Jungle Tales of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs [red queen ebook .txt] 📗

light of the fires—wicked, frightful, terrifying. The warrior screamed, and as he screamed, the sinuous trunk encircled him, lifted him high above the ground, and hurled him far after the fleeing crowd.

 

Another and another Tantor wrenched from the body of the ape-man, throwing them to right and to left, where they lay either moaning or very quiet, as death came slowly or at once.

 

At a distance Mbonga rallied his warriors. His greedy eyes had noted the great ivory tusks of the bull.

The first panic of terror relieved, he urged his men forward to attack with their heavy elephant spears; but as they came, Tantor swung Tarzan to his broad head, and, wheeling, lumbered off into the jungle through the great rent he had made in the palisade.

 

Elephant hunters may be right when they aver that this animal would not have rendered such service to a man, but to Tantor, Tarzan was not a man—he was but a fellow jungle beast.

 

And so it was that Tantor, the elephant, discharged an obligation to Tarzan of the Apes, cementing even more closely the friendship that had existed between them since Tarzan as a little, brown boy rode upon Tantor’s huge back through the moonlit jungle beneath the equatorial stars.

3

The Fight for the Balu TEEKA HAD BECOME a mother. Tarzan of the Apes was intensely interested, much more so, in fact, than Taug, the father. Tarzan was very fond of Teeka. Even the cares of prospective motherhood had not entirely quenched the fires of carefree youth, and Teeka had remained a good-natured playmate even at an age when other shes of the tribe of Kerchak had assumed the sullen dignity of maturity.

She yet retained her childish delight in the primitive games of tag and hide-and-go-seek which Tarzan’s fertile man-mind had evolved.

 

To play tag through the tree tops is an exciting and inspiring pastime. Tarzan delighted in it, but the bulls of his childhood had long since abandoned such childish practices. Teeka, though, had been keen for it always until shortly before the baby came; but with the advent of her firstborn, even Teeka changed.

 

The evidence of the change surprised and hurt Tarzan immeasurably.

One morning he saw Teeka squatted upon a low branch hugging something very close to her hairy breast— a wee something which squirmed and wriggled. Tarzan approached filled with the curiosity which is common to all creatures endowed with brains which have progressed beyond the microscopic stage.

 

Teeka rolled her eyes in his direction and strained the squirming mite still closer to her. Tarzan came nearer.

Teeka drew away and bared her fangs. Tarzan was nonplussed.

In all his experiences with Teeka, never before had she bared fangs at him other than in play; but today she did not look playful. Tarzan ran his brown fingers through his thick, black hair, cocked his head upon one side, and stared. Then he edged a bit nearer, craning his neck to have a better look at the thing which Teeka cuddled.

 

Again Teeka drew back her upper lip in a warning snarl.

Tarzan reached forth a hand, cautiously, to touch the thing which Teeka held, and Teeka, with a hideous growl, turned suddenly upon him. Her teeth sank into the flesh of his forearm before the ape-man could snatch it away, and she pursued him for a short distance as he retreated incontinently through the trees; but Teeka, carrying her baby, could not overtake him.

At a safe distance Tarzan stopped and turned to regard his erstwhile play-fellow in unconcealed astonishment.

What had happened to so alter the gentle Teeka? She had so covered the thing in her arms that Tarzan had not yet been able to recognize it for what it was; but now, as she turned from the pursuit of him, he saw it. Through his pain and chagrin he smiled, for Tarzan had seen young ape mothers before. In a few days she would be less suspicious.

Still Tarzan was hurt; it was not right that Teeka, of all others, should fear him. Why, not for the world would he harm her, or her balu, which is the ape word for baby.

 

And now, above the pain of his injured arm and the hurt to his pride, rose a still stronger desire to come close and inspect the newborn son of Taug. Possibly you will wonder that Tarzan of the Apes, mighty fighter that he was, should have fled before the irritable attack of a she, or that he should hesitate to return for the satisfaction of his curiosity when with ease he might have vanquished the weakened mother of the newborn cub; but you need not wonder. Were you an ape, you would know that only a bull in the throes of madness will turn upon a female other than to gently chastise her, with the occasional exception of the individual whom we find exemplified among our own kind, and who delights in beating up his better half because she happens to be smaller and weaker than he.

 

Tarzan again came toward the young mother—warily and with his line of retreat safely open. Again Teeka growled ferociously. Tarzan expostulated.

 

“Tarzan of the Apes will not harm Teeka’s balu,” he said.

“Let me see it.”

 

“Go away!” commanded Teeka. “Go away, or I will kill you.”

 

“Let me see it,” urged Tarzan.

 

“Go away,” reiterated the she-ape. “Here comes Taug.

He will make you go away. Taug will kill you. This is Taug’s balu.”

 

A savage growl close behind him apprised Tarzan of the nearness of Taug, and the fact that the bull had heard the warnings and threats of his mate and was coming to her succor.

 

Now Taug, as well as Teeka, had been Tarzan’s play-fellow while the bull was still young enough to wish to play.

Once Tarzan had saved Taug’s life; but the memory of an ape is not overlong, nor would gratitude rise above the parental instinct. Tarzan and Taug had once measured strength, and Tarzan had been victorious.

That fact Taug could be depended upon still to remember; but even so, he might readily face another defeat for his firstborn—if he chanced to be in the proper mood.

 

From his hideous growls, which now rose in strength and volume, he seemed to be in quite the mood. Now Tarzan felt no fear of Taug, nor did the unwritten law of the jungle demand that he should flee from battle with any male, unless he cared to from purely personal reasons.

But Tarzan liked Taug. He had no grudge against him, and his man-mind told him what the mind of an ape would never have deduced— that Taug’s attitude in no sense indicated hatred. It was but the instinctive urge of the male to protect its offspring and its mate.

 

Tarzan had no desire to battle with Taug, nor did the blood of his English ancestors relish the thought of flight, yet when the bull charged, Tarzan leaped nimbly to one side, and thus encouraged, Taug wheeled and rushed again madly to the attack. Perhaps the memory of a past defeat at Tarzan’s hands goaded him. Perhaps the fact that Teeka sat there watching him aroused a desire to vanquish the ape-man before her eyes, for in the breast of every jungle male lurks a vast egotism which finds expression in the performance of deeds of derring-do before an audience of the opposite sex.

 

At the ape-man’s side swung his long grass rope—the plaything of yesterday, the weapon of today—and as Taug charged the second time, Tarzan slipped the coils over his head and deftly shook out the sliding noose as he again nimbly eluded the ungainly beast.

Before the ape could turn again, Tarzan had fled far aloft among the branches of the upper terrace.

 

Taug, now wrought to a frenzy of real rage, followed him.

Teeka peered upward at them. It was difficult to say whether she was interested. Taug could not climb as rapidly as Tarzan, so the latter reached the high levels to which the heavy ape dared not follow before the former overtook him. There he halted and looked down upon his pursuer, making faces at him and calling him such choice names as occurred to the fertile man-brain. Then, when he had worked Taug to such a pitch of foaming rage that the great bull fairly danced upon the bending limb beneath him, Tarzan’s hand shot suddenly outward, a widening noose dropped swiftly through the air, there was a quick jerk as it settled about Taug, falling to his knees, a jerk that tightened it securely about the hairy legs of the anthropoid.

 

Taug, slow of wit, realized too late the intention of his tormentor. He scrambled to escape, but the ape-man gave the rope a tremendous jerk that pulled Taug from his perch, and a moment later, growling hideously, the ape hung head downward thirty feet above the ground.

 

Tarzan secured the rope to a stout limb and descended to a point close to Taug.

 

“Taug,” he said, “you are as stupid as Buto, the rhinoceros.

Now you may hang here until you get a little sense in your thick head. You may hang here and watch while I go and talk with Teeka.”

 

Taug blustered and threatened, but Tarzan only grinned at him as he dropped lightly to the lower levels. Here he again approached Teeka only to be again greeted with bared fangs and menacing growls. He sought to placate her; he urged his friendly intentions, and craned his neck to have a look at Teeka’s balu; but the she-ape was not to be persuaded that he meant other than harm to her little one.

Her motherhood was still so new that reason was yet subservient to instinct.

 

Realizing the futility of attempting to catch and chastise Tarzan, Teeka sought to escape him.

She dropped to the ground and lumbered across the little clearing about which the apes of the tribe were disposed in rest or in the search of food, and presently Tarzan abandoned his attempts to persuade her to permit a close examination of the balu. The ape-man would have liked to handle the tiny thing. The very sight of it awakened in his breast a strange yearning. He wished to cuddle and fondle the grotesque little ape-thing. It was Teeka’s balu and Tarzan had once lavished his young affections upon Teeka.

 

But now his attention was diverted by the voice of Taug.

The threats that had filled the ape’s mouth had turned to pleas. The tightening noose was stopping the circulation of the blood in his legs—he was beginning to suffer.

Several apes sat near him highly interested in his predicament.

They made uncomplimentary remarks about him, for each of them had felt the weight of Taug’s mighty hands and the strength of his great jaws. They were enjoying revenge.

 

Teeka, seeing that Tarzan had turned back toward the trees, had halted in the center of the clearing, and there she sat hugging her balu and casting suspicious glances here and there. With the coming of the balu, Teeka’s carefree world had suddenly become peopled with innumerable enemies. She saw an implacable foe in Tarzan, always heretofore her best friend. Even poor old Mumga, half blind and almost entirely toothless, searching patiently for grubworms beneath a fallen log, represented to her a malignant spirit thirsting for the blood of little balus.

 

And while Teeka guarded suspiciously against harm, where there was no harm, she failed to note two baleful, yellow-green eyes staring fixedly at her from behind a clump of bushes at the opposite side of the clearing.

 

Hollow from hunger, Sheeta, the panther, glared greedily at the tempting meat so close at