He—­that lonely one—­was going to drink, and he may have been doing it early because he had only his two eyes and ears, and his one nose, to warn him of the dozen or two forms of death that awaited him at the drinking-place, instead of the eyes and ears and noses of all the herd.

The gnu saw neither honey-bird nor badger till he was within a yard of them.  Then he stopped as instantly still as if he had been electrocuted.

The ratel, who had himself to feed, and a wounded wife and two young whom he would lead to that honey-feast anon, looked calmly over his shoulder at the form of the antelope towering above him.  There was no sign of fear in his straight stare at the shaggy, ferocious-looking horned head.  He had no business with it, and would thank it to mind its own affairs.  And the honey-bird didn’t care much, either, she having no young to feed, because, cuckoo-like, she left other birds—­woodpeckers, for choice—­to see to that.

Wherefore, for as long as a man would take to select a cigarette with care and light it, there was dead silence and stillness, broken only by the distant, deep “Hoo-hoo, hoo! hoo-hoo, hoo!” of a party of ground hornbills.

Then that devil of meddlesome curiosity which is the curse of the wildebeests fell upon that gnu, and sanity left him.

“Kwank!” neighed he.  And again, “Kwank!”

Next instant he had spun, top-fashion, on all four feet at once, and jumped in the same manner, and was gone, whirling round them, with great shaggy head down, and in a halo of his own swishing tail, at the rate of knots.

It was nothing to be wondered at in that strange antelope that he should then sink from wild motion to absolute, fixed rigidity, broken only by the restless, horse-like swishing of the long tail, staring hard at the ratel.

Perhaps it was the bees that did it, or perhaps the ratel stood in the gnu’s very own path, or in the way of his private dusting-hole.  I know not; neither did the ratel—­nor care much, for the matter of that.  But when the gnu went off again, circling with hoarse snorts, and shying and swerving furiously and wonderfully at top speed, he sat up on his hindlegs, the better to get a view of the strange sight.  Perhaps he thought a lion was lying somewhere near that he could not see from his lowly, natural position.

Again the gnu stopped as utterly instantly as if he had run into a brick wall, pawed, stamped, snorted, and went off once more into furiously insane caperings—­a new set—­all the time circling, with the little, black-and-gray, erect figure of the surprised ratel as a pivot.

And then, in a flash, before any one had a second’s warning to grasp the truth or prepare, with head down, eyes burning in the down-dropped, shaggy head, and upcurved horn-points gleaming in the afternoon sun, he charged, hurling himself, a living, reckless, furious battering-ram, straight at the little ratel.