Here and there at some distance, he saw the ungainly, shambling gait of hyenas, in twos and fours and threes together, or alone. Once when four passed quite near, he felt Nels' shoulder against his thigh.
"Nels, old man, buck up. I tell you, get a grip. They may be the devil, but he isn't hard to kill. I'll show you. Do you get me, son?"
Nels looked up into the man's face, a long look. Then he pressed his head close, under Skag's hand.
Spotted deer ran in small groups; they came into sight and passed out quickly. More swift and more beautiful, were slender deer with single horns, twisted spirally; sometimes very long. Skag thrilled to their pride of action; but Nels seemed in no wise interested.
There was another kind of deer seen at some distance; the bucks were full-antlered and from where Skag stood, they looked light grey colour. Rabbits scuttled in and out of sight constantly, all over the landscape.
Between the parallel lines of seven spotted deer on one side and a small herd of grey deer on the other, he saw a great, low-leaping beast; plainly yellow with black stripes—one tiger the sportsmen had not bagged.
Evidently some mighty thing had transcended enmity and annihilated fear—for one day.
Little things held his eye one while. Creatures like monster rats—they were really mongooses—racing for their lives. Lizards from two to eighteen inches long; and he saw one with rainbow colours in his skin, mostly red. He learned afterward it was a great-chameleon; and angry. He saw one small scaled thing, rather like a crocodile in shape, but with a sharp-pointed nose; it waddled by, near enough to show two little black beads in its face.
When Skag lifted his eyes the earth seemed to have given up a score of packs of jackals. Their action was not like the wolf nor like the dog; it was a short, high leap—giving to a running pack the effect of bobbing. They were more perfect wolves than the American coyote, but smaller; and they looked to have much fuller coats. Searching the location of these groups of bobbing runners, his eye lifted toward the southeast.
. . . The grey knife-blade had cut away half the world. It lay straight across the earth, midway between his feet and where the horizon line should curve. Without any look of motion, without any shine or sheen, smooth as a wall of dull-polished granite, it rose to beyond sight in the sky—the utterly true line of its base upon the ground.