death-fangs

Updated: May 22, 2025

They passed a hippopotamus feeding a sheaf at a mouthful upon long grass; they came upon three wild dogs eating an antelope and gibbering like gnomes; they beheld two striped zebras stampeding from a lion; they got into the middle of a herd of elephants but what must those giants have seemed to them, almost at ground-level? and did not know it, so silent can the mighty ones be, till they heard the unmistakable digestive rumblings; they happened on the tail of a leopard, observing a young waterbuck antelope, and retired therefrom without his suspecting them; they watched some bush-pigs rooting in a clearing, hoping they might turn up some insects worth eating; they heard a mother-lion grunting among some reeds, and were nearly run over by the stampede of zebras that followed; they chased a rat that ran into a hole in which was a snake, and it never came out again; they went up a tree after a weaver-bird's nest, but, from the way the bottle-shaped structure was hung, could not get at it; they investigated a hare's hole, and found a six-foot mamba snake, with four-minute death-fangs, in possession; they risked the thousand spikes of a thorn-bush to get at a red-necked pheasant roosting, only to find the branch he was on too slender to hold their weight; they were stalked by a wild cat, and hid in a hollow tree; and were pounced upon by a civet cat who was their big cousin and dodged him most wonderfully; and were chased by a jackal, whose nose they bit when it followed them into a hollow log.

F. St. Mars - The Way of the Wild