For a few minutes, or a few moments, I cannot tell which, I lay there half stunned.
Then I began to think that I should be torn to pieces and devoured, and my next vivid thought took the form of a question—Will it hurt much?
This set me wondering whether I was already badly injured, and as I had read that people who are seriously hurt do not feel pain at the time, I took it for granted that I was in a very sad state. But all the same I did not feel torn by the creature’s claws, nor yet as if its teeth had been driven into the back of my neck, though I supposed that they had been. What I did feel was that the puma was heavy, soft, and very hot.
“Then I can’t be hurt,” I reasoned with myself at last, “or I should feel the pain now,” and with this I began to think it was time to do something; but I hesitated about beginning, for I could make no use of my discharged gun.
There was my knife, though, if I could get it out from its sheath in my belt, and feeling that, if it were to come to a struggle, my empty hands would be no match for the puma’s teeth and claws, I began to steal my fingers towards my belt.
I stopped directly, though, for at the first movement there was a deep shuddering growl at the nape of my neck, and it seemed to run down my spine and out at the tips of my fingers and toes. It was just as if the puma were saying—
“You just lie still, or I’ll bite.”
That must have been the meaning, for I lay quite still with the great heat drops tickling my face and running in the roots of my hair, while the puma crouched upon my back so that I could feel its shape exactly.
“What can I do?” I said to myself, and then I remembered the old story about the traveller and the bear—how he shammed death, and the bear left him. That was what I felt that I must do, and I lay perfectly still in the hope that the puma would leave me, though it seemed quite to approve of its couch, and lay close, breathing steadily, so that I felt the rise and fall of its breast against my back.
Just when I was beginning to feel faint with the heat and excitement, a thrill ran through me, for from somewhere close at hand, but invisible to me in the position I occupied, I heard Pete’s voice—