Gonch crawled away to hide himself behind a stone and watch.
It took the Woolly Rhinoceros several minutes to realize his friend’s plight and to devise ways and means for effecting a rescue. Having determined his course, he anchored his forefeet firmly and as close to the pit as he dared, then extended his head toward the Mammoth. The latter responded by raising his trunk and curling its flexible tip about the other’s nose-horn, a formidable affair about two feet long, as smooth and glossy as polished steel. When assured that his partner had secured a firm grip, the Woolly Rhinoceros settled back his full weight, at the same time pushing hard with his legs.
The Mammoth’s trunk tautened until it seemed about to break. His feet drew clear of the mire one by one, slowly but surely; and now that the Rhinoceros was relieving him of so much of his dead weight, he clung to that nose-horn with the persistence of one drowning. Even when his right forefoot touched solid ground, he did not release this hold. “Friends should ever help each other” might not be considered a slogan applicable to beasts, but Gonch saw it being applied now and in most marvelous fashion.
“I am asleep,” he thought. “What I now see is but a dream.” The Mammoth had by this time freed his front limbs and was resting with his feet and elbows on the pit-edge. Meanwhile the Rhinoceros maintained the tension on his partner’s trunk, hanging on as determinedly as a bull-dog. Having rested, the Mammoth now concentrated every ounce of his strength for the final heave. The Rhinoceros, too, put on more power until his friend’s nose-spout stretched almost to the breaking point.
The Mammoth’s hindquarters slowly emerged from the engulfing slime. The soft ooze slobbered and sighed as the rear pillar limbs drew clear, and the next moment both beasts stood shoulder to shoulder, stamping and snorting with rage.
They sniffed vigorously, but the wind told no tales, for it blew from them—the wrong way. Lucky Gonch! The time had not yet come for him to be impaled upon the horn of a rhinoceros or crushed beneath an elephant’s ponderous feet. The breeze was his friend and the eyesight of his enemies was comparatively poor. He made himself as small as possible and lay motionless behind the stone, entirely unconscious that the grunts and squeals he heard were animal conversation.
“He must have gone away,” said Wulli. “I can neither see nor smell him.”
“To smell him is to know him,” the Mammoth grumbled. “Never have I known a man to bear such an odor.”
“It is that of a hyena,” said the Rhinoceros.
“Let us find and punish him.” The huge Elephant ground his teeth as he said this. Although slow to anger, he could neither forgive nor forget.