Then, presently, they went to feeding again as though nothing had
happened, and with them fed John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.

He noticed, however, that Akut kept always close to him, and was
often looking at him with a strange wonder in his little bloodshot
eyes, and once he did a thing that Tarzan during all his long
years among the apes had never before seen an ape do--he found a
particularly tender morsel and handed it to Tarzan.

As the tribe hunted, the glistening body of the ape-man mingled
with the brown, shaggy hides of his companions. Oftentimes they
brushed together in passing, but the apes had already taken his
presence for granted, so that he was as much one of them as Akut
himself.

If he came too close to a she with a young baby, the former would
bare her great fighting fangs and growl ominously, and occasionally
a truculent young bull would snarl a warning if Tarzan approached
while the former was eating. But in those things the treatment
was no different from that which they accorded any other member of
the tribe.

Tarzan on his part felt very much at home with these fierce, hairy
progenitors of primitive man. He skipped nimbly out of reach of
each threatening female--for such is the way of apes, if they be
not in one of their occasional fits of bestial rage--and he growled
back at the truculent young bulls, baring his canine teeth even
as they. Thus easily he fell back into the way of his early life,
nor did it seem that he had ever tasted association with creatures
of his own kind.