Adventure Magazine Cover — page 95: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ie nd 7 B ’ ay met ee Ae: in years, and years, and years, never given. Instead was empty, watery silence, and in the silence could be distinctly heard the rush of waves thrown up by some monster beast swim- ming rapidly along the shore of the lake. It approached at speed, that animal, and becamea submarine-like dark mass deeper than the sur- rounding dark on the face of the waters. Swiftly it passed, crossing the mouth of the river, and onward into the night. It had not seen Ol’ Makaw simply because OI’ Makaw had been standing motionless, rigid as a polished - carven monument; his huge square chin resting, as if in thought, upon the ground; his little piggy eyeswatching, watching, watching as they had never watched before. In short, he knew he was beholding another hippopotamus, and a female one. And when you remember that never in all the years that Ol’ Makaw had lived in the river and upon the waters of Lake Zim had he seen, heard, scented, or beheld the foot- prints even of another of his own kind, you will realize what the vision he had just been vouch- safed, meant to him. Whereafter came to the disproportionately - small, but plenty sharp, ears of Ol’ Makaw gurglings, splashings, grunts, snorts, and the squpds as if the god the natives supposed to iin the lake was taking his bath. But OD Makaw knew better than mere savageman. It was the sportings of a herd of hippopotamuses really he could hear—for never were such so- ciable, playful giants as hippopotamuses. AndOl Makawe? Oh, he sank, and with con- siderably less noise than any stone. He sank, and the newly arrived herd of hippopotamuses— come from far up some river ’way across on the other side of the lake probably—came out upon the very sand-spit he had but just vacated, showing like polished stone monster carvings in the moonlight —smooth.as glass. OV Makaw sank, I repeat; and the moonlight, an hour later, gave away his colossal presence nearly a mile inland, gathering the five bushels of vegetation necessary to feed the furnace of his eleven-foot stomach—they tell me it was eleven feet, but I did not measure it; I only know it was disproportionate even for so large a beast—to keep up the life fires, and the fat with which he, in common with so many sub- marine animals, was covered. not good to be awake. They say that more lives pass out in that hour than in any other of the twenty-four. It is the coldest, most cruel hour, a lugubrious, long hour. On that night also it was the darkest hour after the moon. Oddly enough, ’tis said it is the hour of birth as well as death. In that hour it was, then, that Ol? Makaw, drifting down’ stream, silent as a cloud drifts across the face of the moon, and with only his oF ae Now there is an hour before dawn when Ol’ Makaw eyes showing, those little but intelligent pro- — truding eyes that saw so much, came unto the hippo herd, fresh from a night’s feeding, strung out along the sand-spit. Practically speaking they were mere huge smudges in the dark—the cow with her calf, the cow expecting a calf, the old fat cow fast asleep, the old lean cow (lean for a hippo) very wide awake, the middle-aged cows, three in number, lying half awash, the young bull, the very young bull, and the great - big adult bull, which latter was flirting with the “beautiful” young cow hippo in a far corner. He was indeed a very big bull, or a very fat one anyway, bigger even than Ol’ Makaw, but younger and with smaller tusks—a bull in his prime, fit to fight for his life, or love, against the world. . 55 Ol’ Makaw came up out of the depths and climbed out upon the sand-spit all dripping, but otherwise. with startling silence for so gigantic a beast. He did it as if he had a peculiar right there; which indeed, if you come to think of it, he had. And in silence, too, he confronted the pair. ae » The cow hippopotamus at the other end of the sand-spit snorted not less loudly than a freight locomotive on an up-grade. . The young bull, and the very young bull, grunted pig grunts a thousand times magnified. The young cow said nothing, and—the big bull bellowed a roaring bellow that rolled all across the still lake and up into the dim hills and back again. Then the young cow retired waterward and thoughtfully, as if she had not seen either bull, and the two leviathans charged at one another with ‘cavernous mouths agape. With such jaws, with such tusks, no fight could hope to be a light matter. The teeth of both clashed as they met, like the shutting of steel-barred gates. : Ol’ Makaw, somewhat the lighter of the two— or the less heavy, shall we say?—gave back a little in the push tactics that followed. But Ol Makaw, the lighter, cleared himself with more agility—agility in a hippo sounds absurd, but it was quite marvelous really—than the big fat bull. Nay, more; he was in again with a short, sharp charge, and, playing the pigs’ trump- card, got under—not over, as many beasts try to—his foe’s guard. For this he took a scrunch on the shoulder that would have chopped any ordinary beast in two. Like whales, the larger seals, and others, however, Ol’ Makaw’s cover- ing of fat under skin inches thick could take wounds calmly that would kill anything else. He took, therefore, and ripping upward, the terrible, slashing upstroke of all the pigs, cut into the big bull’s chest deep and true. The latter acknowledged receipt with a roar that was heard at the native village miles away; half blundered sidewise, and from that moment was never given a chance to turn and slash back. OV Makaw remorselessly kept right under CORMICLOO® S (C@