Chapter Seventeen.
Unexpected Recognitions.
It was not long before the spectators, who awaited this terrible conflict, perceived the jaguars advancing toward the crest of the ridge. All at once, however, the two made an abrupt pause, uttering a loud roar that seemed to express disappointment. They had just scented the presence of the two men within the cistern—from which the animals were now only a few paces distant.
For a moment both male and female stood together, stretching their bodies out to their full length, and lashing their flanks with their long sinewy tails. Then, uttering another prolonged roar, they bounded simultaneously forward, passing, at a single leap, over a space of full twenty feet. A second spring brought them upon the crest of the ridge, upon which they had scarce rested an instant, before the quick sharp crack of a rifle, followed by a yell of agony, told that one of them had fallen to the hunter’s bullet.
The second jaguar appeared for the moment to have escaped, but not to have retreated. He was seen to launch himself into the bottom of the little valley; and then was heard a confusion of noises—human voices mingling with the howls of the fierce brute, and the sound of a struggle, as if jaguar and hunters were rolling over one another. A second report now struck upon the ear, followed as before by the expiring yell of the tiger, and then succeeded a profound silence, which told that the wild scene was at an end.
The great trapper was now perceived scrambling up to the ridge—towards which the whole of the travellers had advanced to meet him.
“See!” he said, addressing himself to his admiring auditory, “see what a brace of Kentucky rifles and a good knife can do in the hands of those who know how to manage them!”
The darkness, however, hindered the spectators from making out the tableau which was exhibited at the bottom of the little valley.
A few minutes afterwards the moon lighted up the scene, and then could be observed the dead bodies of the two tigers, stretched along the ground by the water’s edge, while the other trapper upon his knees was engaged in bathing with cold water a long scar, which he had received from the claws of the last killed jaguar, and which extended from behind his ear nearly down to his waist. Fortunately this ugly-looking wound was no more than skin-deep, and therefore not very dangerous.
“What signify the sharpest claws compared with the scratch of a knife!” cried he, pointing to the nearest of the jaguars, whose upturned belly exhibited a huge cut of more than a foot in length, and through which the entrails of the animal protruded.