The Way of the Wild

by F. St. Mars

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.