Nahara, a fairly respectable cattle-killer before, had become in a single night one of the worst terrors of India.  Of course she was still a coward, but she had learned, by virtue of a chance meeting with a postman on a trail after a week of heart-devouring starvation, two or three extremely portentous lessons.  One of them was that not even the little deer, drinking beside the Manipur, died half so easily as these tall, forked forms of which she had previously been so afraid.  She found out also that they could neither run swiftly nor walk silently, and they could be approached easily even by a tiger that cracked a twig with every step.  It simplified the problem of living immensely; and just as any other feline would have done, she took the line of least resistance.  If there had been plenty of carrion in the jungle, Nahara might never have hunted men.  But the kites and the jackals looked after the carrion; and they were much swifter and keener-eyed than a lame tiger.

She knew enough not to confine herself to one village; and it is rather hard to explain how any lower creature, that obviously cannot reason, could have possessed this knowledge.  Perhaps it was because she had learned that a determined hunt, with many beaters and men on elephants, invariably followed her killings.  It was always well to travel just as far as possible from the scene.  She found out also that, just as a doe is easier felled than a horned buck, certain of this new kind of game were more easily taken than the others.  Sometimes children played at the door of their huts, and sometimes old men were afflicted with such maladies that they could not flee at all.  All these things Nahara learned; and in learning them she caused a certain civil office of the British Empire to put an exceedingly large price on her head.

Gradually the fact dawned on her that unlike the deer and the buffalo, this new game was more easily hunted in the daylight—­particularly in that tired-out, careless twilight hour when the herders and the plantation hands came in from their work.  At night the village folk kept in their huts, and such wood-cutters and gipsies as slept without wakened every hour to tend their fires.  Nahara was deathly afraid of fire.  Night after night she would creep round and round a gipsy camp, her eyes like two pale blue moons in the darkness, and would never dare attack.

And because she was taking her living in a manner forbidden by the laws of the jungle, the glory and beauty of her youth quickly departed from her.  There are no prisons for those that break the jungle laws, no courts and no appointed officers, but because these are laws that go down to the roots of life, punishment is always swift and inevitable.  “Thou shall not kill men,” is the first law of the wild creatures; and everyone knows that any animal or breed of animals that breaks this law has sooner or later been hunted down and slain—­just like any other murderer.  The mange came upon her, and she lost flesh, and certain of her teeth began to come out.  She was no longer the beautiful female of her species, to be sung to by the weaver-birds as she passed beneath.  She was a hag and a vampire, hatred of whom lay deep in every human heart in her hunting range.