Often the hunting was poor, and sometimes she went many days in a stretch without making a single kill.  And in all beasts, high and low, this is the last step to the worst degeneracy of all.  It instils a curious, terrible kind of blood-lust—­to kill, not once, but as many times as possible in the same hunt; to be content not with one death, but to slay and slay until the whole herd is destroyed.  It is the instinct that makes a little weasel kill all the chickens in a coop, when one was all it could possibly carry away, and that will cause a wolf to leap from sheep to sheep in a fold until every one is dead.  Nahara didn’t get a chance to kill every day; so when the opportunity did come, like a certain pitiable kind of human hunter who comes from afar to hunt small game, she killed as many times as she could in quick succession.  And the British Empire raised the price on her head.

One afternoon found her within a half mile of Warwick’s bungalow, and for five days she had gone without food.  One would not have thought of her as a royal tigress, the queen of the felines and one of the most beautiful of all living things.  And since she was still tawny and graceful, it would be hard to understand why she no longer gave the impression of beauty.  It was simply gone, as a flame goes, and her queenliness was wholly departed, too.  In some vague way she had become a poisonous, a ghastly thing, to be named with such outcasts as the jackals or hyenas.

Excessive hunger, in most of the flesh-eating animals, is really a first cousin to madness.  It brings bad dreams and visions, and, worst of all, it induces an insubordination to all the forest laws of man and beast.  A well-fed wolf-pack will run in stark panic from a human being; but even the wisest of mountaineers do not care to meet the same gray band in the starving times of winter.  Starvation brings recklessness, a desperate frenzied courage that is likely to upset all of one’s preconceived notions as to the behaviour of animals.  It also brings, so that all men may be aware of its presence, a peculiar lurid glow to the balls of the eyes.

In fact, the two pale circles of fire were the most noticeable characteristics of the long, tawny cat that crept through the bamboos.  Except for them, she would hardly have been discernible at all.  The yellow grass made a perfect background, her black stripes looked like the streaks of shadow between the stalks of bamboo, and for one that is lame she crept with an astounding silence.  One couldn’t have believed that such a great creature could lie so close to the earth and be so utterly invisible in the low thickets.

A little peninsula of dwarf bamboos and tall jungle grass extended out into the pasture before the village and Nahara crept out clear to its point.  She didn’t seem to be moving.  One couldn’t catch the stir and draw of muscles.  And yet she slowly glided to the end; then began her wait.  Her head sunk low, her body grew tense, her tail whipped softly back and forth, with as easy a motion as the swaying of a serpent.  The light flamed and died and flamed and died again in her pale eyes.