With a roar that rolled in thunder over the plain and seemed to set the very tree-tops quivering, they leaped lazily aside and went off in enormous bounds through the grass, circling about as if to intercept, in sheer wantonness of slaughter, the remnants of the fleeing herd. At the sight Grôm frowned anxiously, thinking how helpless he and the girl would be against such foes, now that they no longer had the Shining One to protect them.
Squealing to split the ears, the pig-tapirs came galloping past the tree, making for a piece of water some 108 furlongs further on, where doubtless they hoped to evade both the lion and the rhinoceros. But they had yet another adversary to reckon with.
Just past the tree, at a thicket of immense scarlet poinsettias, the trail curved sharply. From behind the poinsettias arose a gigantic shape unlike anything that Grôm had ever dreamed of. And he knew that the maker of the mysterious trail and those tremendous footprints was before him.
With a trumpeting bray of indignation the monster sat upright on hind-quarters far more ponderous than those of a mammoth. Its tail, as thick at the base as the body of a bear, helped to support it, while its clumsy frame towered to a height of eighteen or twenty feet. Its hind legs were very short, thick like tree-trunks, grotesquely bowed; and its thighs like buttresses. Its fore legs were more arms than legs, of startling length and massive strength, draped in long, stiff hair, and terminated by colossal hands with immense hooked claws for fingers. The whole body was clothed with rusty hair of an amazing coarseness, like matting fiber. The vast head, flat on top and prolonged to a snout that was almost a proboscis, had the look of being deformed by reason of its fantastically exaggerated jowl, or lower jaw. This terrifying monster thrust out a narrow pink tongue, some three or four feet in length, stooped and turned, and gave a hurried look at something crouching behind its mighty thighs. 109
“Its baby!” muttered the girl, with a little indrawn breath of sympathy.
Then the strange being sat up again to meet and ward off the rush of the maddened pig-tapirs.
For a moment it beat off the assault, seizing the frantic beasts and hurling them this way and that as if they had been so many rabbits. Then it was completely surrounded by the reeking squealing bleeding horde, which paid no more personal attention to it than if it had been a mass of rock. They rolled over the little one, unheeding, and trod it flat. Its death cry split the air; and at that sound the mother seemed to sink down into her haunches. In her agony of rage and grief she literally tore some of her assailants in halves, throwing the awful fragments impatiently from her in order to lose no time in seizing a new victim. A few seconds more and the rush was past; and presently the mad rout was hurling itself with a tremendous splashing into the water. The monster looked around for more victims––and was just in time to see the hideous vision of the rhinoceros charging down upon her. Triumphant from the encounter with the lions, he rushed back to slake his still unsatisfied fury on the pig-tapirs. At any other time he would have given such an antagonist as the colossal megatherium a wide berth; but just now he was in one of his madnesses. His furious little swinish eyes blinking through the blood which dripped over them, he hurled himself straight onward. His horn was 110 plunged into the monster’s paunch; but at the same time one of those gigantic armed hands fell irresistibly on his neck, shattering the vertebræ through all their deep protection of hide and muscle. He collapsed with an explosive grunt; and the giant hands tossed him aside.
It was a frightful wound which the monster had received, but for a few moments she paid no attention to it, being occupied in licking the trampled body of her young one with that amazing tongue of hers. At length, apparently convinced that the little one was quite dead, she brayed again piteously, dropping forward upon all fours, and made off slowly down the trail, walking with grotesque awkwardness on the sides of her feet. For two or three hundred yards she kept on, drawing a wake of crimson behind her; and then, apparently exhausted by her wound, she turned off among the canes, and lay down, close beside the trail, but effectively screened from it.
From their place in the tree Grôm and the girl had followed breathlessly these astounding encounters. At last Grôm spoke:
“This is a country of very great beasts,” he remarked, with the air of one announcing a discovery. As A-ya showed no inclination whatever to dissent from this statement, he presently went on to his conclusion, leaving her to infer his minor premise.