acknowledge her sovereignty in the
jungle. But, the present was not an ordinary occasion, for soon Warruk,
as the Indians on the Ichilo River called the Jaguar cub, was to make his
appearance in the big world; and it was but for his comfort and safety
that Suma provided.

After a three days' retirement the great cat emerged from the seclusion
of her dark retreat, hungry and ferocious but with a stealth and caution
well calculated to evade any prying eyes that might attempt to observe
her actions from the treetops and surmise their meaning.

A puff, like smoke, from the entrance to the cavity announced her
coming; but it was only the madly dancing cloud of craneflies clearing
the passage at her approach.

The rain was falling with a steady drone from a sky of unbroken,
cheerless gray, and rivulets of water trickled from the drooping
vegetation. Mosses and ferns, revived by the superabundance of moisture
had sprung up on the decaying trunks and branches of the uprooted
trees, pushing their feathery leaflets through the blanket of creepers
and forming a dense, soggy layer cold and clammy to the touch and
treacherous underfoot. But Suma knew her domicile well and passed
rapidly and surefootedly over the interlocking tree skeletons and soon
reached the level forest floor.

Straight as an arrow she headed to the north on some mission well-known
to herself, moving like a shadow and at a rapid pace. Before long the
windfall with the giant cottonwood containing the precious little Warruk
had been left far behind. Suma knew where the round, red chonta nuts
grew and that they ripened during the season of rains; and that even now
the ground was covered with the tasty morsels. But this knowledge was of
a vague nature only and interested her but indirectly. What was far more
important was that the peccary herds fed on the chonta nuts and were
sure to be in the neighborhood of their favorite feeding-grounds.

To stalk and kill one of the ferocious little animals entailed a great
deal of danger--to the inexperienced hunter, but Suma feared them not.
Never, since the time she had miscalculated the distance of the spring
and had succeeded only in slightly wounding her quarry--with the
resultant squeal of terror and the onrush of fully a hundred of the
stricken one's fellows--and the night of uncertainty spent in the
treetop, had they given her any trouble. But all that is another story
as likely as not to repeat itself in the life o