"You're a beauty!" commented Wild Boar. "When you shove your ugly face up to the bars the women-kind scream, and jump back—I've noticed that."
"Presently," continued Chita, "one would come my way, seeing the great pile of straw, and I'd have him. Jungle Dwellers! how he'd squeal; and his mates would scurry away jinking and bounding like Kakur Deer. Cowardly swine they were. Now, Buffalo, when one of my kind charged them, would throw themselves together like men of the war-kind, and stand shoulder to shoulder."
"Yes; but, great Cat," objected Boar, "you took care to seize upon a young one, I warrant. Suppose you come out here and try a charge with me. Ugh, ugh! I'll soon slit up your lean sides with my sharp tusks."
"Be still!" commanded Sa'-zada; "here we are all friends, and this is but a tale of what has been."
Chita had turned in a rage at Boar's taunt, and glared through the bars, his great fangs bared, and tail lashing his sides. When the Keeper spoke he snarled in disdain at the bristling Pig, and continued the story.
"Then came the hungry year. At the turning of the monsoons there should have been rain, but no rain came. All through the cold weather the jungle had gone on drying up, and the grass turned brown, even to the color of my coat. The Tree-Crickets and Toads whistled shrill and loud, until the jungle was like a great nest of the sweet-feeders—the Bees. Then when it was time for rain there was only more dryness.
"The yellow-clothed Phoongyis (Priests) prayed; and the Men-kind brought sweetmeats and sheet-gold to their God Buddha; but still there was no rain. Miles and miles I traveled for a drink; and if I made a kill at the pool it was nothing but skin and bones. The small Deer that bark, what were they? Not a mouthful. And the Pigs shriveled up until one might as well have eaten straw. The Nilgai and the Sambhur-deer, as big as you, Mooswa, went away from that land of desolation, and soon nothing seemed to stir in all the jungle but the Koel Bird; and his cry of 'fee-e-ever!' forever ringing in my ears drove me full mad.
"Then it was that I stalked close to the place of the Men-kind—though I had never killed a Bullock before—and I made a kill. But after that they took the Bullocks under their houses at night, thinking I would not venture so close.
"But hunger is the death of all fear, and even there I made a kill. Then again the Men-kind, in their selfishness, thought to outwit me, for about the small village they built a stockade."