spite of Fate, manage to rear their young. And if the
gamekeeper and the collector, the sportsman and the farmer, have not
been too cruel, those young are alive-to-day.

XII

THE FURTIVE FEUD

There was a sun. You could not see it much because of burning, dancing
haze, but you could not get anywhere without feeling it. Almost
everything you touched--sand, rock, and such like--blistered you; and
the vegetation, where it wasn't four-inch thorns and six-inch spikes
and bloated cacti, was shriveled yellow-brown, like the color of a
lion. Perhaps it was a lion, some of it. How could one tell?

Lizards, which were bad; and scorpions, which were worse; and snakes,
which were worse than worse, lay about in the sun, as if they were
pieces of leather drying. You could not see them--which was awkward,
for some of them held a five-minute death up their sleeve--partly
because they matched their surroundings, partly because they were
still. They were colored burnt to hide in a burnt land.

Yet it was possible to be bright and gay and unobtrusive in this place,
too--if you were cold-blooded enough not to boil dry and explode before
getting a drink--for under some trees lay, in the old-gold, yellow,
black-shade-streaked, tawny-red grass, a sleek and glistening, banded,
blotched, and spotted, newly painted python. Yes, sirs, a python
snake; and you couldn't see it in its new levee uniform--the old one
lay not fifty yards away--any more than you could see the other, and
plainly attired, bad dreams--so long as it did not move. Its length
was not apparent, because it was coiled up; but it would have uncoiled
out into something most alarming if stretched, I fancy.

The jackal made no sound as he came, tripping daintily, graceful and
light as a rubber ball, into the scene, blissfully oblivious,
apparently, of the fact that any other next step might awake a volcano
under his feet.

He was a black-backed jackal; red-tawny sides, fading to nearly white
under-parts; black back, grizzled with white hairs, neatly ruled off
from the rest of him, like a big saddle; large, wide-awake ears; long,
thin legs; bushy tail; very knowing eyes, and all complete--part wolf,
part fox, and yet neither and something of both. No one living could,
perhaps, have been agile enough to measure him, but he looked over two
and a half feet from nose-tip to tail-root; and you can add, possibly,
a third of that for the tail. But he was all there, w