wild cat was courting a domestic cat of the bungalow close by, at the
corner of the compound, but, flat as strips of tawny-spotted cloth, they
got past him all right.

A black-backed jackal was gnawing a bit of old hide at the angle of the
wall, and they were forced to make a detour up to the veranda of the
bungalow to avoid that sharp-eared, sharp-eyed one.

Here, on the veranda, they discovered a chair, and the male genet,
standing on hindlegs to see what was in the chair, found himself looking
straight into the electric-blue, purplish balls of light that betokened
another cat, which had been asleep, but was now very wide awake.

He went round that chair in the form of a hazy, wavy, streak, as the cat
shot out of it. The female genet faded from publicity behind a palm in a
pot. But the genet's tail was so long that, with the cat and himself
going round and round that chair like a living Catherine-wheel--both he
and the cat spitting no end--the cat was touching his tail, while he was
snapping at the cat's. Wherefore he moved across the veranda as an arrow
flies, and round the corner, and as he turned the corner he--leapt.

It was a beautiful leap, and it cleared the danger that he seemed bound
to run into, as it lifted in his path, by about an inch. As he sprang he
heard the cat's claws scraping loudly, as she madly endeavored to
stop--too late.

Then the head of the eight-foot python that had been creeping up round
that corner in the process of stalking that cat whizzed by beneath him
like a hurled poleax.

As he landed the genet heard the cat make one sound--only one--and it was
indescribable, and he dropped off the veranda into the shadow of a bush,
where the female genet presently joined him.

There was a small mongoose (my! what a lot of hunters do collect about
the bungalows at night, to be sure!) under the bush, engaged in eating
that precise reptilian form of poisoned death known as a night adder,
which it had just killed. But the genets had other and private business,
and they parted from the mongoose with no more than a snarl, the two
genets to appear next--or, rather, to be no more than guessed
at--crossing the last stretch of moonlight between them and the fowlhouse.

As they did so, a blurred, vast-winged, silent, dark shadow passed
overhead, and a peculiarly piercing whistle stabbed dagger-like through
the waiting, listening silence. Both genets jumped, as if the whistle
had really been a da