alf-stunned.

It was the sudden and peculiar growling hiss from his wife--sounding all
a-magnified in that wilderness silence after the battle--that made him
look up, at her first, and then almost instantly at _something else_.
His wife was backing slowly towards the "bush," every hair on her body
sticking straight out at right angles, her eyes fixed strangely upon that
something else. His young had taken to cover, not, it seemed, too
readily, but by their parent's order.

A lion was standing, still as a carved beast, at the far end of that
little clearing--_he_ was the something else. Goodness and his kingly
self alone knew how long he had been there, that great, heavy-jowled,
deep-bellied, haughty-eyed brute. He may have been present from the
first, or the middle, or only at that moment. Being a lion, he was just
there, suddenly, without any visible effect of having got there, a
presence of dread, created apparently out of thin air at the moment, in
that spot, and with less sound than a blown leaf.

This power of being, without seeming to come, of evolving from nowhere,
is one of the lion's most highly perfected tricks; for King Leo believes
in all the ritual of his craft, and is great on effects, even down to the
minor details. Power, grim and terrible, he has, without shadow of
doubt; but he never forgets to impress that fact--and more--upon the
world, and every action is carefully studied to advertise, not himself,
but his "frightfulness." A very fine play-actor is the king of all the
beasts.

But the ratel did not move. He had met his Napoleon, and was not--so far
as the watcher could see--afraid.

Motionless, scowling, with head down, and shrewd, proud eyes smoldering,
the lion stood there like an apparition of doom. He was, I fully
suspect, letting the effect sink in deliberately. He knew his game.
Also, he had a reason. Surely a great poker-player was lost in the lion.

But the little ratel met that regal stare squarely and unmoved. He whose
proud boast it was that he feared nothing that walked or crawled, or swam
or flew, could not be frightened now. And he who came to terrify was
perhaps all but ten feet long, and he whom he sought to terrify was
barely three feet. It was a comparison to make you gasp.

Now, that lion did not want the ratel at all, or his wife, or his family,
or anything that was his. He wanted the gnu, and would be very pleased
if the ratel would go away and leave it to