After about an hour, she came, quite suddenly, upon the body of the deltagar.
It lay sprawled on its side in a welter of gore, but Jugrid was no longer with it. Indeed, the jungle monarch was nowhere to be seen. The cat lay in a pool of its own blood and dabbling her fingers in the crimson fluid, Ylana found that it was tepid to the touch and already beginning to congeal where it lay the thinnest. By this sign she guessed that the brute had been dead for a little less than an hour.
Wiping her hands clean on the grasses, the girl rose easily to her feet and looked around her, thoughtfully, debating the course of action she should follow. Should she retrace her steps to meet Tomar? Or should she circle the’place where the beast had fallen, hoping to find her father? Obviously, Jugrid had fallen from the rampaging monster’s back, or had jumped clear, something before the deltagar had gasped its last breath. That he had left the path marked by the blood-trail, suggested to her anxious mind that he was himself injured, and had crawled into the thick brush for such protection or concealment as it might afford him from the lesser predators and scavengers of the jungle, who were doubtless even now following the blood so that they might sate their hungers on the body of the slain deltagar.
Reaching a decision shortly, the savage girl turned, surveyed the nearer trees, and selected one to her liking. Then she climbed it easily and swiftly to its middle tier of branches. From this height she could see more of the jungle paths and trails and clearings within her immediate vicinity. Nowhere did she spy the boy Tomar or Jugrid, her father.
She ran out along a broad branch which was level with the ground, and climbed therefrom into the next tree. From thence she found a tangle of thick vines by which she swung into the foliage of an adjoining tree, having tested them for strength. Moving through the middle terraces of the jungle in this manner, she could cover far more territory much more swiftly than on foot, and she could also enjoy a relative immunity from the possibilities of attack by the jungle scavengers, which were already gathering on the trail of the dead cat-monster.
Some two hours later, about to swing into the next tree, she stopped short, and froze motionless. Was it only her imagination, or had her keen ears indeed detected the approach of armed men?
There it was again, that crackling of dry leaves and snapping of twigs, as of many men forcing a path through the underbrush. And now she could faintly make out the muttering of voices conversing in low tones. The men, for there seemed to be several of them, were somewhere up ahead of her, not very far away, and moving at a good pace through the aisles of the forest, coming directly toward the tree in which she crouched.
She crouched lower, seeking a place of concealment behind a screen of thick leaves. As her sharp eyes searched the jungle path below, she clenched in one small, capable fist her only weapon, the bow she had taken up from before the mouth of the cave.
She placed an arrow nocked and ready, and crouched waiting.
If it was a search party from the Cave Country that she heard coming nearer, it was not her intention to permit herself to be taken alive. Like a beast, once trapped, who somehow has managed to escape from its captors, Ylana fiercely determined to give her life rather than suffer the indignity of falling a second time into the hunter’s snare.
She held her breath, eyes keen, as the first man stepped into view from the bushes.
JUGRID clung between the shoulders of the beast as the great cat sprang through the bushes into the thick darkness of the jungle. Twigs slashed at his arms and shoulders, leaves whipped across his eyes, blinding him, as the cat went crashing through the foliage. It landed on its haunches, and again he drew back his arm and struck, sinking his knife deep within its panting breast.
Hissing with pain and fury, maddened by the unaccustomed burden of bearing a rider, the cat went loping off down the nearest of the jungle aisles. It was panting heavily now, and foam dripped from its gaping jaws. Erelong, Jugrid saw that blood was mixed with this foam, and knew thereby that at least one of his dagger blows had bitten deep into the great cat’s lung.
Now it tried to scrape him from its back by brushing up against the trunks of trees. His bronze hide lacerated and bruised by the rough bark, the jungle man nevertheless continued to cling to his precarious perch atop the slavering brute. This he deemed the wiser course, for he knew that if he sprang from his place astride the savage deltagar, the great cat would turn upon him like a flash with its cruel fangs and claws. He was wise in the ways of cats, was Jugrid. So he clung to the back of the beast, overcoming its every attempt to dislodge him.
Then, a little while later, the deltagar, now wobbling drunkenly upon its feet and bleeding profusely from several of its wounds, blundered into a net of vines which dangled like a dense curtain from the branches of one enormous tree. As luck would have it, one of these lianas looped itself around Jugrid’s throat as the cat pushed its way through. The jungle man was forced to release his hold on the beast, or be garroted by the vine as by a strangler’s noose.
He swung free in the tangle of vines, clutching to them. As the beast realized the hated man-thing no longer clung between its shoulders, it whipped about as Jugrid had predicted it would do, filled with a furious frenzy to savage him with its great claws. One sidewise stroke of those fearsome hooked claws could disembowel him, Jugrid knew.
So he did the only logical thing: he climbed up the vines to the branch above, and sat upon it, hoping that the cat in its present condition would be unable to climb the tree after him.
It was. After staggering around and around the tree in a circle a time or two, the deltagar went lurching off through the bushes and vanished from view. And Jugrid began to relax, and to examine himself for wounds.
As far as he knew, no one had ever before slew one of the dreaded cat-monsters before, armed only with a knife. The beast had measured twenty-two feet from nose-tip to tail.
It was not a feat he cared to attempt a second time.
HIS wounds proved to be less serious than he might have expected. He was bruised and lame, aching and sore in every muscle, but nothing seemed to, be broken. His back and shoulders were marked with many small cuts and lacerations suffered when he had ridden the deltagar through the bushes, but these were mere scratches and would soon heal. His most dangerous injury was a long, jagged wound in the right thigh, where the deltagar had gored him with the tip of one of the two curling horns that grew from its brow.
Finding a small pool in a clearing, Jugrid cleansed the wound as best he could, smeared the raw flesh with the sticky ooze of a medicinal plant that grew amid the rocks above the pool, and bound the lips of the long cut together tightly with a strip of fur torn from the end of his garment.
It was rude enough medicine; but it would have to do.
He began to search for Ylana and Tomar. It was broad daylight by now, and the more dangerous of the jungle predators had crept one by one to their lairs, so he could stride along boldly without fear of any enemy other than man. That enemy, however, he was wary of and went cautiously about the search, making as little noise as possible, for he knew that by now a search party from the caves would have entered the jungle to track them. Xangan would never permit them to escape with their lives, if he could help it.