For the taboo was upon him,
and he might unchidden invade their sleeping-mats or food calabashes. He
might bully as he pleased, and be arrogant beyond decency, and there was
no one to say him nay. Even had Bashti's word gone forth that if Jerry
were attacked by the full-grown bush dogs, it was the duty of the Somo
folk to take his part and kick and stone and beat the bush dogs. And
thus his own four-legged cousins came painfully to know that he was
taboo.

And Jerry prospered. Fat to stupidity he might well have become, had it
not been for his high-strung nerves and his insatiable, eager curiosity.
With the freedom of all Somo his, he was ever a-foot over it, learning
its metes and bounds and the ways of the wild creatures that inhabited
its swamps and forests and that did not acknowledge his taboo.

Many were his adventures. He fought two battles with the wood-rats that
were almost of his size, and that, being mature and wild and cornered,
fought him as he had never been fought before. The first he had killed,
unaware that it was an old and feeble rat. The second, in prime of
vigour, had so punished him that he crawled back, weak and sick to the
devil devil doctor's house, where, for a week, under the dried emblems of
death, he licked his wounds and slowly came back to life and health.

He stole upon the dugong and joyed to stampede that silly timid creature
by sudden ferocious onslaughts which he knew himself to be all sound and
fury, but which tickled him and made him laugh with the consciousness of
playing a successful joke. He chased the unmigratory tropi-ducks from
their shrewd-hidden nests, walked circumspectly among the crocodiles
hauled out of water for slumber, and crept under the jungle-roof and
spied upon the snow-white saucy cockatoos, the fierce ospreys, the heavy-
flighted buzzards, the lories and kingfishers, and the absurdly garrulous
little pygmy parrots.

Thrice, beyond the boundaries of Somo, he encountered the little black
bushmen who were more like ghosts than men, so noiseless and
unperceivable were they, and who, guarding the wild-pig runways of the
jungle, missed spearing him on the three memorable occasions. As the
wood-rats had taught him discretion, so did these two-legged lurkers in
the jungle twilight. He had not fought with them, although they tried to
spear him. He quickly came to know that these were other folk than Somo
folk, that his taboo did not extend to them, and tha