vely safe--looked askance at it when told
what it was, and was only partly reassured by the information that
termites were eaters of wood rather than of flesh. After sleep had
embraced the rest of the camp he still was uneasy, lifting his net at
long intervals and squinting at the moonlit mound as if expecting a
horde of pincer-jawed insects to erupt from it and charge him. And
during one of these inspections he saw something totally unexpected.

From the black shadows of the forest had emerged another shadow, so
grotesque and misshapen that it seemed a figment of indigestion and
weird dreams--a thing from whose shaggy body protruded what appeared to
be only a long tubular snout where a head should be, and which looked to
be overbalanced at the other end by a great mass of hair. It stood stone
still, and for the moment Tim could not decide which end of it was head
and which was tail, or even whether it were not double-tailed and
headless. Then, slowly, the apparition moved.

Into that hard-packed earth it dug huge hooked claws, and from its
tapering muzzle a wormlike tongue licked about, gathering the outrushing
white ants into its gullet. For minutes Tim lay blinking at it,
wondering if he really saw it.

Then, picking up his rifle, he slipped outside his net and advanced on
the creature.

The animal turned, sat back on its great tail, lifted its terrible
claws, and waited. Six feet away, just out of its reach, Tim stopped and
stared anew. Then he grinned.

"You win, feller," he informed the beast. "What ye are I dunno, but any
critter that's got the guts to ramble right into camp and offer to gimme
a battle is too good a sport for me to shoot. Help yourself to all the
ants in the world, for all o' me. I'm goin' back to bed. Bon sewer,
monseer."

Wherewith, still grinning, but warily watching, he backed until sure the
big invader would not spring at him. Knowing nothing of ant bears, he
did not know it was hardly a springing animal.

Its claws looked sufficiently formidable to disembowel a man--as,
indeed, they were, if the man came near enough. But when Tim had
withdrawn and the sluggish brute had decided that it would not need to
defend itself, it sank to all-fours and passed stiffly away into the
shades whence it had come.

On another night, when Tim slept, Knowlton detected a creeping,
slithering sound which made him slip off the safety catch of his
heavy-bulleted pistol and peer at the hut where slept th