e 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