Zebra or deer or man, what mattered
it so that it was warm flesh, red with the hot juices of life?
Even Dango, the hyena, eater of offal, would, at the moment, have
seemed a tidbit to Numa.
The great lion knew the habits and frailties of man, though he never
before had hunted man for food. He knew the despised Gomangani as
the slowest, the most stupid, and the most defenseless of creatures.
No woodcraft, no cunning, no stealth was necessary in the hunting
of man, nor had Numa any stomach for either delay or silence.
His rage had become an almost equally consuming passion with
his hunger, so that now, as his delicate nostrils apprised him of
the recent passage of man, he lowered his head and rumbled forth
a thunderous roar, and at a swift walk, careless of the noise he
made, set forth upon the trail of his intended quarry.
Majestic and terrible, regally careless of his surroundings, the
king of beasts strode down the beaten trail. The natural caution
that is inherent to all creatures of the wild had deserted him.
What had he, lord of the jungle, to fear and, with only man to hunt,
what need of caution? And so he did not see or scent what a more
wary Numa might readily have discovered until, with the cracking of
twigs and a tumbling of earth, he was precipitated into a cunningly
devised pit that the wily Wamabos had excavated for just this
purpose in the center of the game trail.
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