Then things happened, but that which immediately followed was not a fight; it was not even a spar.  The ratel never moved, although he was moved—­astoundingly.  The gnu bull did the moving, and produced the most amazing bit of violent activity one could dream of.  It was quite indescribable.  A buck-jumping mustang of the most hustling kind would have been as a gentle lamb to it.  The ground all about looked as if herds had jumped upon it—­bushes, grass, flowers, and all were trampled down flat.  But it did not do what it was designed to do—­it did not break the ratel’s hold.  Bruised, assuredly, shaken so that he ought to have fallen to hits, dizzy and blind, he did not let go, and in the position he held he could not be hammered off.  He just glued where he was, saying nothing at all, till the end—­till that grand old bull sank and was still, exhausted, by loss of blood, and with one great hopeless sigh his life departed from him, and he died.

The ratel did not leave go for some little time.  He seemed to suspect that the gnu bull was bluffing, or perhaps he was himself half-stunned.

It was the sudden and peculiar growling hiss from his wife—­sounding all a-magnified in that wilderness silence after the battle—­that made him look up, at her first, and then almost instantly at something else.  His wife was backing slowly towards the “bush,” every hair on her body sticking straight out at right angles, her eyes fixed strangely upon that something else.  His young had taken to cover, not, it seemed, too readily, but by their parent’s order.

A lion was standing, still as a carved beast, at the far end of that little clearing—­he was the something else.  Goodness and his kingly self alone knew how long he had been there, that great, heavy-jowled, deep-bellied, haughty-eyed brute.  He may have been present from the first, or the middle, or only at that moment.  Being a lion, he was just there, suddenly, without any visible effect of having got there, a presence of dread, created apparently out of thin air at the moment, in that spot, and with less sound than a blown leaf.

This power of being, without seeming to come, of evolving from nowhere, is one of the lion’s most highly perfected tricks; for King Leo believes in all the ritual of his craft, and is great on effects, even down to the minor details.  Power, grim and terrible, he has, without shadow of doubt; but he never forgets to impress that fact—­and more—­upon the world, and every action is carefully studied to advertise, not himself, but his “frightfulness.”  A very fine play-actor is the king of all the beasts.

But the ratel did not move.  He had met his Napoleon, and was not—­so far as the watcher could see—­afraid.

Motionless, scowling, with head down, and shrewd, proud eyes smoldering, the lion stood there like an apparition of doom.  He was, I fully suspect, letting the effect sink in deliberately.  He knew his game.  Also, he had a reason.  Surely a great poker-player was lost in the lion.