The dark over his head burst like a mine, and feathers and noise enveloped him whirling.  That represented the female genet coming down, fixed to the throat of a hapless fowl.  She sucked the blood, and flew at another.  Ordinarily she would have removed that one and found it enough; but men who have been “broke,” when they got suddenly rich, seem to go temporarily mad with the lust of spending, and so it was with her; only, her madness was the lust of killing.

She killed, leaping and wrenching at the poor, screaming birds’ throats, blinded to the world with excitement, drunk with blood.  That is an awful intoxication, and makes even men, let alone wild, carnivorous beasts, do unmentionable things.  Also, the smell of blood was too much for the male genet, and he presently rushed, with flying tail, into the crimson orgy too.

They were some time at this craziness; and when they had finished, they and the fowls that were still alive could only lie and pant together among the contorted slain, the blood—­you would never believe how a cockerel will bleed—­and the carmine-tinted feathers.  You might not believe me if I told you how many fowls they had killed, but it was a most disgraceful number, and quite inexcusable.

And then, even as they lay there, dead-beat, they started suddenly and together, for, almost like a blow, the fact dawned upon them that it was day.  Night had stolen away, and dawn discovered them at the killing; and goodness alone knows how long they had been at it—­ten minutes or hours.  Anyway, here it was, and they leapt to their feet together.

As they hurried out they had to pass the place where the carcass of the owl had been!  It was gone—­mysteriously sauntered as a corpse into nowhere.  Owls are uncanny creatures at any time, but moving about when dead is not usually a recognized habit of theirs.  The genets sniffed anxiously, and ran the trail to the hole under the roof, since it happened to be on their way.  Through the hole it went, and into the air—­literally into the air.  In other words, that owl had simply “bluffed” death when she realized that she was near death.  The bluff had come off; and at a later, and what she judged a proper, time, she had just, and of course silently, flown off by the way she had come; and—­as I live!—­a fowl had gone with her.

One minute later an unsuspected martial hawk-eagle precipitated himself out of a big, hoary, old fig-tree, a hundred yards away from the fowlhouse, on to one of the genets’ disappearing tails.  This is the world’s most general view of a genet, by the way—­its disappearing tail; and it is given to very few to see the beautiful, dark-blotched, creamy, little, lithe, long beast that the ringed tail belongs to.  Of course, the eagle was too late.

Two minutes later, a late leopard, returning to his lair after a blank night’s hunt, saw the tail of the female genet, who was leading, disappear into a hollow tree.  The male had not time to get in as the leopard sprang, so he shot up another tree close by, disturbing a mamba cobra, whose color was green, and whose bite was death, as it lay asleep among the twined vines.  The legless terror fell to the ground and streaked for its hole, and the following leopard only just managed to bound out of its way as it did so.