A Wild Education

Whose Animal Characters Are As Real As Your Own Buddies HE was born one fine April night in a disused ant-bear’s hole, which had been enlarged by his mother and her “sisters of the pack” out of all resemblance to its original self, and for many weeks he knew nothing more of the world than that he lay huddled with some seven more whelps—of which one only was his brother and one his sister, the remainder belonging to his mother’s lady friends aforementioned—in a stifling atmosphere of semi-darkness, but anything but semi-smelliness. At certain intervals his mother was there nursing his brother and sister and himself—not, I think, the other whelps—and at certain intervals she went away. Usually, however, one of his mother’s lady friends was there seeing to her own whelps, and so they were not generally utterly alone. But there were times when none of the mothers was there, and there was a period of brooding, instinctive dread, utter silence, broken once or twice by happenings. Thus there was the happening of a sharp, wet muzzle—smaller than his mother’s—which poked into the hole, obscuring the moonlight, grabbed a whelp, and vanished, the whelp protesting in a high key, and the sudden rush and awful noise of worrying without, followed by a death howl that announced his mother’s return in time to slay a thieving jackal. Once, also, there was another snout that came on a dark, rainy night—not a small and sharp snout this time, but long, and hard, and tusked, which rooted up the ground all about and enlarged the entrance to get at the whelps, and the sound of battle that followed on the return of his mother, and of her friends, who heard her rallying cry at once, must have raged round the hole for ten minutes, before the enemy, who was one of a party of the fierce red bush pigs, was driven off. And once there was a third, and very terrible time, when something with yellow eyes aflame stared into the hole, and inserted a great mittened paw, unfolded suddenly deadly hooked claws, and started to fish a whelp out, but after patting about at the little creature, who crawled in a helpless, shivering heap to the extreme corner, it was nearly stung by a scorpion—who might have stung one of them if not disturbed and went away spitting, and that was, without doubt, a leopard