackal went away, dejected and disgusted. He was honestly proud of his slaying of that python.

It was the biggest screw-up of courage he had ever accomplished in his life, and to be done out of his rewarding big feast by that purring skeleton of a king of beasts! It was too much even for his pessimistic philosophy.

"Yaaa-ya-ya-ya-ya!" he howled, with his nose pointed to the brazen sun, and melted away among the accursed thorn-scrub with a look about him that said, as plainly as words, "And that's what comes of hunting in daylight."

The jackal, after a long skirmish and a drink, retired homewards towards sunset, when suddenly, from a tuft of grass ahead of him, a shadow shot and vanished. He picked up the trail at once, diagnosed it as that of a hare, and gave chase.

It was a fine chase, characterized by every aspect of first-class trailing, and carried along at such a speed that the quarry never got a chance to stop and get its second wind. Indeed, the quarry never had a chance to stop at all, until it was stopped, and the manner of that happening was strange.

Whether designedly driven, or whether by chance, one cannot tell, but the fact remains that the hare took a "line of country" which, if persisted in, would lead her close past the jackal's lair, or, rather, his wife's lair. This was important--for the jackal.