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.