one--on the spot.

Then they knew, most entirely did they know, and the knowledge gave them
no end of a fright. It was the giant eagle-owl. She--it was a she--had
beaten the robbers in hole-creeping, had outburgled the burglars, and
outcrept the creepers, though goodness alone knows how.

The only difficulty was, who was going out first, and who alive, and who
dead?

The male genet apparently knew about owls, and nothing of what he knew
had shown that they were cowards. Nor was he a coward; but the wild
hunters we not out to win the V.C., as a rule, I guess; and, if they
were, he was not one of them. He was out to feed, not fight.

Possibly, while he was considering this, standing there with arched
back--by reason of his long body and apologies for legs--in the darkness,
the owl was considering the same thing. Anyway, both seemed to make up
their minds in the same instant, and to act on it. Wherefore they
arrived at the hole under the roof in the same instant, too; and you can
take it from me that there are very few creatures indeed who can go into
a hole, or come out of it, with such an amazing rush as the genet.

The result naturally was war, and red-hot at that.

Grappling, spitting, hissing, growling, snorting, coughing, the two fell
in a heap to the ground--and an owl on the ground is one degree more of a
spiked handful than an owl in the air--where they continued the
discussion in a young whirlwind of their own, much to the perturbation of
the roosting fowls, who woke up and added to the riot.

The female genet had gone out of the other end of the hole, like a cork
out of a bottle, taking a scratch on the nose from the owl with her; but,
finding nothing further happen, she now crept back and peered in. What
she discovered did not give her any comfort, for, although upon her back,
it looked as if that she-owl had been specially designed to fight that
way. She had one fiend's claw gripped well home on the male genet's
shoulder, and another doing its best to skin him alive; while her beak
was hammering the gray top of his weasely-looking head. True, the male
genet's fangs were buried up to the socket in the owl's throat, but that
was no proof that he had found either her windpipe or the equally useful
jugular vein, and, if he did not pretty quick, it looked as if it would
never matter, so far as he was concerned.

I like to think of what that little, long, crippled female genet did
then, in that we