United States or Bolivia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
At midnight they left us, moving cautiously away into the black blank space toward the southwest, and making a wide detour from their real line of direction. The Indians were on the alert, and a man must walk as noiselessly as a panther to slip between their guards. The scouts wore blankets to resemble the Indians more closely in the shadows of the night.
He was a strange man, great in size, dressed in buckskin, very brown of countenance and with long hair, tied as the western Indians would wear it. He was something of a genial boaster, was this man, and he was known up and down the Texas border as the Ring Tailed Panther although his right name was Martin Palmer.
But between the pure-blooded of each kind there is real antipathy, far deeper than the antipathies of race, politics, or religion an antipathy that not circumstance, love, goodwill, or necessity will ever quite get rid of. Sooner shall the panther agree with the bull than that other one with the man of facts. There is no bridging the gorge that divides these worlds.
His slow steps conducted him far along this open course. Soon after he had disappeared, around a curve in the distance there came the panther, following stealthily upon his crimsoned trail. The crafty beast was waiting till the bleeding and the hunger should do its work, and the object of its inexorable pursuit should have no more heart left for resistance. This was late in the afternoon.
A tiger, a panther, a buffalo or a hog rouses your utmost energies for its destruction you even risk your lives in its pursuit. How much higher game is a Thug's!" That must really be the secret of the rise and development of Thuggee. The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done these are traits of the human race at large.
Next morning we sent the two men for the deer skins, and a further supply of venison; but when they came back they brought the skin of the panther as well. They had found the animal close to the body of the deer, by the scent of which he must have been attracted; but he must have died of his wounds before he had begun to eat the flesh.
This heterogeneous multitude, scattered in tribes and groups of tribes over two thousand miles of wilderness, was like a vast menagerie of wild animals; and the lynx bristled at the wolf, and the panther grinned fury at the bear, in spite of all his efforts to form them into a happy family under his paternal rule.
I have no doubt that if the little animal had been betwixt me and the mother, she would have snatched it and run away with it. As it was, I felt very, very queer; take to my heels I could not, and the panther would not leave her cub behind; on the contrary, she continued making a circle round me, I turning within her, and with my rifle pointed towards her.
It was the baying of a hound! It was far off, at the foot of the mountain. Time enough to fly; time enough to put miles between her and the hound, before he should come upon her fresh trail; time enough to escape away through the dense forest, and hide in the recesses of Panther Gorge; yes, time enough. But there was the fawn. The cry of the hound was repeated, more distinct this time.
And, if that were the case, of course it would not be the den of a panther or other carnivorous animal at all; for monkeys, pigs, and antelopes would not frequent a spring in a cave which one or more of their most deadly enemies had made their lair. And yet what about that abominable stench which issued from the cave; how was that to be accounted for?
Word Of The Day