Part 42

Honey! Honey! Honey!

That was it. That was the magic word the bird, who was a honey-guide by name, had shouted to the ratel, who was a honey-badger, you remember; and honey-bees they were that made the air delirious.

The bird, with the quick eye of a detective, had located the hole of the nest, but having no trowel, forthwith fetched the ratel, who had, and together they fed, the beast on honey, and the bird on the grubs in the combs.

And the bees? Oh, they don't count! At least, they might have been house-flies for all the notice the ratel took of them, save now and then to bunch a dozen or so off his cowled head carelessly. Yet they would probably have nearly killed us.

It was about this time that the bull-gnu appeared, tramping steadily towards them; a rugged, rough renegade of the wilderness; a ruffian kicked--or, rather, horned--out of some herd forever, and, for his sins, doomed always to face the risks of life alone, or in the companionship of other male outlaws of soured temper like himself--almost always male; the female wild seems guiltless of law-breaking, or is under a banner of protection if it is not. Such "rogues," as men call them, are not gentlemanly, as a rule. And, by the way, you know the gnu, of course, alias wildebeest? The head of a very shaggy buffalo, the horsy mane, the delicate, strong, sloping antelope body, the long, mustang-like tail, and the strange, twisted, unconventional character, half-fierce, half-inquisitive.

He--that lonely one--was going to drink, and he may have been doing it early because he had only his two eyes and ears, and his one nose, to warn him of the dozen or two forms of death that awaited him at the drinking-place, instead of the eyes and ears and noses of all the herd.

The gnu saw neither honey-bird nor badger till he was within a yard of them. Then he stopped as instantly still as if he had been electrocuted.

The ratel, who had himself to feed, and a wounded wife and two young whom he would lead to that honey-feast anon, looked calmly over his shoulder at the form of the antelope towering above him. There was no sign of fear in his straight stare at the shaggy, ferocious-looking horned head. He had no business with it, and would thank it to mind its own affairs. And the honey-bird didn't care much, either, she having no young to feed, because, cuckoo-like, she left other birds--woodpeckers, for choice--to see to that.

Wherefore, for as long as a man would take to select a cigarette with care and light it, there was dead silence and stillness, broken only by the distant, deep "Hoo-hoo, hoo! hoo-hoo, hoo!" of a party of ground hornbills.

Then that devil of meddlesome curiosity which is the curse of the wildebeests fell upon that gnu, and sanity left him.

"Kwank!" neighed he. And again, "Kwank!"

Next instant he had spun, top-fashion, on all four feet at once, and jumped in the same manner, and was gone, whirling round them, with great shaggy head down, and in a halo of his own swishing tail, at the rate of knots.

It was nothing to be wondered at in that strange antelope that he should then sink from wild motion to absolute, fixed rigidity, broken only by the restless, horse-like swishing of the long tail, staring hard at the ratel.

Perhaps it was the bees that did it, or perhaps the ratel stood in the gnu's very own path, or in the way of his private dusting-hole. I know not; neither did the ratel--nor care much, for the matter of that. But when the gnu went off again, circling with hoarse snorts, and shying and swerving furiously and wonderfully at top speed, he sat up on his hindlegs, the better to get a view of the strange sight. Perhaps he thought a lion was lying somewhere near that he could not see from his lowly, natural position.

Again the gnu stopped as utterly instantly as if he had run into a brick wall, pawed, stamped, snorted, and went off once more into furiously insane caperings--a new set--all the time circling, with the little, black-and-gray, erect figure of the surprised ratel as a pivot.

And then, in a flash, before any one had a second's warning to grasp the truth or prepare, with head down, eyes burning in the down-dropped, shaggy head, and upcurved horn-points gleaming in the afternoon sun, he charged, hurling himself, a living, reckless, furious battering-ram, straight at the little ratel.

Did that ratel quit quick? Do ratels ever quit an unbeaten foe? I don't know. They may, once in the proverbial blue moon; but I haven't seen 'em. This one didn't. He seemed to know that it is held to be a sound military maxim to meet an attack by counter-attack, and he did, though he had only the fifth of a second to do it in. Ah, but it was good to see that odd little beast trotting out coolly, head low, tail high, singing his war-song as he rolled along to meet the charging foe so many, many times his own size.

Next moment there was a thud--somewhat as if some one had punched a pillow--and the ratel was flying through the air, high and fine, in a graceful and generous curve. A thorn-bush--what matter the precise name? there are so many in those parts, all execrable--acknowledged receipt of his carcass with a crash, and for a few seconds he hung, like a sack on a nail, spitted cleanly by at least one thorn, far thornier than anything we know here, before the thing gave way, and he fell, still limply, this way and that, hesitatingly, as it were, as each point lovingly sought to retain him, to a fork near the bottom, where he stayed.

At last he picked himself out of the fork, and--oh my!--with a whistling grunt of rage, coolly, calmly, clumsily if you like, but grandly all the same, trotted forth into the open to look for that bull-gnu again. And that, sirs, was the sort, of animal he was.

The bull-gnu, however, who was not previously acquainted with small beasts that would face his charge--and an aerial journey, and the thorns--and come back for more, had fetched a curve at full gallop, and loped off into the landscape. For the first time since the herds outlawed him, I fancy, he seemed to be quite pleased with himself, and soon, antelope-like, put the ratel from him placidly, and forgot. But he was reckoning without his host. If he had done with the ratel, the ratel had not done with him. No, by thunder--not by a good bit!

Finding no bull-gnu, the slow little black and grayish-white fighter from Fightersville returned at a walk, still whistling with rage, to the unearthed bees'-nest, which looked like a town after a bad air-raid. And the first thing he did was to patter almost on top of a cobra, a five-footer, who, having narrowly escaped death by the gnu's flying hoofs, was what one might call considerably "het" up, or "off the handle," so to say.

The servant of the Devil sat up, blew out its beastly hood, and shot forth a hiss that seemed to run all up and down one's spine, like lightning on an elm-tree.

The robber of honey sat up, said "Tchik!" and turned a somersault. What's that? Yes, somersault is right.

Followed instantly two thin jets of liquid, as much as anything I can think of like those lines called "trajectory curves" which ballisticians do so love to draw in books on rifle-shooting; only, these curved lines began at the hollow point of Mr. Cobra's poison-fangs, and were meant to end in Mr. Ratel's eyes. They didn't. Old man ratel, he was standing on his hind-legs, with his sturdy paws in front of his eyes--like a man who looks across a sunny land--and seemed just about to turn a somersault again. He changed his mind, though, when the poison, that would have blinded him for life--and that life wouldn't have been long in that wild then, I want to tell you--stopped, and he went in at that black-necked, legless, soulless servant of Satan, utterly and amazingly unafraid. It was fine.

Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you that when Nature repented, and gave the ratel a courage surpassing the courage of any other beast on earth, she also gave him a skin tough as a pachyderm's, and loose, as if it were two sizes too large; and that is why that black-necked cobra died quite quickly, and the ratel didn't, even slowly. Even if the snake's fangs had got through, which was not in the least likely, that did not mean to say they would touch Mr. Ratel's person inside. This, by the way, may explain why being spitted on thorns, like a beetle on a pin, when the bull-gnu charged, did not seem to worry him much, either.

The moon was up when the wounded mother ratel, on guard at the mouth of her burrow, looked up sharply. A side-striped jackal, who kidded himself she had not seen him lying in wait to find out, when she went hunting, what she hid in that den, suddenly bolted with a yap; and a hyena, represented by two burning eyes, who appeared, by some magic of his own, to guess she was wounded, jumped up and made way for something that approached. It was her husband and the cobra, the latter trailing along limply behind, who came that way; and even the hyena had retired, with an audible sigh--at least, it wasn't a moan quite--when he claimed the path. After all, there is no sense, if you are the most cowardly beast for your power on earth, in getting up against the pluckiest thing in creation in full possession of life and liberty.

Later our ratel sallied forth to "face the world" again. His wife had recovered from her wounds--the result, these, of refusing to believe she was not so good as a twelve-foot python, and a bit better--sufficiently to walk slowly; but that was not enough to face that wild where die-quicks, from lions, down through leopards, hyenas, wild-dogs, jackals, and the rest, are forever hiding, on the lookout for unfortunate ones flying an S.O.S. signal. No, he must go and do the provisioning alone, and alone he went.

For a peaceful beast, one only too pleased to mind his own business and thank other folks to mind theirs, his subsequent doings were rather astonishing. This was because he cared for neither man nor beast nor devil, in the first place, and because the night produced all three, in the second.