The Way of the Wild

by F. St. Mars

No honey-guide? Then he must go and search for himself. And he did, returning, in fifty minutes, for his wife, who, now much recovered—as only a ratel can recover from the very jaws of death—followed him with her young to the hole he had torn in a rotten tree-trunk where the bees were nesting.

They had proceeded perhaps three hundred yards, when, turning a bush carelessly, as no other creature would dare to do, the ratel fell almost on to the back of the bull-gnu.

There is no need to be surprised that they should meet. The wild is not an aimless mix-up in that way. Each creature has its beat, temporarily or permanently, nor seeks to deviate. You may look for the same herd of antelope, feeding near the same place, about the same hour each day; the same lion stumping the same beat, as regular as a policeman, most nights; the same hyena uttering horrible nothings within hearing of the same hills, any time after the setting of each sun, just as surely as the same cock-robin asks you for crumbs, the same blackbird awakens you with inimitable fluting, and the same black cat seeks for both in the same vicinity each dusk.

The surprise was in what followed. Perhaps the bull-gnu kicked our ratel badly as he lurched to his feet, jerked from half-sleep into violent collision with he knew not what. Perhaps the ratel had a memory. Perhaps the presence of his family weighed with him. Whatever the cause, the result was decided enough. He reared and hit deep, and fixed home a very living vise, where he bit.

Then things happened, but that which immediately followed was not a fight; it was not even a spar. The ratel never moved, although he was moved—astoundingly. The gnu bull did the moving, and produced the most amazing bit of violent activity one could dream of. It was quite indescribable. A buck-jumping mustang of the most hustling kind would have been as a gentle lamb to it. The ground all about looked as if herds had jumped upon it—bushes, grass, flowers, and all were trampled down flat. But it did not do what it was designed to do—it did not break the ratel's hold. Bruised, assuredly, shaken so that he ought to have fallen to hits, dizzy and blind, he did not let go, and in the position he held he could not be hammered off. He just glued where he was, saying nothing at all, till the end—till that grand old bull sank and was still, exhausted, by loss of blood, and with one great hopeless sigh his life departed from him, and he died.

The ratel did not leave go for some little time. He seemed to suspect that the gnu bull was bluffing, or perhaps he was himself half-stunned.

It was the sudden and peculiar growling hiss from his wife—sounding all a-magnified in that wilderness silence after the battle—that made him look up, at her first, and then almost instantly at something else. His wife was backing slowly towards the "bush," every hair on her body sticking straight out at right angles, her eyes fixed strangely upon that something else. His young had taken to cover, not, it seemed, too readily, but by their parent's order.

A lion was standing, still as a carved beast, at the far end of that little clearing—he was the something else. Goodness and his kingly self alone knew how long he had been there, that great, heavy-jowled, deep-bellied, haughty-eyed brute. He may have been present from the first, or the middle, or only at that moment. Being a lion, he was just there, suddenly, without any visible effect of having got there, a presence of dread, created apparently out of thin air at the moment, in that spot, and with less sound than a blown leaf.

This power of being, without seeming to come, of evolving from nowhere, is one of the lion's most highly perfected tricks; for King Leo believes in all the ritual of his craft, and is great on effects, even down to the minor details. Power, grim and terrible, he has, without shadow of doubt; but he never forgets to impress that fact—and more—upon the world, and every action is carefully studied to advertise, not himself, but his "frightfulness." A very fine play-actor is the king of all the beasts.

But the ratel did not move. He had met his Napoleon, and was not—so far as the watcher could see—afraid.