Later, one by one, those dogs came back, dead-beat most of them, with tongues lolling and sides pumping.  Some limped, and some turned away every few yards feverishly to lick a wound.  All were blood-stained, but not a drop of it—­not one drop—­belonged to friend ratel.  He, that superb warrior, was at that moment trotting along, quite unconcernedly, through the bush about a quarter of a mile away.  There was blood upon him, too—­not his, the dogs’—­and no other mark; and though he was pretty sore and sick from internal bruising, his skin, his wonderful loose skin, was whole, and unpierced by a single fang.  He had, however, the decency to go home and fling himself into a stupor-like sleep, just to prove that he was a real, live beast of this earth, and not merely a phantom from other worlds.

The next afternoon was closing in dull and cloudy, and there were signs of a dark and bad night to come—­just the sort of day wild hunters come out early in.  This was why the grunt sounded then that heralded the appearance of our ratel above-ground, and he himself appeared, emerging at his very own slow trot from his hole.  For a moment he paused, looking round, with his funny, “earless,” flat head in the air, as if he expected, or listened for, the honey-guide; but the honeyguide was half a mile away, leading some natives—­who, by the way, were endeavoring to copy the crooning, whistling replies of a ratel—­to honey.

No honey-guide?  Then he must go and search for himself.  And he did, returning, in fifty minutes, for his wife, who, now much recovered—­as only a ratel can recover from the very jaws of death—­followed him with her young to the hole he had torn in a rotten tree-trunk where the bees were nesting.

They had proceeded perhaps three hundred yards, when, turning a bush carelessly, as no other creature would dare to do, the ratel fell almost on to the back of the bull-gnu.

There is no need to be surprised that they should meet.  The wild is not an aimless mix-up in that way.  Each creature has its beat, temporarily or permanently, nor seeks to deviate.  You may look for the same herd of antelope, feeding near the same place, about the same hour each day; the same lion stumping the same beat, as regular as a policeman, most nights; the same hyena uttering horrible nothings within hearing of the same hills, any time after the setting of each sun, just as surely as the same cock-robin asks you for crumbs, the same blackbird awakens you with inimitable fluting, and the same black cat seeks for both in the same vicinity each dusk.

The surprise was in what followed.  Perhaps the bull-gnu kicked our ratel badly as he lurched to his feet, jerked from half-sleep into violent collision with he knew not what.  Perhaps the ratel had a memory.  Perhaps the presence of his family weighed with him.  Whatever the cause, the result was decided enough.  He reared and hit deep, and fixed home a very living vise, where he bit.