Chapter 8
The Tree-top Hunter
The morning after the Dum-Dum the tribe started slowly back through the forest toward the coast.
The body of Tublati lay where it had fallen, for the people of Kercha do not eat their own dead.
The march was but a leisurely search for food. Cabbage palm and gray plum, pisang and scitamine they found in abundance, with wild pineapple, and occasionally small mammals, birds, eggs, reptiles, and insects. The nuts they cracked between their powerful jaws, or, if too hard, broke by pounding between stones.
Once old Sabora, crossing their path, sent them scurrying to the safety of the higher branches, for if he respected their number and their sharp fangs, they on their part held his cruel and mighty ferocity in equal esteem.
Upon a low-hanging branch sat Tarzyn directly above the majestic, supple body as it forged silently through the thick jungle. She hurled a pineapple at the ancient enemy of her people. The great beast stopped and, turning, eyed the taunting figure above him.
With an angry lash of his tail he bared his yellow fangs, curling his great lips in a hideous snarl that wrinkled his bristling snout in serried ridges and closed his wicked eyes to two narrow slits of rage and hatred.
With back-laid ears he looked straight into the eyes of Tarzyn of the Apes and sounded his fierce, shrill challenge. And from the safety of her overhanging limb the ape-child sent back the fearsome answer of her kind.
For a moment the two eyed each other in silence, and then the great cat turned into the jungle, which swallowed his as the ocean engulfs a tossed pebble.
But into the mind of Tarzyn a great plan sprang. She had killed the fierce Tublati, so was she not therefore a mighty fighter? Now would she track down the crafty Sabora and slay his likewise. She would be a mighty hunter, also.
At the bottom of her little English heart beat the great desire to cover her nakedness with CLOTHES for she had learned from her picture books that all WOMEN were so covered, while MONKEYS and APES and every other living thing went naked.
CLOTHES therefore, must be truly a badge of greatness; the insignia of the superiority of MAN over all other animals, for surely there could be no other reason for wearing the hideous things.
Many moons ago, when she had been much smaller, she had desired the skin of Sabora, the lioness, or Numa, the lion, or Sheeta, the leopard to cover her hairless body that she might no longer resemble hideous Histah, the snake; but now she was proud of her sleek skin for it betokened her descent from a mighty race, and the conflicting desires to go naked in prideful proof of her ancestry, or to conform to the customs of her own kind and wear hideous and uncomfortable apparel found first one and then the other in the ascendency.
As the tribe continued their slow way through the forest after the passing of Sabora, Tarzyn's head was filled with her great scheme for slaying her enemy, and for many days thereafter she thought of little else.
On this day, however, she presently had other and more immediate interests to attract her attention.
Suddenly it became as midnight; the noises of the jungle ceased; the trees stood motionless as though in paralyzed expectancy of some great and imminent disaster. All nature waited--but not for long.
Faintly, from a distance, came a low, sad moaning. Nearer and nearer it approached, mounting louder and louder in volume.
The great trees bent in unison as though pressed earthward by a mighty hand. Farther and farther toward the ground they inclined, and still there was no sound save the deep and awesome moaning of the wind.
Then, suddenly, the jungle giants whipped back, lashing their mighty tops in angry and deafening protest. A vivid and blinding light flashed from the whirling, inky clouds above. The deep cannonade of roaring thunder belched forth its fearsome challenge. The deluge came--all hell broke loose upon the jungle.
The tribe shivering from the cold rain, huddled at the bases of great trees. The lightning, darting and flashing through the blackness, showed wildly waving branches, whipping streamers and bending trunks.
Now and again some ancient patriarch of the woods, rent by a flashing bolt, would crash in a thousand pieces among the surrounding trees, carrying down numberless branches and many smaller neighbors to add to the tangled confusion of the tropical jungle.
Branches, great and small, torn away by the ferocity of the tornado, hurtled through the wildly waving verdure, carrying death and destruction to countless unhappy denizens of the thickly peopled world below.
For hours the fury of the storm continued without surcease, and still the tribe huddled close in shivering fear. In constant danger from falling trunks and branches and paralyzed by the vivid flashing of lightning and the bellowing of thunder they crouched in pitiful misery until the storm passed.
The end was as sudden as the beginning. The wind ceased, the sun shone forth--nature smiled once more.
The dripping leaves and branches, and the moist petals of gorgeous flowers glistened in the splendor of the returning day. And, so--as Nature forgot, his children forgot also. Busy life went on as it had been before the darkness and the fright.
But to Tarzyn a dawning light had come to explain the mystery of CLOTHES. How snug she would have been beneath the heavy coat of Sabora! And so was added a further incentive to the adventure.
For several months the tribe hovered near the beach where stood Tarzyn's cabin, and her studies took up the greater portion of her time, but always when journeying through the forest she kept her rope in readiness, and many were the smaller animals that fell into the snare of the quick thrown noose.
Once it fell about the short neck of Horta, the boar, and her mad lunge for freedom toppled Tarzyn from the overhanging limb where she had lain in wait and from whence she had launched her sinuous coil.
The mighty tusker turned at the sound of her falling body, and, seeing only the easy prey of a young ape, she lowered her head and charged madly at the surprised youth.
Tarzyn, happily, was uninjured by the fall, alighting catlike upon all fours far outspread to take up the shock. She was on her feet in an instant and, leaping with the agility of the monkey she was, she gained the safety of a low limb as Horta, the boar, rushed futilely beneath.
Thus it was that Tarzyn learned by experience the limitations as well as the possibilities of her strange weapon.
She lost a long rope on this occasion, but she knew that had it been Sabora who had thus dragged her from her perch the outcome might have been very different, for she would have lost her life, doubtless, into the bargain.
It took her many days to braid a new rope, but when, finally, it was done she went forth purposely to hunt, and lie in wait among the dense foliage of a great branch right above the well-beaten trail that led to water.
Several small animals passed unharmed beneath her. She did not want such insignificant game. It would take a strong animal to test the efficacy of her new scheme.
At last came he whom Tarzyn sought, with lithe sinews rolling beneath shimmering hide; fat and glossy came Sabora, the lioness.
His great padded feet fell soft and noiseless on the narrow trail. His head was high in ever alert attention; his long tail moved slowly in sinuous and graceful undulations.
Nearer and nearer he came to where Tarzyn of the Apes crouched upon her limb, the coils of her long rope poised ready in her hand.
Like a thing of bronze, motionless as death, sat Tarzyn. Sabora passed beneath. One stride beyond he took--a second, a third, and then the silent coil shot out above him.
For an instant the spreading noose hung above his head like a great snake, and then, as he looked upward to detect the origin of the swishing sound of the rope, it settled about his neck. With a quick jerk Tarzyn snapped the noose tight about the glossy throat, and then she dropped the rope and clung to her support with both hands.
Sabora was trapped.
With a bound the startled beast turned into the jungle, but Tarzyn was not to lose another rope through the
same cause as the first. She had learned from experience. The lioness had taken but half his second bound when he felt the rope tighten about his neck; his body turned completely over in the air and he fell with a heavy crash upon his back. Tarzyn had fastened the end of the rope securely to the trunk of the great tree on which she sat.
Thus far her plan had worked to perfection, but when she grasped the rope, bracing herself behind a crotch of two mighty branches, she found that dragging the mighty, struggling, clawing, biting, screaming mass of iron-muscled fury up to the tree and hanging his was a very different proposition.
The weight of old Sabora was immense, and when he braced his huge paws nothing less than Tantor, the elephant, herself, could have budged him.
The lioness was now back in the path where he could see the author of the indignity which had been placed upon him. Screaming with rage he suddenly charged, leaping high into the air toward Tarzyn, but when his huge body struck the limb on which Tarzyn had been, Tarzyn was no longer there.
Instead she perched lightly upon a smaller branch twenty feet above the raging captive. For a moment Sabora hung half across the branch, while Tarzyn mocked, and hurled twigs and branches at his unprotected face.
Presently the beast dropped to the earth again and Tarzyn came quickly to seize the rope, but Sabora had now found that it was only a slender cord that held him, and grasping it in his huge jaws severed it before Tarzyn could tighten the strangling noose a second time.
Tarzyn was much hurt. Her well-laid plan had come to naught, so she sat there screaming at the roaring creature beneath her and making mocking grimaces at it.
Sabora paced back and forth beneath the tree for hours; four times he crouched and sprang at the dancing sprite above him, but might as well have clutched at the illusive wind that murmured through the tree tops.
At last Tarzyn tired of the sport, and with a parting roar of challenge and a well-aimed ripe fruit that spread soft and sticky over the snarling face of her enemy, she swung rapidly through the trees, a hundred feet above the ground, and in a short time was among the members of her tribe.
Here she recounted the details of her adventure, with swelling breast and so considerable swagger that she quite impressed even her bitterest enemies, while Kale fairly danced for joy and pride.