Adventure Magazine Cover — page 106: what you’re looking at

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

Union Is Strength + double strength. Therefore she had never left the herd in all her life since one awful early day when, straying devious in a mocca-mocca thicket, she had been set upon by a jaguar. She carried the scars of that introduction to this day. Just as she had never deserted the herd, the herd had never deserted her. It was a hundred strong, that herd, but in spite of its only tiny tusks it was, by reason of its united confidence and ferocity, a terrible proposition for any beast to face. Thus the little peccary had enjoyed impregna- bility against her foes. Now, however, tonight she was compelled to leave the herd, for she had little ones to look after. The little peccary slipped away unseen, unnoted. The ocelot, turning his head slowly from staring upward in the direction of a howling monkey and wondering whether it would be worth the trouble to climb up the hun- dred and a half feet or so of branchless tree-trunk to where he was hiding and howl- ing among the interlaced boughs of the top, saw suddenly, as it were, the passing of a smoke-like wraith—the little peccary. And the ocelot was still. Dappled silver in the dappled silver ‘ moonlight, he was as nearly invisible as it is possible for a plainly visible thing to be— and still trick the eye. Anyway the smoke-wraith thing, if it were a thing and alive at all, did not see him. And the ocelot did keep still; few stones could have moved less. For three minutes nothing happened— and they seemed like three hours. Then one became aware that something had moved. The dappled silver moon- light was dappled silver moonlight only; the ocelot was no longer part of it, but had gone. | Then a pair of eyes appeared—the ocelot’s eyes, pale, circular disks of green film, floating among the mighty iron-hard trunks in the darkness. And those eyes were alight; there was a smoldering fire at the back of them. FROM the human point of view the ocelot’s nose may have been very wonderful, but not from Na- ture’s. It did not lead him to be absolutely sure what the smoke-wraith thing was, so that for all his stealth and care when he approached the sickly clump of stems of 105 the ground-plant into which the wraith had vanished, he was none too sure whether he was stalking a reality or a fantom. But he was hungry. Behind a forest giant, however, a mora- tree, slain by the gorgeous-blossomed “‘bush ropes,” whose python-like coils the tree had partially broken down in its fall, formed a mound smothered in bush-like ~ mammoth mistletoe, and here at last the ocelot knew the truth. The peccary had squeezed in here. . The stems, by the taint upon them, said so. It was like having one’s name pasted up outside one’s bed- room door; but the name was very faintly written—anyway for the*ocelot, who had to sniff about for some time before he felt anything like certain. Where the small wild pig had squeezed in it is to be presumed that the ocelot could follow. ‘The question was—would he? And after one prolonged stare he decided that he would not. Peccaries’ tusks are only very small— mere miniatures in the tusk line; but pec- caries’ courage is also very large, and cats, even big, hungry ocelots, do not believe in risking a hurt in obtaining a meal, if it can be avoided. The ocelot therefore faded out as a figure fades on the screen at a picture show and was no more seen till his eyes—only his eyes and nothing else—appeared upon the top of the mighty mora-trunk, floating down it. From time to time those balls of slow green fire paused to peer down through the host of orchids and epiphytes, which smothered the fallen monarch of the forest. Then suddenly the eyes became still, with a deadly fixed stare; a haze, almost as of smoke, passed across them momentari- ly, and the ocelot dropped off the trunk like a stone. What followed was hectic. The big cat had fallen upon the peccary. Cat-like, the ocelot had commandeered unto himself the initial advantage of com- plete surprize. There was no warning, nothing; just that lithe, armed beast dropping deadly out of the stillness and the dark. Once launched, however, the actions of the ocelot were as terribly lightning-like and furious as they had been cautious and slow before. He seemed to have gone mad. He tore, with all great claws unsheathed Eomichbooks:co