Chapter 11

But that was not the worst of it, for she was longer than the enemy, a bit, and might have put up a good fight--she had fought for her life, as a matter of course, ever since she left her mother's side--if the enemy had not brought with her an ally. It was not visible to the eye, that ally, but it was to the nose--a most distinct and appalling stink, and it could be felt, for it made her nostrils smart. Apparently, then, that white tail was intentional, was as a red flag, insolently displayed, warning all to beware of the stink. Well, there is more than one way of holding your own in the wild, and a most unholy smell is not such a bad way, either, when you come to think about it.

The owner of that nameless odor was a polecat--not our polecat; worse than that--and--well, you know the breed. Fear they know not; neither is pity with them a weakness, especially where the lives of their young are concerned. This one did not wait. She attacked quicker than you could cry "Knife," taking off with all four feet together, in a peculiar and patent way of her own.

The would-be murderess, who was long, and absurdly short in the leg, too, just like her opponent, only with a more graceful and not such a thick-set body, turned on herself in a snaky fashion, and her neck, that the fangs had aimed at, was not there when the polecat arrived, but her teeth were, and they closed on the polecat's cheek.

The latter gibbered horribly at the spark of pain, and set herself really down to fight.

The intending murderess said nothing at all, but, unbalanced with her game hindleg, having no force to push or spring with, and being very weak, she knew she was done for directly they closed to the clinch.

In a few seconds the polecat had her down, and only an awful, mad, desperate clashing of fang against fang kept the attacker off her throat. It could not last.

Then it was, at that moment, that a sharp little, gray little, dark-spotted, clean-cut, close-cropped, intelligent head, on a snaky, long neck, peeped out of the shadows, and peered about, as if to see what in whiskers all the pother was about. The head might have been there by chance, but it wasn't. Its owner had been running her trail for hours, and looking for it for days, and didn't mean to let her go, now that he had finally come up with her, polecats or no polecats, smells or not. But he was not a fool. He knew the game, the bitter, cruel game of death, as it is played throughout the wild. With man the inexorable law is, "Get on or get out." In the wild they phrase it another way: "Kill or be killed." Man puts it more politely, perhaps, but it's all the same old natural law, I guess.

The head and snaky neck developed a long, creamy, tawny-spotted body, and the body a long, banded, tapering tail--all set on legs so short, they scarcely kept the owner off the ground; and the name of that beast was genet. The same are a sort of distant relation of the cats, a fourth cousin once removed; but it is necessary to tell you, because you might think they were beautiful weasels, otherwise. _And she was a genet_, too--the murderess that might have been.

Then the new-comer moved. Then he began to move, and--here! It was just like the buzzing of a fly in a tumbler. Certainly you could say that he was still there, but you could not swear that you actually saw him.

The first that the polecat knew of him was that red-hot fork-like feeling that means fangs in the back of your neck. The polecat spun on herself, and bit, quick as an electric needle, at the spotted thing, that promptly ceased to be there, and, to use the professional term, she "made the stink" for all she was worth. She forgot all about the long female would-be slayer of her children, and the genet was mightily thankful to drag herself clear, but she would not have been she if she had failed to get her fangs home, as a parting shot, before she went.

Then, I fancy, she was ill; and, upon my soul, I don't wonder. It was enough to asphyxiate a whale-factory hand. But the male genet was not ill, or, if he was, he was moving from place to place too quickly to give the fact away; and by the time he shot up a tree, like a long, rippling, cream and tawny-dappled, banded line, he left that polecat considerably redder than when he found her, and weak, as if she had been bitten by leeches. The polecat had certainly saved her young, or thought she had, although I cannot swear that the female genet had really meant them harm; but she did not look as if she had saved much else. However, she held the field of battle, and the foe had fled, and that is supposed to be the sign of victory; but that had been done by her "gassing" methods, so to speak, not by fighting alone.

Rippling about among the branches, an incarnation of grace personified, and hunting for her by nose alone, for in the moonlight her exquisite creamy, dappled coat was invisible--a real piece of magic, this--the male genet quickly found her for whom he sought. She remained low, lying along a bough, line for line, shadow-patch for shadow-patch, flat as the very bark, and as undulating, until she felt sure that he would run over her; then she rose, spitting and snarling in his face, cat-like and vicious.

It was a poor kind of thanks for having saved her life, perhaps, but it was her way--_then_. And, anyway, who can blame her? She had never met any living creature that was not a foe or an armed "unbenevolent" neutral in all her life, and she did not know that any other category or creature existed, the recent fight notwithstanding.

But the male genet neither ran nor fought. He dodged her snap, by a tenth of an inch, almost without seeming to move, and there he stood looking at her meekly. She leapt to him, and he shot off, as she arrived upon, the place where he had been. Perhaps she knew that only a genet, or a mongoose, could do that trick in a manner at once so machine-like and precise; and after that she merely sat, bent in a curve, with her lips up. But her spring had given her away, and he saw that she was lame. Perhaps he saw, too, the gleam of hunger, the wild, cruel gleam that forgets all else, in her eyes; but who am I to say whether he understood it?

Be that as it may, the male vanished suddenly and without explanation, doubling on his trail and going out like a snuffed candle. He was in view, as a matter of fact, several times during the next few minutes, climbing quietly; but the dark blotches of the leaf-shadows magicked him into invisibility, and no one could tell where he was, till suddenly the silence was smitten by one piercing squawk somewhere among the greenery above. Then a crash, wild flutterings, a hectic commotion, and he and a terrified guinea-fowl came down together, more nearly falling than he liked. Indeed, he must have let it fall, or gone himself with it, as he slid past, grabbing for holds, if she had not dropped quickly to the next bough and taken a hold, too. Then, side by side, they hauled the warm, feathery, fluttering thing up, and he slew swiftly, in order to silence the noisy prey, who foolishly kicked up such a noise, as if maliciously; for he knew--and perhaps the gleany (guinea-fowl) did, too--how quickly a crowd may gather to interfere in an advertised "killing" in that wild.

The female genet, however, was past caring about risks. She had reached a stage of hunger when no risks can overshadow the risk of starvation, and she had the guinea-fowl by the throat, and was sucking its blood before the other had time to realize what she was at. Then, with fine discrimination, she ate the breast and thigh, and later might, or might not, have let him have a look in, if some blotched shape had not slid up, without sound, across the blue black night sky, and, halting in the tree, begun, apparently, to crack nuts very sharply and very quickly. Whereupon, without saying anything, the genets faded out.

It was nothing much, really--only the noise she makes when the giant eagle-owl is angry; but when you are a genet, with a body under two feet long, you may find it rather a bore, if nothing else, to remain cheek by jowl with an angry eagle-owl three feet or so across the wings, with the feline temper of an owl, and armed, owl-like, to the teeth, if I may so put it.

Now the question came as the two genets arrived at the ground--would she follow him, or would he have to follow her? He was determined, anyway, that nothing short of calamity should part them. Yet I don't see, since he never uttered a sound, how she understood him to say that if she would follow him he would find her food, even though she was still hungry, for she had not yet got to trusting him much more than she trusted any other beast, and seemed to think that he was half as likely to eat her as to get her something to eat. Such a thing as another creature finding her food for only just friendliness--love was out of the question yet, or out of her question--was an idea her suspicious nature could not yet grasp. However, she followed.

Twining and twisting, turning and tripping, in and out among the bush and the tree-trunks, soundless, and quite invisible, except when they crossed a moonbeam--and then nearly so, because the moon has a trick of, as it were, dissolving the colors of even fairly conspicuous creatures--they crept on their low way. There was not a sound that they did not crouch for, often flat as a whip-lash--and that wild is full of sounds by night, too--not a puff of air that they did not throw up their sharp little muzzles to test, not a movement or the hint of a movement which their eyes did not fix with a suspicious stare.

They passed a hippopotamus feeding--a sheaf at a mouthful--upon long grass; they came upon three wild dogs eating an antelope and gibbering like gnomes; they beheld two striped zebras stampeding from a lion; they got into the middle of a herd of elephants--but what must those giants have seemed to them, almost at ground-level?--and did not know it, so silent can the mighty ones be, till they heard the unmistakable digestive rumblings; they happened on the tail of a leopard, observing a young waterbuck antelope, and retired therefrom without his suspecting them; they watched some bush-pigs rooting in a clearing, hoping they might turn up some insects worth eating; they heard a mother-lion grunting among some reeds, and were nearly run over by the stampede of zebras that followed; they chased a rat that ran into a hole in which was a snake, and it never came out again; they went up a tree after a weaver-bird's nest, but, from the way the bottle-shaped structure was hung, could not get at it; they investigated a hare's hole, and found a six-foot mamba snake, with four-minute death-fangs, in possession; they risked the thousand spikes of a thorn-bush to get at a red-necked pheasant roosting, only to find the branch he was on too slender to hold their weight; they were stalked by a wild cat, and hid in a hollow tree; and were pounced upon by a civet cat--who was their big cousin--and dodged him most wonderfully; and were chased by a jackal, whose nose they bit when it followed them into a hollow log. Finally, they came to the wall, and stopped.

Their noses told them it was not the wall of a native village, for no one, not even a man, could possibly make any mistake about _that_. Also, their noses may have told them other things. Anyway, the moon saw them, in the form of two gray lines, slide over the wall and drop silently into the shadow on the far side.

A wild cat was courting a domestic cat of the bungalow close by, at the corner of the compound, but, flat as strips of tawny-spotted cloth, they got past him all right.

A black-backed jackal was gnawing a bit of old hide at the angle of the wall, and they were forced to make a detour up to the veranda of the bungalow to avoid that sharp-eared, sharp-eyed one.

Here, on the veranda, they discovered a chair, and the male genet, standing on hindlegs to see what was in the chair, found himself looking straight into the electric-blue, purplish balls of light that betokened another cat, which had been asleep, but was now very wide awake.

He went round that chair in the form of a hazy, wavy, streak, as the cat shot out of it. The female genet faded from publicity behind a palm in a pot. But the genet's tail was so long that, with the cat and himself going round and round that chair like a living Catherine-wheel--both he and the cat spitting no end--the cat was touching his tail, while he was snapping at the cat's. Wherefore he moved across the veranda as an arrow flies, and round the corner, and as he turned the corner he--leapt.

It was a beautiful leap, and it cleared the danger that he seemed bound to run into, as it lifted in his path, by about an inch. As he sprang he heard the cat's claws scraping loudly, as she madly endeavored to stop--too late.

Then the head of the eight-foot python that had been creeping up round that corner in the process of stalking that cat whizzed by beneath him like a hurled poleax.

As he landed the genet heard the cat make one sound--only one--and it was indescribable, and he dropped off the veranda into the shadow of a bush, where the female genet presently joined him.

There was a small mongoose (my! what a lot of hunters do collect about the bungalows at night, to be sure!) under the bush, engaged in eating that precise reptilian form of poisoned death known as a night adder, which it had just killed. But the genets had other and private business, and they parted from the mongoose with no more than a snarl, the two genets to appear next--or, rather, to be no more than guessed at--crossing the last stretch of moonlight between them and the fowlhouse.

As they did so, a blurred, vast-winged, silent, dark shadow passed overhead, and a peculiarly piercing whistle stabbed dagger-like through the waiting, listening silence. Both genets jumped, as if the whistle had really been a dagger and had stabbed them, and vanished into hiding before the sound had ceased, almost. They knew that shadow--the owner of the whistle; they had met her earlier that night--the giant eagle-owl. But what the fangs and claws was she doing here? After rats, perhaps. They hoped so, and tried to think she was not after them.

The people who are condemned to live in those parts know that deaths, many and mysterious, go about there in the night, seeking victims, and that fowls must, in consequence, be well penned. Yet they die; and it has been said that where a snake can squeeze into a fowl-house, there a genet can follow--perhaps dealing with the snake first, and the fowls afterwards. Certainly, there seems to be no longer, and narrower, and lower, and more sinuous little beast on this earth than the genet.

The male genet took the problem upon himself as his own special province to find entrance into places; and the female, her suspicions of him oozing away more and more every minute, "kept cave." And he found an entrance, that little, long, low beggar; he found an entrance, a hole up under the roof, that appeared small enough, in all conscience, to be overlooked by anybody.

The moon knows how they climbed to it--I don't. And as the male genet dropped down inside, the female took his place. But even as he landed he wished he had not. Fear was there before him.

In the smelly, stifling, heated pitch-darkness a fowl squawked with pain, and others burst into noise above his head.

Then he made a blunder. Surprised certainly, and angry perhaps, he growled.

Instantly the confusion ceased and hushed to silence; and instantly, too, round, large, amber-gold balls of light like lamps, to the number of two, were switched on--fixed upon him, staring, so that he "froze" in his tracks where he stood, and her crest stood up on the female genet, as it does on a cat, as she peered through the hole. They had disturbed something at its killing.

Very few graven images move less than those two pretty but small hunters did in the nest half-minute, while the fowls settled down again, and the genets tried--mainly with their noses--to find out what, in the wilderness or out of it, they had run up against this time.

At the end of that period there fell upon their stupefied ears the sound as if some one unseen were cracking nuts--nut after nut, very quickly--in the blackness, and both genets very nearly had a fit--a motionless one--on the spot.

Then they knew, most entirely did they know, and the knowledge gave them no end of a fright. It was the giant eagle-owl. She--it was a she--had beaten the robbers in hole-creeping, had outburgled the burglars, and outcrept the creepers, though goodness alone knows how.

The only difficulty was, who was going out first, and who alive, and who dead?

The male genet apparently knew about owls, and nothing of what he knew had shown that they were cowards. Nor was he a coward; but the wild hunters we not out to win the V.C., as a rule, I guess; and, if they were, he was not one of them. He was out to feed, not fight.

Possibly, while he was considering this, standing there with arched back--by reason of his long body and apologies for legs--in the darkness, the owl was considering the same thing. Anyway, both seemed to make up their minds in the same instant, and to act on it. Wherefore they arrived at the hole under the roof in the same instant, too; and you can take it from me that there are very few creatures indeed who can go into a hole, or come out of it, with such an amazing rush as the genet.

The result naturally was war, and red-hot at that.

Grappling, spitting, hissing, growling, snorting, coughing, the two fell in a heap to the ground--and an owl on the ground is one degree more of a spiked handful than an owl in the air--where they continued the discussion in a young whirlwind of their own, much to the perturbation of the roosting fowls, who woke up and added to the riot.

The female genet had gone out of the other end of the hole, like a cork out of a bottle, taking a scratch on the nose from the owl with her; but, finding nothing further happen, she now crept back and peered in. What she discovered did not give her any comfort, for, although upon her back, it looked as if that she-owl had been specially designed to fight that way. She had one fiend's claw gripped well home on the male genet's shoulder, and another doing its best to skin him alive; while her beak was hammering the gray top of his weasely-looking head. True, the male genet's fangs were buried up to the socket in the owl's throat, but that was no proof that he had found either her windpipe or the equally useful jugular vein, and, if he did not pretty quick, it looked as if it would never matter, so far as he was concerned.

I like to think of what that little, long, crippled female genet did then, in that well-like blackness and that smelly heat, with the chance of retreat open to her, and no one to say her nay. Without hesitation, she dropped to the ground beside the scuffle, and flung herself into it--into the winnowing, slapping radius of big pinions, that beat and beat and beat, smothering all with feathers and dust. One wing caught her squarely, and she fetched up against the wall, winded and dazed; but she was back again in a flash, dancing on her toes, and, suddenly flattening, shot in, level with the ground, like a snake.

She arrived. She felt feathers against her nose--she could not see. The wings pounded her flatter. She laid hold, biting in as deep and as far as she could get.

As a matter of fact, she had got the owl by the neck, but one would have thought she had turned on a young volcano by the confusion that followed. Both genets shut their precious eyes, and hung on, while that owl beat herself round and round in one last wild flurry, coughing horribly and humanly the while, and cracking nuts. Finally she collapsed as suddenly as a pricked bladder, and lay still--a great, mixed-up feathery heap, limp and pathetic, with her vast flung-out wings.

The two genets backed away, glad enough to be done with such a fiery, feathered fury. The male genet stumbled a little, and sat down. He was nearly as red as the sun on a stormy dawn, but all the blood was not his.

They did not seem to trouble further about the great foe lying beside them. Certainly she pervaded the air with a musty smell that was not attractive, or, at least, not attractive when fowls were by; and it was to the fowls they turned, the female first, the male later, after he had done some very necessary licking.

I fancy that, though dizzy, the male genet was rather proud of himself. He had brought his lady-love to such a feast as she may have dreamed of, and she had saved his life. That gave them a fellow-feeling that looked well for his prospects in love. But I do not think he had quite realized how hungry that beautiful velvet-skinned damsel of his choice was till that minute, and then he was given no time to think about it.

The dark over his head burst like a mine, and feathers and noise enveloped him whirling. That represented the female genet coming down, fixed to the throat of a hapless fowl. She sucked the blood, and flew at another. Ordinarily she would have removed that one and found it enough; but men who have been "broke," when they got suddenly rich, seem to go temporarily mad with the lust of spending, and so it was with her; only, her madness was the lust of killing.

She killed, leaping and wrenching at the poor, screaming birds' throats, blinded to the world with excitement, drunk with blood. That is an awful intoxication, and makes even men, let alone wild, carnivorous beasts, do unmentionable things. Also, the smell of blood was too much for the male genet, and he presently rushed, with flying tail, into the crimson orgy too.

They were some time at this craziness; and when they had finished, they and the fowls that were still alive could only lie and pant together among the contorted slain, the blood--you would never believe how a cockerel will bleed--and the carmine-tinted feathers. You might not believe me if I told you how many fowls they had killed, but it was a most disgraceful number, and quite inexcusable.

And then, even as they lay there, dead-beat, they started suddenly and together, for, almost like a blow, the fact dawned upon them that it was day. Night had stolen away, and dawn discovered them at the killing; and goodness alone knows how long they had been at it--ten minutes or hours. Anyway, here it was, and they leapt to their feet together.

As they hurried out they had to pass the place where the carcass of the owl _had been_! It was gone--mysteriously sauntered as a corpse into nowhere. Owls are uncanny creatures at any time, but moving about when dead is not usually a recognized habit of theirs. The genets sniffed anxiously, and ran the trail to the hole under the roof, since it happened to be on their way. Through the hole it went, and into the air--literally into the air. In other words, that owl had simply "bluffed" death when she realized that she was near death. The bluff had come off; and at a later, and what she judged a proper, time, she had just, and of course silently, flown off by the way she had come; and--as I live!--a fowl had gone with her.

One minute later an unsuspected martial hawk-eagle precipitated himself out of a big, hoary, old fig-tree, a hundred yards away from the fowlhouse, on to one of the genets' disappearing tails. This is the world's most general view of a genet, by the way--its disappearing tail; and it is given to very few to see the beautiful, dark-blotched, creamy, little, lithe, long beast that the ringed tail belongs to. Of course, the eagle was too late.