JAN OF THE JUNGLE & Its Sequel, Jan in India. Otis Adelbert Kline
to desert him. Nor did he want to leave Chicma, who was leading him farther and farther away from the only human being who had unselfishly befriended him.
He stopped and shouted to the chimpanzee to wait. But the cry had scarcely left his lips when something flashed through the forest shadows striking his left side, and spinning him half around with the force of its impact.
Jan clutched at the long shaft, wet with his own blood, and broke it off, gritting his teeth that he might silently bear the pain. Then he reached behind him for that part which had gone through his flesh, and jerked it out. But the pain and loss of blood were too great. A giddiness assailed him, and he sank limply to the ground.
With a whoop of triumph, and machete flashing in his hand ready to deliver the death-blow, a savage came bounding out of the shadows.
Chapter 9. Chicma’s Attack
Sitting on a limb fully fifty feet above Jan’s head, Chicma heard his call and noticed with bewilderment his actions when the arrow struck him. But when she heard the whoop of the savage, and saw him rushing toward Jan with upraised knife, her mother instinct came to the fore. With a snarl of rage, she swung down from the limb on which she had been sitting, and timed her drop with such precision that she landed on the Indian before he could reach his intended victim.
Knocked off his feet by the impact of the hairy body of the ape, the Indian fell on his face, dropping both his machete and his longbow. For a moment he lay there, half stunned and breathless. Then Chicma sank her huge teeth into his neck. The pain brought him to his senses, and he groped for his weapons. Failing to find them; he stood up and shook himself with the ape still clinging to him like a bloodthirsty octopus.
Watching the struggle of the two as through a dim haze, Jan made several attempts to rise, but each time fell back because of the giddiness induced by his wound. It was not until he saw the Indian stoop and reach for his machete that he was able to get to his feet.
His keen weapon recovered, the savage made a slash at Chicma’s head. She dodged, and he was about to swing for her again when he saw Jan facing him, similarly armed. With lightning swiftness he struck for the youth’s neck, a blow so powerful that it would have severed his head from his body. But Jan was faster than the savage, even though giddy. Avoiding the deadly blow by a quick step backward, he leaped in before the red man could recover. Jan’s machete flashed once, and the Indian’s hand, still clutching his weapon, flew into the undergrowth. Jan’s blade flashed a second time and the savage fell to the ground with a fatal body wound, and died almost at once.
Jan gathered up the weapons of his fallen foe: a bow, a bundle of arrows, and a machete with belt and case. Then he and Chicma proceeded on through the forest. His wound was very painful, but not dangerous as the arrow had passed only through the muscles beneath his left arm without injuring any vital organs. When darkness came on, with the suddenness of the tropics, they perched themselves, supperless, in a tall tree for the night.
Rising with the sun the youth and the ape set out in search of breakfast and a drink of water. But it was not until half the day had passed that they found either. Then, suddenly emerging from the depths of the tangled jungle, they came upon both in satisfying abundance. They found themselves on the bank of a tiny stream, the water of which was clear and cold. Growing on both banks of this stream in profusion were oranges, pineapples and bananas.
Having drunk their fill of the sparkling water and satisfied their appetites with the fruit, they proceeded along the bank of the little stream. They had not gone far before Jan heard, ahead of them, a strange noise that made him uneasy. He looked quickly at Chicma to see if it had alarmed her, but she plodded along so unconcernedly that he decided it could not be anything of consequence.
The noise grew louder as they proceeded, until they came to a sheer cliff of bare rock towering more than two thousand feet above the jungle. Emerging from a hole in this rock about fifty feet above the level of the stream, was a small waterfall. Clear and limpid as crystal, it tumbled almost vertically into an oval pool.
Jan gasped with admiration at the beauty of this scene. He tried to explain his feelings to Chicma, but being tired and sleepy she only grunted and climbed a tall tree beside the pool to find a comfortable crotch for a nap. To her this was merely a place where food and drink might be had in abundance. Until the food gave out or the place became too dangerous here she would remain.
While Chicma took her nap, Jan practiced with his new weapons. While a prisoner of the hunters, he had often seen them use the bent stick with the string stretched across it. He found however, that it was far from being as easy as it looked. The bow was stiff, requiring all his strength to bend it, and the arrows seemed to strike anywhere but the place intended.
With the passing days, however, he mastered the weapon, though he had lost or broken most of his arrows in the meantime.
Chicma spent the greater part of her time dozing in the tree, only coming down for food or water, but Jan, always searching for something new, roamed away from the pool every day. For a long time he subsisted only on fruit, as did the ape, but growing within him, day by day, was the desire for meat, his favorite food.
One day he brought down a curassow with one of his arrows. Curious he cut into it with his machete. A slab of the turkey-like breast meat came away, and Jan, who had never tasted other than raw meat before his escape from Dr. Bracken, sampled it. Finding it good, he cut away and ate as much as he wanted, then took the rest back to the pool with him, hanging it in the tree to keep. But in the morning when he awoke, ravenous after his long sleep, he found it swarming with little white worms and giving forth an abominable stench. Disgusted, he hurled it far out into the jungle, and set forth after new meat.
The first animal to cross his path was an ocelot, the beautiful markings of which gave him the impression that its flesh must be delicious. Having wounded it with an arrow, he foolishly rushed to close quarters to finish it with his machete. But the fierce tiger cat, sorely wounded though it was, gave him a terrific battle, from which he did not fully recover for two weeks. And its meat, he found, was not nearly so good to eat as that of the dingy-colored curassow.
Day by day the youth learned the lessons that the jungle had to teach him. He learned to hunt with the silence and cunning of the jaguar, to travel among the branches and vines with the ease and facility of the monkeys, or to speed along the forest floor with the swiftness of the deer and the stealth of the panther.
Man, he found, was his natural enemy, and after several encounters in which he barely escaped with his life, he took to stalking the savages as he would jaguars or ocelots. Only a few escaped with their lives to tell of a red- headed jungle demon, half man, half jaguar, that shot at them from the trees and made off through the branches as easily as a monkey.
After two years he had not only learned many of the hardest lessons which the jungle has to teach, but had accumulated a small arsenal of weapons taken from the savages he had slain. There were a score of bows, more than a hundred arrows, a dozen long spears, five blow-guns with their deadly poison-tipped darts, and a miscellaneous assortment of steel and stone axes, machetes, knives, ornaments and trappings.
He had watched the birds building their nests and the natives their huts; and the idea had come to him to combine the two in the big tree in which he and Chicma slept. It proved a hard task indeed for his untutored hands, but after nearly a month of trials and tearings down, he completed a round, compact, rainproof tree—but about fifty feet above the ground, divided into two parts by a rude partition. On the floor of each “room” he made a nest of soft grass. The hut proved snug and dry, even during the heaviest of the tropical rains.
In this hut he kept his weapons, ornaments and other treasures— bits of bright stone that he had picked up, teeth, claws, and sometimes bones of animals he had slain, bright feathers and plumes from the birds he had brought down, and a few odorous, badly cured hides.
Very often he bored Chicma by repeating the human words which Borno had taught him.
All