“Kick your spirit away, vile brute, I shall not budge,” cried Appadocca, now half mad with fury.
On its legs the creature stood, and shook its head and plunged, and away it went with Appadocca still clutching its wind-pipe with the grasp of the dying crocodile. The animal staggered a few paces and fell heavily to the ground, strangled to death.
Appadocca got up from the ground to which he had been borne by the beast in its fall, and walked round his prey in triumph.
“Whatever you are,” said he, “provided you are flesh and blood, I shall have a meal of you.”
He groped about among the small stones that strewed the upper part of the beach, and found what he seemed to have been searching for, a flint. He dashed it against a larger one and with the sharp pieces of it he began to cut through the hide of the animal that he had killed. He then succeeded in cutting a large portion of the still quivering flesh, and eat it.
What will not famine relish? Oh! hunger, that eternally tells us of our lowliness. Hunger levels. Hunger brings down the highest and proudest individuals to the standard of the meanest creature, whose instinct is to eat, whose life is concentrated in devouring, and whose death comes by over-feeding.
After Appadocca had fed upon the reeking flesh of his victim, he seemed recalled to himself: the madness of famine was past. He now looked upon the carcass before him with the indifference that formed the greater part of his nature, and the faint glimmerings of the fact that he had defied that beast which was now before him, and had engaged it in mortal combat, disgusted him: he contemned himself, too, when he recollected a little, the vain boastful and undignified language that he had held, and bent his steps in much sadness towards the same crevice where he had slept away the first part of the night. The other animals had fled after the fall of the one we have mentioned, and the stillness of the night was, as before, broken upon only by the moans of the ocean.
The next morning revealed to Appadocca the extent of the danger that he had escaped the night before. The animal was discovered to be one of those American tigers or jaguars, which pervade the plains of South America, and whose hunger has not unfrequently surmounted their instinctive cowardice so far as to bring them to the very houses of the Rancheros. The huge and powerful jaws of the animal, in which his bones could have been ground to pieces, attracted the attention of Appadocca; and when he observed the wound on the animal—the rude incision that he had made with the flint, and recollected the bloody meal that he had made of its flesh, he shuddered in disgust.