That afternoon the beast had struck again, this time seizing a child in its jaws and padding away, white-muzzled, into the brush. The child had been taken not more than twenty yards from Hamilton. Its back had been broken in the first bite. Its eyes open it had dangled in the jaws, lost in shock. It would not live more than a few moments. Hamilton had screamed and tried to flee. Ugly Girl, jerked about by the leash, had held her, not letting her run. Hamilton, wildly, sank to her knees, and held Ugly Girl. They clung together. The women began to weep and cry out. One woman, the mother, tried to run into the brush after the animal but Spear followed her and, striking her again and again, tried to beat her unconscious. To Hamilton’s amazement he, with his strength, could not do so, but, at last, dazed, and in shock, the woman sunk to the ground and Spear carried her back to the old woman and to the heavy-breasted woman. Another child, too, ran to her and she took it in her arms, holding it closely, weeping, rocking back and forth, trying to sing to it.
That night many fires bad been set about the group and the women, Ugly Girl and Hamilton, too, and the children, were put in the center of the group. The men crouched about the outside of. the circle, where they might reach brands from the fire.
Wolves circled the group late, in the darkness, but they were merely curious.
The beast did not return. Somewhere, gorged, it slept. It might not wish to feed for another two or three days. It might wish to feed again by tomorrow nightfall. The men did not know its hunger.
The next morning, the tenth after Hamilton’s arrival in the Men’s camp, in a suitable place, the pit was dug. It was some sixteen feet deep, some five feet wide, some ten feet long. While the women dug and carried away dirt, the men constructed the runway. It was done with naturalness, with branches and sticks and thorn brush. It was widest at the point at which the beast would find it most convenient to enter, narrowest before the pit. It would be difficult to approach, except from one direction. Spear and Stone, in the bottom of the pit, when it was ready, at roughly six-inch intervals, set many sharpened stakes. The intervals were narrow for the beast, though large, was lithe, sinuous. If it were not impaled it would have little difficulty climbing from the pit. Furthermore, if it survived, it would be doubly dangerous, for it would now be wary of its approach and its footing. It would have profited, unfortunately for the Men, from a lesson that would not need to be repeated, a lesson which the men, in effect, had the opportunity to administer only once. When the stakes had been placed, Spear and Stone, on ropes, scrambled from the pit. Then the light network of branches was placed over the pit, and covered with other branches, and grass and broad leaves.
Behind the pit, leading to it, a path, approximately a foot wide, had been left in the thorn brush.
Brenda Hamilton wondered with what the pit would be baited.
She felt the band of Stone on her arm.
“No!” she cried.
She saw Spear held Ugly Girl, who was whimpering, her simple, vacant eyes filled with terror.
The rawhide thong which linked the two slaves by the throat was removed.
For an instant Hamilton was elated. They would use Ugly Girl, not her!
But Spear gestured that she, too, should edge between the narrow walls of thorn brush leading to the back of the pit.
“No!” she cried.
She fell to her knees.
“Use her! Not me!” cried Hamilton. “I’m human! I’m like you! Use her! Not me! Not me!”
But Stone, rawhide strips in his teeth, pulled her up by the arm and, painfully, thrust her through the narrow opening in the brush.
At the back edge of the pit Brenda Hamilton and Ugly Girl were forced to kneel. There they were tied back to back, their arms about one another, the wrists of each, behind them, tied about the belly of the other. Then their ankles were tied together, right ankle to left, left to right. They knelt then at the back edge of the pit; they could not rise to their feet.
Through the opening in the brush Hamilton saw the women. Several of them were smiling in particular the darkhaired girl, and the shorter, blond girl. She saw, too, her hunter. He was looking at her, impassively. She moaned. She struggled in the bonds perfectly secured. Then she saw, thorn, bush by thorn bush, the narrow opening, from the edge of the pit backwards, being filled with brush, walling them in. There was a ledge about a yard wide between the wall of thorn brush and the edge of the pit. It was here that the bait would wait, kneeling.
“Come back!” cried Hamilton. “Come back!”
But the Men had gone.
The eyes of the animal, ovoid, gleaming, came a foot closer.
Brenda Hamilton threw her head back and screamed, struggling in the rawhide thongs.
It was some ten yards away.
It paused, testing the wind, lifting its head. Then it entered, back low, head down, between the walls of brush at the open end of the funnel.
Ugly Girl was, head turned to one side, watching it.
The beast, low, dark, tail moving back and forth, was suspicious.
Now Brenda Hamilton was too terrified even to scream. It seemed she could not move her body. Her world seemed limited by the dark walls of brush, the shape, the gleaming eyes.
Then the beast, low, tail switching, ears back, crept a foot closer, then stopped.
Then Ugly Girl began to whimper, but it was not a fear whimper, it was a tiny noise.
Brenda Hamilton did not know the noise but it was the rooting noise of the small-tusked bush pig.
The beast, an old one, may not have caught such a swift, erratically running, delicately fleshed animal in more than a year.
The leap of the beast begins with a short run, but the leap is timed, always, to fall just short of the game, and it is on the bound, following the leap, when earth is again struck, and the great coiled springs of the back legs unleash themselves at point-blank range, that the game is seized. Just as the bullet has its greatest speed and power at muzzle velocity, so, too, the strike of the beast is most terrible at the instant that it has just left the earth. Accordingly, it strikes the prey, when possible, on the upbound. It takes its run, leaps, hits the earth a yard before the prey, and then, with its full ferocity and strength, on the upbound, strikes it, biting and tearing. The weight of the beast was some six hundred pounds, its length was some ten feet. Its strike, if made immediately from the ground, could knock a water buffalo, rolling, from its feet. It could break the back of a small horse laterally, snapping the spine. The pit the Men had dug was ten feet in length. It was thus almost certain that the termination of the approach leap, the striking of the earth immediately prior to the killing bound, would be at the pit’s edge.
Ugly Girl continued to make the small noises of the bush pig.
Then, suddenly, she stopped. To Hamilton’s amazement then, after an instant’s silence, Ugly Girl uttered a tiny, inhuman squeal of fear. It was the warning signal of the bush pig. It is a genetically linked terror signal which also, genetically, releases the fear and flight response in other pigs.
In the old brain of the beast this was a sound it well remembered.
It preceded momentarily the almost instantaneous, terrified scattering of the pigs.
Suddenly, without an instant’s hesitation, the dark, low shape, swift and terrible, sprang up, bounding forward. At the edge of the pit it sprang into the air.
Hamilton and Ugly Girl threw themselves back against the brush.