nd out among the bush and
the tree-trunks, soundless, and quite invisible, except when they crossed
a moonbeam--and then nearly so, because the moon has a trick of, as it
were, dissolving the colors of even fairly conspicuous creatures--they
crept on their low way. There was not a sound that they did not crouch
for, often flat as a whip-lash--and that wild is full of sounds by night,
too--not a puff of air that they did not throw up their sharp little
muzzles to test, not a movement or the hint of a movement which their
eyes did not fix with a suspicious stare.

They passed a hippopotamus feeding--a sheaf at a mouthful--upon long
grass; they came upon three wild dogs eating an antelope and gibbering
like gnomes; they beheld two striped zebras stampeding from a lion; they
got into the middle of a herd of elephants--but what must those giants
have seemed to them, almost at ground-level?--and did not know it, so
silent can the mighty ones be, till they heard the unmistakable digestive
rumblings; they happened on the tail of a leopard, observing a young
waterbuck antelope, and retired therefrom without his suspecting them;
they watched some bush-pigs rooting in a clearing, hoping they might turn
up some insects worth eating; they heard a mother-lion grunting among
some reeds, and were nearly run over by the stampede of zebras that
followed; they chased a rat that ran into a hole in which was a snake,
and it never came out again; they went up a tree after a weaver-bird's
nest, but, from the way the bottle-shaped structure was hung, could not
get at it; they investigated a hare's hole, and found a six-foot mamba
snake, with four-minute death-fangs, in possession; they risked the
thousand spikes of a thorn-bush to get at a red-necked pheasant roosting,
only to find the branch he was on too slender to hold their weight; they
were stalked by a wild cat, and hid in a hollow tree; and were pounced
upon by a civet cat--who was their big cousin--and dodged him most
wonderfully; and were chased by a jackal, whose nose they bit when it
followed them into a hollow log. Finally, they came to the wall, and
stopped.

Their noses told them it was not the wall of a native village, for no
one, not even a man, could possibly make any mistake about _that_. Also,
their noses may have told them other things. Anyway, the moon saw them,
in the form of two gray lines, slide over the wall and drop silently into
the shadow on the far side.

A