rifle; but by the luck of the gods he might achieve it. He wanted to
find Singhai's knife and hold it compressed in his palm.

It wasn't that he had any vain hopes of repelling the tiger's attack
with a single knife-blade that would be practically impossible for his
mutilated hand to hold. Nahara had five or so knife-blades in every
paw and a whole set of them in her mouth. She could stand on four legs
and fight, and Warwick could not lift himself on one elbow and yet
wield the blade. But there were other things to be done with blades,
even held loosely in the palm, at a time like this.

He knew rather too much of the way of tigers. They do not always kill
swiftly. It is the tiger way to tease, long moments, with half-bared
talons; to let the prey crawl away a few feet for the rapture of
leaping at it again; to fondle with an exquisite cruelty for moments
that seem endless to its prey. A knife, on the other hand, kills
quickly. Warwick much preferred the latter death.

And even as he called, again and again, he began to feel about in the
grass with his lacerated hand for the hilt of the knife. Nahara was
steadily stealing toward him through the shadows.

The great tigress was at the height of her hunting madness. The
earlier adventure of the evening when she had missed her stroke, the
stir and tumult of the beaters in the wood, her many days of hunger,
had all combined to intensify her passion. And finally there had come
the knowledge, in subtle ways, that two of her own kind of game were
lying wounded and helpless beside the ford.

But even the royal tiger never forgets some small measure of its