The Black Lion

Tarzan the Untamed

by Edgar R. Burroughs

THE BLACK LION, TARZAN THE UNTAMED by Edgar R. Burroughs
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Numa, the lion, was hungry. He had come out of the
desert country to the east into a land of plenty but
though he was young and strong, the wary grass-eaters
had managed to elude his mighty talons each time he had
thought to make a kill.

Numa, the lion, was hungry and very savage. For two days
he had not eaten and now he hunted in the ugliest of humors.
No more did Numa roar forth a rumbling challenge to the
world but rather he moved silent and grim, stepping softly
that no cracking twig might betray his presence to the keen-
eared quarry he sought.

Fresh was the spoor of Bara, the deer, that Numa picked
up in the well-beaten game trail he was following. No hour
had passed since Bara had come this way; the time could be
measured in minutes and so the great lion redoubled the
cautiousness of his advance as he crept stealthily in pursuit of
his quarry.

A light wind was moving through the jungle aisles, and it
wafted down now to the nostrils of the eager carnivore the
strong scent spoor of the deer, exciting his already avid appe-
tite to a point where it became a gnawing pain. Yet Numa
did not permit himself to be carried away by his desires into
any premature charge such as had recently lost him the juicy
meat of Pacco, the zebra. Increasing his gait but slightly he
followed the tortuous windings of the trail until suddenly just
before him, where the trail wound about the bole of a huge
tree, he saw a young buck moving slowly ahead of him.

Numa judged the distance with his keen eyes, glowing now
like two terrible spots of yellow fire in his wrinkled, snarling
face. He could do it -- this time he was sure. One terrific
roar that would paralyze the poor creature ahead of him into
momentary inaction, and a simultaneous charge of lightning-
like rapidity and Numa, the lion, would feed. The sinuous
tail, undulating slowly at its tufted extremity, whipped sud-
denly erect. It was the signal for the charge and the vocal
organs were shaped for the thunderous roar when, as light-
ning out of a clear sky, Sheeta, the panther, leaped suddenly
into the trail between Numa and the deer.

A blundering charge made Sheeta, for with the first crash of
his spotted body through the foliage verging the trail, Bara
gave a single startled backward glance and was gone.

The roar that was intended to paralyze the deer broke
horribly from the deep throat of the great cat -- an angry roar
of rage against the meddling Sheeta who had robbed him of
his kill, and the charge that was intended for Bara was
launched against the panther; but here too Numa was doomed
to disappointment, for with the first notes of his fearsome
roar Sheeta, considering well the better part of valor, leaped
into a near-by tree.

A half-hour later it was a thoroughly furious Numa who
came unexpectedly upon the scent of man. Heretofore the
lord of the jungle had disdained the unpalatable flesh of the
despised man-thing. Such meat was only for the old, the
toothless, and the decrepit who no longer could make their
kills among the fleet-footed grass-eaters. Bara, the deer, Horta,
the boar, and, best and wariest, Pacco, the zebra, were for the
young, the strong, and the agile, but Numa was hungry --
hungrier than he ever had been in the five short years of
his life.

What if he was a young, powerful, cunning, and ferocious
beast? In the face of hunger, the great leveler, he was as the
old, the toothless, and the decrepit. His belly cried aloud in
anguish and his jowls slavered for flesh. Zebra or deer or
man, what mattered it so that it was warm flesh, red with the
hot juices of life? Even Dango, the hyena, eater of offal,
would, at the moment, have seemed a tidbit to Numa.

The great lion knew the habits and frailties of man, though
he never before had hunted man for food. He knew the
despised Gomangani as the slowest, the most stupid, and the
most defenseless of creatures. No woodcraft, no cunning, no
stealth was necessary in the hunting of man, nor had Numa
any stomach for either delay or silence.

His rage had become an almost equally consuming passion
with his hunger, so that now, as his delicate nostrils apprised
him of the recent passage of man, he lowered his head and
rumbled forth a thunderous roar, and at a swift walk, careless
of the noise he made, set forth upon the trail of his intended
quarry.

Majestic and terrible, regally careless of his surroundings,
the king of beasts strode down the beaten trail. The natural
caution that is inherent to all creatures of the wild had de-
serted him. What had he, lord of the jungle, to fear and, with
only man to hunt, what need of caution? And so he did not
see or scent what a more wary Numa might readily have
discovered until, with the cracking of twigs and a tumbling
of earth, he was precipitated into a cunningly devised pit that
the wily Wamabos had excavated for just this purpose in the
center of the game trail.

Tarzan of the Apes stood in the center of the clearing watch-
ing the plane shrinking to diminutive toylike proportions in
the eastern sky. He had breathed a sigh of relief as he saw it
rise safely with the British flier and Fraulein Bertha Kircher.
For weeks he had felt the hampering responsibility of their
welfare in this savage wilderness where their utter helplessness
would have rendered them easy prey for the savage carnivores
or the cruel Wamabos. Tarzan of the Apes loved unfettered
freedom, and now that these two were safely off his hands, he
felt that he could continue upon his journey toward the
west coast and the long-untenanted cabin of his dead father.

And yet, as he stood there watching the tiny speck in the
east, another sigh heaved his broad chest, nor was it a sigh
of relief, but rather a sensation which Tarzan had never
expected to feel again and which he now disliked to admit
even to himself. It could not be possible that he, the jungle
bred, who had renounced forever the society of man to return
to his beloved beasts of the wilds, could be feeling anything
akin to regret at the departure of these two, or any slightest
loneliness now that they were gone. Lieutenant Harold Percy
Smith-Oldwick Tarzan had liked, but the woman whom he
had known as a German spy he had hated, though he never
had found it in his heart to slay her as he had sworn to slay
all Huns. He had attributed this weakness to the fact that
she was a woman, although he had been rather troubled by
the apparent inconsistency of his hatred for her and his re-
peated protection of her when danger threatened.

With an irritable toss of his head he wheeled suddenly
toward the west as though by turning his back upon the fast
disappearing plane he might expunge thoughts of its passen-
gers from his memory. At the edge of the clearing he paused;
a giant tree loomed directly ahead of him and, as though
actuated by sudden and irresistible impulse, he leaped into
the branches and swung himself with apelike agility to the
topmost limbs that would sustain his weight. There, balanc-
ing lightly upon a swaying bough, he sought in the direction
of the eastern horizon for the tiny speck that would be the
British plane bearing away from him the last of his own race
and kind that he expected ever again to see.

At last his keen eyes picked up the ship flying at a con-
siderable altitude far in the east. For a few seconds he
watched it speeding evenly eastward, when, to his horror, he
saw the speck dive suddenly downward. The fall seemed
interminable to the watcher and he realized how great must
have been the altitude of the plane before the drop com-
menced. Just before it disappeared from sight its downward
momentum appeared to abate suddenly, but it was still moving
rapidly at a steep angle when it finally disappeared from view
behind the far hills.

For half a minute the ape-man stood noting distant land-
marks that he judged might be in the vicinity of the fallen
plane, for no sooner had he realized that these people were
again in trouble than his inherent sense of duty to his own
kind impelled him once more to forego his plans and seek to
aid them.

The ape-man feared from what he judged of the location
of the machine that it had fallen among the almost impassable
gorges of the arid country just beyond the fertile basin that
was bounded by the hills to the east of him. He had crossed
that parched and desolate country of the dead himself and
he knew from his own experience and the narrow escape he
had had from succumbing to its relentless cruelty no lesser
man could hope to win his way to safety from any considerable
distance within its borders. Vividly he recalled the bleached
bones of the long-dead warrior in the bottom of the pre-
cipitous gorge that had all but proved a trap for him as well.
He saw the helmet of hammered brass and the corroded
breastplate of steel and the long straight sword in its scabbard
and the ancient harquebus -- mute testimonials to the mighty
physique and the warlike spirit of him who had somehow
won, thus illy caparisoned and pitifully armed, to the center
of savage, ancient Africa; and he saw the slender English
youth and the slight figure of the girl cast into the same fate-
ful trap from which this giant of old had been unable to escape
-- cast there wounded and broken perhaps, if not killed.

His judgment told him that the latter possibility was prob-
ably the fact, and yet there was a chance that they might
have landed without fatal injuries, and so upon this slim
chance he started out upon what he knew would be an ardu-
ous journey, fraught with many hardships and unspeakable
peril, that he might attempt to save them if they still lived.

He had covered a mile perhaps when his quick ears caught
the sound of rapid movement along the game trail ahead of
him. The sound, increasing in volume, proclaimed the fact
that whatever caused it was moving in his direction and
moving rapidly. Nor was it long before his trained senses
convinced him that the footfalls were those of Bara, the deer,
in rapid flight. Inextricably confused in Tarzan's character
were the attributes of man and of beasts. Long experience
had taught him that he fights best or travels fastest who is
best nourished, and so, with few exceptions, Tarzan could
delay his most urgent business to take advantage of an op-
portunity to kill and feed. This perhaps was the predominant
beast trait in him. The transformation from an English gentle-
man, impelled by the most humanitarian motives, to that of
a wild beast crouching in the concealment of a dense bush
ready to spring upon its approaching prey, was instantaneous.

And so, when Bara came, escaping the clutches of Numa
and Sheeta, his terror and his haste precluded the possibility
of his sensing that other equally formidable foe lying in am-
bush for him. Abreast of the ape-man came the deer; a light-
brown body shot from the concealing verdure of the bush,
strong arms encircled the sleek neck of the young buck and
powerful teeth fastened themselves in the soft flesh. Together
the two rolled over in the trail and a moment later the ape-
man rose, and, with one foot upon the carcass of his kill,
raised his voice in the victory cry of the bull ape.

Like an answering challenge came suddenly to the ears of
the ape-man the thunderous roar of a lion, a hideous angry
roar in which Tarzan thought that he discerned a note of
surprise and terror. In the breast of the wild things of the
jungle, as in the breasts of their more enlightened brothers
and sisters of the human race, the characteristic of curiosity
is well developed. Nor was Tarzan far from innocent of it.
The peculiar note in the roar of his hereditary enemy aroused
a desire to investigate, and so, throwing the carcass of Bara,
the deer, across his shoulder, the ape-man took to the lower
terraces of the forest and moved quickly in the direction
from which the sound had come, which was in line with the
trail he had set out upon.

As the distance lessened, the sounds increased in volume,
which indicated that he was approaching a very angry lion
and presently, where a jungle giant overspread the broad game
trail that countless thousands of hoofed and padded feet had
worn and trampled into a deep furrow during perhaps count-
less ages, he saw beneath him the lion pit of the Wamabos and
in it, leaping futilely for freedom such a lion as even Tarzan
of the Apes never before had beheld. A mighty beast it was
that glared up at the ape-man -- large, powerful and young,
with a huge black mane and a coat so much darker than any
Tarzan ever had seen that in the depths of the pit it looked
almost black -- a black lion!

Tarzan who had been upon the point of taunting and re-
viling his captive foe was suddenly turned to open admira-
tion for the beauty of the splendid beast. What a creature!
How by comparison the ordinary forest lion was dwarfed into
insignificance! Here indeed was one worthy to be called king
of beasts. With his first sight of the great cat the ape-man
knew that he had heard no note of terror in that initial roar;
surprise doubtless, but the vocal chords of that mighty throat
never had reacted to fear.

With growing admiration came a feeling of quick pity for the
hapless situation of the great brute rendered futile and help-
less by the wiles of the Gomangani. Enemy though the beast
was, he was less an enemy to the ape-man than those blacks
who had trapped him, for though Tarzan of the Apes claimed
many fast and loyal friends among certain tribes of African
natives, there were others of degraded character and bestial
habits that he looked upon with utter loathing, and of such
were the human flesh-eaters of Numabo the chief. For a mo-
ment Numa, the lion, glared ferociously at the naked man-
thing upon the tree limb above him. Steadily those yellow-
green eyes bored into the clear eyes of the ape-man, and then
the sensitive nostrils caught the scent of the fresh blood of
Bara and the eyes moved to the carcass lying across the brown
shoulder, and there came from the cavernous depths of the
savage throat a low whine.

Tarzan of the Apes smiled. As unmistakably as though a
human voice had spoken, the lion had said to him "I am hun-
gry, even more than hungry. I am starving," and the ape-
man looked down upon the lion beneath him and smiled, a
slow quizzical smile, and then he shifted the carcass from his
shoulder to the branch before him and, drawing the long
blade that had been his father's, deftly cut off a hind quarter
and, wiping the bloody blade upon Bara's smooth coat, he
returned it to its scabbard. Numa, with watering jaws, looked
up at the tempting meat and whined again and the ape-man
smiled down upon him his slow smile and, raising the hind
quarter in his strong brown hands buried his teeth in the ten-
der, juicy flesh.

For the third time Numa, the lion, uttered that low pleading
whine and then, with a rueful and disgusted shake of his
head, Tarzan of the Apes raised the balance of the carcass of
Bara, the deer, and hurled it to the famished beast below.

"Old woman," muttered the ape-man. "Tarzan has become
a weak old woman. Presently he would shed tears because he
has killed Bara, the deer. He cannot see Numa, his enemy,
go hungry, because Tarzan's heart is turning to water by con-
tact with the soft, weak creatures of civilization." But yet he
smiled, nor was he sorry that he had given way to the dic-
tates of a kindly impulse.

As Tarzan tore the flesh from that portion of the kill he had
retained for himself his eyes were taking in each detail of the
scene below. He saw the avidity with which Numa devoured
the carcass; he noted with growing admiration the finer points
of the beast, and also the cunning construction of the trap.
The ordinary lion pit with which Tarzan was familiar had
stakes imbedded in the bottom, upon whose sharpened points
the hapless lion would be impaled, but this pit was not so
made. Here the short stakes were set at intervals of about a
foot around the walls near the top, their sharpened points in-
clining downward so that the lion had fallen unhurt into the
trap but could not leap out because each time he essayed it his
head came in contact with the sharp end of a stake above him.

Evidently, then, the purpose of the Wamabos was to capture
a lion alive. As this tribe had no contact whatsoever with
white men in so far as Tarzan knew, their motive was doubt-
less due to a desire to torture the beast to death that they
might enjoy to the utmost his dying agonies.

Having fed the lion, it presently occurred to Tarzan that his
act would be futile were he to leave the beast to the mercies
of the blacks, and then too it occurred to him that he could
derive more pleasure through causing the blacks discomfiture
than by leaving Numa to his fate. But how was he to release
him? By removing two stakes there would be left plenty of
room for the lion to leap from the pit, which was not of any
great depth. However, what assurance had Tarzan that Numa
would not leap out instantly the way to freedom was open,
and before the ape-man could gain the safety of the trees?
Regardless of the fact that Tarzan felt no such fear of the lion
as you and I might experience under like circumstances, he yet
was imbued with the sense of caution that is necessary to all
creatures of the wild if they are to survive. Should necessity
require, Tarzan could face Numa in battle, although he was
not so egotistical as to think that he could best a full-grown
lion in mortal combat other than through accident or the utili-
zation of the cunning of his superior man-mind. To lay him-
self liable to death futilely, he would have considered as repre-
hensible as to have shunned danger in time of necessity; but
when Tarzan elected to do a thing he usually found the means
to accomplish it.

He had now fully determined to liberate Numa, and having
so determined, he would accomplish it even though it entailed
considerable personal risk. He knew that the lion would be
occupied with his feeding for some time, but he also knew
that while feeding he would be doubly resentful of any fancied
interference. Therefore Tarzan must work with caution.

Coming to the ground at the side of the pit, he examined the
stakes and as he did so was rather surprised to note that Numa
gave no evidence of anger at his approach. Once he turned
a searching gaze upon the ape-man for a moment and then
returned to the flesh of Bara. Tarzan felt of the stakes and
tested them with his weight. He pulled upon them with the
muscles of his strong arms, presently discovering that by work-
ing them back and forth he could loosen them: and then a
new plan was suggested to him so that he fell to work excavat-
ing with his knife at a point above where one of the stakes
was imbedded. The loam was soft and easily removed, and
it was not long until Tarzan had exposed that part of one of
the stakes which was imbedded in the wall of the pit to almost
its entire length, leaving only enough imbedded to prevent the
stake from falling into the excavation. Then he turned his at-
tention to an adjoining stake and soon had it similarly ex-
posed, after which he threw the noose of his grass rope over
the two and swung quickly to the branch of the tree above.
Here he gathered in the slack of the rope and, bracing him-
self against the bole of the tree, pulled steadily upward. Slowly
the stakes rose from the trench in which they were imbedded
and with them rose Numa's suspicion and growling.

Was this some new encroachment upon his rights and his
liberties? He was puzzled and, like all lions, being short of
temper, he was irritated. He had not minded it when the Tar-
mangani squatted upon the verge of the pit and looked down
upon him, for had not this Tarmangani fed him? But now
something else was afoot and the suspicion of the wild beast
was aroused. As he watched, however, Numa saw the stakes
rise slowly to an erect position, tumble against each other and
then fall backwards out of his sight upon the surface of the
ground above. Instantly the lion grasped the possibilities of
the situation, and, too, perhaps he sensed the fact that the
man-thing had deliberately opened a way for his escape. Seiz-
ing the remains of Bara in his great jaws, Numa, the lion,
leaped agilely from the pit of the Wamabos and Tarzan of the
Apes melted into the jungles to the east.

On the surface of the ground or through the swaying
branches of the trees the spoor of man or beast was an open
book to the ape-man, but even his acute senses were baffled
by the spoorless trail of the airship. Of what good were eyes,
or ears, or the sense of smell in following a thing whose path
had lain through the shifting air thousands of feet above the
tree tops? Only upon his sense of direction could Tarzan de-
pend in his search for the fallen plane. He could not even
judge accurately as to the distance it might lie from him, and
he knew that from the moment that it disappeared beyond the
hills it might have traveled a considerable distance at right
angles to its original course before it crashed to earth. If its
occupants were killed or badly injured the ape-man might
search futilely in their immediate vicinity for some time be-
fore finding them.

There was but one thing to do and that was to travel to a
point as close as possible to where he judged the plane had
landed, and then to follow in ever-widening circles until he
picked up their scent spoor. And this he did.

Before he left the valley of plenty he made several kills and
carried the choicest cuts of meat with him, leaving all the dead
weight of bones behind. The dense vegetation of the jungle
terminated at the foot of the western slope, growing less and
less abundant as he neared the summit beyond which was a
sparse growth of sickly scrub and sunburned grasses, with here
and there a gnarled and hardy tree that had withstood the
vicissitudes of an almost waterless existence.

From the summit of the hills Tarzan's keen eyes searched
the arid landscape before him. In the distance he discerned
the ragged tortuous lines that marked the winding course of the
hideous gorges which scored the broad plain at intervals -- the
terrible gorges that had so nearly claimed his life in punish-
ment for his temerity in attempting to invade the sanctity of
their ancient solitude.

For two days Tarzan sought futilely for some clew to the
whereabouts of the machine or its occupants. He cached por-
tions of his kills at different points, building cairns of rock
to
mark their locations. He crossed the first deep gorge and cir-
cled far beyond it. Occasionally he stopped and called aloud,
listening for some response but only silence rewarded him --
a sinister silence that his cries only accentuated.

Late in the evening of the second day he came to the well-
remembered gorge in which lay the clean-picked bones of the
ancient adventurer, and here, for the first time, Ska, the vul-
ture, picked up his trail. "Not this time, Ska," cried the ape-
man in a taunting voice, "for now indeed is Tarzan Tarzan.
Before, you stalked the grim skeleton of a Tarmangani and
even then you lost. Waste not your time upon Tarzan of the
Apes in the full of his strength. But still Ska, the vulture,
circled
and soared above him, and the ape-man, notwithstanding his
boasts, felt a shudder of apprehension. Through his brain
ran a persistent and doleful chant to which he involuntarily
set two words, repeated over and over again in horrible mo-
notony: "Ska knows! Ska knows!" until, shaking himself in
anger, he picked up a rock and hurled it at the grim scav-
enger.

Lowering himself over the precipitous side of the gorge Tar-
zan half clambered and half slid to the sandy floor beneath.
He had come upon the rift at almost the exact spot at which
he had clambered from it weeks before, and there he saw, just
as he had left it, just, doubtless, as it had lain for centuries,
the mighty skeleton and its mighty armor.

As he stood looking down upon this grim reminder that an-
other man of might had succumbed to the cruel powers of the
desert, he was brought to startled attention by the report of a
firearm, the sound of which came from the depths of the gorge
to the south of him, and reverberated along the steep walls of
the narrow rift.