ss
while the unknown thing at my feet ripped the flesh from his half-dead
rival in strips, and across the damp night wind came the reek of that
abominable feast--the reek of blood and spilt entrails--until I turned
away my face in loathing, and was nearly starting to my feet to venture
a rush into the forest shadows. But I was spellbound, and remained
listening to the heavy munch of blood-stained jaws until presently I
was aware other and lesser feasters were coming. There was a twinkle
of hungry eyes all about the limits of the area, the shine of green
points of envious fire that circled round in decreasing orbits, as the
little foxes and jackals came crowding in. One fellow took me for a
rock, so still I sat, putting his hot, soft paws upon my knee for a
space, and others passed me so near I could all but touch them.

The big beast had taken himself off by this time, and there must have
been several hundreds of these newcomers. A merry time they had of it;
the whole place was full of the green, hurrying eyes, and amidst the
snap of teeth and yapping and quarrelling I could hear the flesh being
torn from the red bones in every direction. One wolf-like individual
brought a mass of hot liver to eat between my feet, but I gave him a
kick, and sent him away much to his surprise. Gradually, however, the
sound of this unholy feast died away, and, though you may hardly
believe it, I fell off into a doze. It was not sleep, but it served
the purpose, and when in an hour or two a draught of cool air roused
me, I awoke, feeling more myself again.

Slowly morning came, and the black wall of forest around became full of
purple interstices as the east brightened. Those glimmers of light
between bough and trunk turned to yellow and red, the day-shine
presently stretched like a canopy from point to point of the treetops
on either side of my sleeping-place, and I arose.

All my limbs were stiff with cold, my veins emptied by hunger and
wounds, and for a space I had not even strength to move. But a little
rubbing softened my cramped muscles presently and limping painfully
down to the place of combat, I surveyed the traces of that midnight
fight. I will not dwell upon it. It was ugly and grim; the trampled
grass, the giant footmarks, each enringing its pool of curdled blood;
the broken bushes, the grooved mud-slides where the unknown brutes had
slid in deadly embrace; the hollows, the splintered boughs, their
ragged points