Soon, with his machete still swinging at his side, he was going up hand over hand.
Scorning the first branch, where the grass clumps were small and ragged, he climbed to the second, then to the third, fully thirty feet above the ground.
“I must be careful,” he warned himself.
Many a man had been killed by a fall from these trees. To gather the grass one must climb far out on a slender limb and hack off the end which holds the heavy clump. Suddenly released from its load, the limb springs up and if the grass gatherer loses his hold he is unseated and down he plunges to injury or death.
“I will be cautious,” Pant told himself. Had he but known it, no amount of caution could save him from facing the peril just before him.
Carefully he climbed over the stouter part of the limb, then out and still out on a slender branch from whose tip there hung a clump of “grass” that seemed as large as a haycock.
“Three days’ feed for old Rip from a single clump,” he told himself as, gripping the branch firmly with one hand, he drew his machete from its sheath.
He had lifted the machete for the first hack when his action was arrested by a slight scratching sound coming from somewhere above him. Imagine his surprise and horror when, upon looking up, he caught the gleam of two yellow eyes and at the same time heard the thumping lash of a great cat’s tail. It was a jaguar about to spring!
Pant was so startled that he all but lost his hold upon the limb. Overpowered by something akin to fear, for the instant he was unable to move. He was not so far bereft of his senses as to fail to note that above the creature’s left eye was a broad white stripe.
“The—the killer!” he gasped.