In the morning George complained that he did not feel well. Ken told
him he had been eating too much fresh meat, and that he had better be
careful. Then Ken set off alone, crossed the river, and found that the
deer carcass was gone. In the sand near where it had lain were plenty
of cat-tracks, but none of the big jaguar. Upon closer scrutiny he
found the cat-tracks to be those of a panther. He had half dragged, half
carried the carcass up one of the steep trails, but from that point
there was no further trace.
Ken struck out across the flat, intending to go as far as the jungle.
Turtle-doves fluttered before him in numberless flocks. Far to one side
he saw Muscovy ducks rising, sailing a few rods, then alighting. This
occurred several times before he understood what it meant. There was
probably a large flock feeding on the flat, and the ones in the rear
were continually flying to get ahead of those to the fore.
Several turkeys ran through the bushes before Ken, but as he was
carrying a rifle he paid little heed to them. He kept a keen lookout
for _javelin_. Two or three times he was tempted to turn off the trail
into little bamboo hollows; this, however, owing to a repugnance to
ticks, he did not do. Finally, as he neared the high moss-decked wall
of the jungle, he came upon a runway leading through the bottom of a
deep swale, and here he found tiger-tracks.
Farther down the swale, under a great cluster of bamboo, he saw the
scattered bones of several deer. Ken was sure that in this spot the
lord of the jungle had feasted more than once. It was an open hollow,
with the ground bare under the bamboos. The runway led on into dense,
leafy jungle. Ken planned to bait that lair with a deer carcass and
watch it during the late afternoon.
First, it was necessary to get the deer. This might prove bothersome,
for Ken’s hands and wrists were already sprinkled with _pinilius_, and
he certainly did not want to stay very long in the brush. Ken imagined
he felt an itching all the time, and writhed inside his clothes.
“Say, blame you! bite!” he exclaimed, resignedly, and stepped into the
low bushes. He went up and out of the swale. Scarcely had he reached a
level when he saw a troop of deer within easy range. Before they winded
danger Ken shot, and the one he had singled out took a few bounds, then
fell over sideways. The others ran off into the brush. Ken remembered
that the old hunter on Penetier had told him how seldom a deer dropped
at once. When he saw the work of the soft-nose .351 bullet, he no
longer wondered at this deer falling almost in his tracks.
“If I ever hit a jaguar like that it will be all day with him,” was
Ken’s comment.
There were two things about hunting the jaguar that Ken had been bidden
to keep in mind--fierce aggressiveness and remarkable tenacity of life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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