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Now, our black-backed jackal was not a young beast, and he was up to most wild-folks' games which was as well. He approached the corpse with caution, and as he poised for the last spring the corpse was at his throat. Black-back, however, was not there, but his tail was, and the side-striped one got a mouthful of the bushy black tip of that.
A side-striped jackal, who kidded himself she had not seen him lying in wait to find out, when she went hunting, what she hid in that den, suddenly bolted with a yap; and a hyena, represented by two burning eyes, who appeared, by some magic of his own, to guess she was wounded, jumped up and made way for something that approached.
For one instant he kept there, hung, wrenching ghastlily, then sprung clear, and, backing slowly, limping, growling horribly, flat-eared and beaten, the side-striped jackal began his slow, backward retreat into the heart of the nearly impenetrable thorns, where the winner was not such a fool as to follow him. And the black-backed jackal never saw him again.
The hare was lying on her back, weakly kicking out the last of her life with her hindlegs, and a stocky, short-nosed, evil, leering, side-striped jackal was standing over her. He had done the deed. And our black-back knew that side-stripe, had met him before. The two families lived only a few hundred yards apart, and it was Mrs.
Many scores of fish were thrown overboard, some to turn up and float for a few minutes before they recovered their breath, as Tom called it, but for the most part they dived down at once, uninjured by what they had gone through, while their largeness fortunate friends were tossed into the basket gilded side-striped perch, with now and then a fat-looking, small-eyed, small-scaled tench, brightly brazen at the sides, and looking as if cast in a soft kind of bronze.
Living or dead, he faded out of our jackal's life forever. And when he turned, his wife was standing at the entrance to the "earth" alone. The other, the female side-striped jackal's form, could be dimly seen dissolving into the night on three legs. "Yaaa-ya-ya-ya!" howled Mesomelas. The sea-birds were very happy along that terrible breaker-hewn coast.
The snarl that she whipped out fetched the jackal round upon himself as if stung. Then he saw, and understood, and rage flamed into his intelligent, dog's eyes. It was the side-striped jackals, Mr. and Mrs., plotting to loot his "kill." It was the black-back who attacked. Perhaps he knew that one secret of defense is swift and unexpected offense.
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