Adventure Magazine Cover, December 10, 1922 — page 161: what you’re looking at

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

Rough Justice the regular roost of the eagle, but it made no difference. A momba snake, whose bite is death with- in ten minutes, got in the way, and feline hiss answered reptile hiss till the legless, lidless horror quitted station. An owl snapped his fish-hook beak in the climber’s face, and was all but pulled off his perch with hooked claws before he could finish. A tree iguana lizard fell to the ground with a flop, and offered no obstruc- tion. And all the while, except for the faint scratching of talons upon rough bark, the old male caracal climbed, grimly and in dead silence. Nothing, it seemed, made any difference. mm AT LAST, just in that thickest Maa, part of the foliage slightly below the R223 summit, he stopped suddenly and turned to stone. He did not move after that for seven minutes, and in the silence one could dis- tinctly hear from the pitch-black depths of the foliage confronting him the sound of some creature snoring steadily. It was decidedly uncanny, especially at that height in the tropic night. Then the caracal rushed, and—half hell seemed to have broken loose in the well-like blackness under the foliage on the treetop. A scream echoed through the night. Wings, tremendous and devastating, beat and beat, sending leaves and twigs flying in all directions. Claws scraped and scraped with the sound of knives hacking up wood. Then out of the foliage fell a shadow, enormous and flapping. It hit a branch 155 with a muffled thop! turned over bodily, and continued its way, striking bough after bough, till at last it slid clear and fell to earth with a final thupl It was nothing much. Only the martial hawk-eagle, dead as dead love, his spine bitten through at the back and base of the skull by the male caracal’s murderous fangs. The caracal himself only barely avoided following the dead bird down by releasing the latter—who weighed over ten pounds— and half-leaping, half-falling, under the dead weight, to a branch far below. Half an hour later the female caracal, happening to glance out quickly from her den at some commotion of the night, was somewhat startled momentarily to behold her bitterest of all bitter enemies, the mar- tial hawk-eagle, lying all stark and motion- less in the pale moonlight upon the bare, trodden earth. And sometime during the night, it is to be presumed, she crawled forth and dragged the corpse in. There could be no doubt that her mate had left the carcass there, for in spite of what has been thought by some there exists a strange, mysterious sympathy between many individual feline fathers and their mates, which is, however, so secret and stealthy that it has apparently been quite overlooked. The point is that but for that timely feast it is doubtful if the wounded caracal mother would have lived, and without her her kit- tens must have perished also. Anyway she was in no state to hunt for some days after her battle, and must have starved but for the swift, vengeful claws of her mate. comichook (Eo)