Adventure Magazine Cover, December 10, 1922 — page 159: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

F. St. ei Author of “A Beast of No Account,” “‘Mighty Motherhood,” etc HE boughs of the camel thorn crackled, and there was a smell of cattle, as a ponderous and dripping black buffalo _ bull thrust his way up from the river. A brilliant flash of lightning revealed his angry red eyes and the enormous ribbed bosses of his wide-sweeping horns. There was a sound in his path as of another beast moving a little to one side. A green parrot screamed and fluttered his wings in a marula-cherry tree hard by, and the bull, pausing, lowered his wet nostrils to the warm earth, snorting. Then it was that the bull saw in his path, head to the ground, green eyes smoldering under scowling brows, a female caracal, pencil-eared, tufted and lean—the tawny red lynx of Africa. Other shadowy shapes came and went behind her in the semi-dark, and the great bull in his isolated strength saw that they were her three fat kittens at play. A dun cloud with a dust-storm beneath it roared away to the northward, and vivid lightnings splashed the copper sky. The bull-pawed before the couched cara- cal, not wishful to hurt her young, and from the semi-darkness among the foliage of a giant fig-tree two hundred yards away there leaped a monstrous martial hawk-eagle, full five feet ten inches in wing-span, his buffish- white breast under his brown mantle shin- ing in the restless, flickering flashes of light. A hoarse snort broke from the buffalo bull as, swift as an arrow, the mighty bird, the most dreaded winged shape in all Africa, landed with a rush just behind the caracal and in an instant, with a couple of sidelong hops, was upon one of the fat, jolly little caracal kittens. A thin cry pierced the roaring and clatter of the wind among the trees, and the feline mother beast recoiled upon herself with the disconcerting quickness of a snake. There was a tawny-red streak drawn through the air very quickly as she leaped to the rescue. A colossal flapping of wings followed, beating up a little cloud of dust, and the big bird, dancing like a great bubble, had somehow transferred himself from the kitten—now kicking on its side—to the mother’s back. For an instant only the hawk-eagle stayed there, gripping with knife-like talons, threshing his vast pinions in her eyes, beat- ing with his heoked beak at her skull. Then, as she cast herself upon her back and be- came a clawing terror the eagle had shifted himself in a flash again to the kitten. The caracal was up and at him before one could wink, with the courage of motherhood and the instantaneousness of a cat; but the bird had thrown himself sidewise on the ground even as she landed, and, striking at her with his dagger-talons cat fashion, too, laid her*foreleg bare to the bone. The caracal spun and spun with the pain —— and the shock in a perfect explosion of snarls, and in a breath the martial hawk- eagle was gradually rising, the squirming caracal kitten clutched tight in his claws. 153 (E(0) Gomichooks