When I awoke, it was daylight, and I found Ajor squatting before a
fine bed of coals roasting a large piece of antelope-meat. Believe
me, the sight of the new day and the delicious odor of the cooking
meat filled me with renewed happiness and hope that had been all
but expunged by the experience of the previous night; and perhaps
the slender figure of the bright-faced girl proved also a potent
restorative. She looked up and smiled at me, showing those perfect
teeth, and dimpling with evident happiness--the most adorable
picture that I had ever seen. I recall that it was then I first
regretted that she was only a little untutored savage and so far
beneath me in the scale of evolution.

Her first act was to beckon me to follow her outside, and there
she pointed to the explanation of our rescue from the bear--a huge
saber-tooth tiger, its fine coat and its flesh torn to ribbons,
lying dead a few paces from our cave, and beside it, equally mangled,
and disemboweled, was the carcass of a huge cave-bear. To have
had one's life saved by a saber-tooth tiger, and in the twentieth
century into the bargain, was an experience that was to say the
least unique; but it had happened--I had the proof of it before my
eyes.

So enormous are the great carnivora of Caspak that they must feed
perpetually to support their giant thews, and the result is that
they will eat the meat of any other creature and will attack anything
that comes within their ken, no matter how formidable the quarry.
From later observation--I mention this as worthy the attention