upon the best the jungle afforded.
Antelope and zebra fell to the boy's spear, or were dragged down by the
two powerful beasts of prey who leaped upon them from some overhanging
limb or from the ambush of the undergrowth beside the trail to the
water hole or the ford.

The pelt of a leopard covered the nakedness of the youth; but the
wearing of it had not been dictated by any prompting of modesty. With
the rifle shots of the white men showering about him he had reverted to
the savagery of the beast that is inherent in each of us, but that
flamed more strongly in this boy whose father had been raised a beast
of prey. He wore his leopard skin at first in response to a desire to
parade a trophy of his prowess, for he had slain the leopard with his
knife in a hand-to-hand combat. He saw that the skin was beautiful,
which appealed to his barbaric sense of ornamentation, and when it
stiffened and later commenced to decompose because of his having no
knowledge of how to cure or tan it was with sorrow and regret that he
discarded it. Later, when he chanced upon a lone, black warrior
wearing the counterpart of it, soft and clinging and beautiful from
proper curing, it required but an instant to leap from above upon the
shoulders of the unsuspecting black, sink a keen blade into his heart
and possess the rightly preserved hide.

There were no after-qualms of conscience. In the jungle might is
right, nor does it take long to inculcate this axiom in the mind of a
jungle dweller, regardless of what his past training may have been.
That the black would have killed him had he had the chance the boy knew
full well. Neither he nor the black were any more sacred than the
lion, or the buffalo, the zebra or the deer, or any other of the
countless creatures who roamed, or slunk, or flew, or wriggled through
the dark mazes of the forest. Each had but a single life, which was
sought by many. The greater number of enemies slain the better chance
to prolong that life. So the boy smiled and donned the finery of the
vanquished, and went his way with Akut, searching, always searching for
the elusive anthropoids who were to welcome them with open arms. And
at last they found them. Deep in the jungle, buried far from sight of
man, they came upon such another little natural arena as had witnessed
the wild ceremony of the Dum-Dum in which the boy's father had taken
part long years before.

First, at a great distance, they heard the bea