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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.

For the better part of a week he roamed the jungle with his new friends, partly

because of a desire for companionship and partially through a well-laid plan to

impress himself indelibly upon their memories, which at best are none too long;

for Tarzan from past experience knew that it might serve him in good stead to

have a tribe of these powerful and terrible beasts at his call.

When he was convinced that he had succeeded to some extent in fixing his

identity upon them he decided to again take up his exploration. To this end he

set out toward the north early one day, and, keeping parallel with the shore,

travelled rapidly until almost nightfall.

When the sun rose the next morning he saw that it lay almost directly to his right

as he stood upon the beach instead of straight out across the water as heretofore,

and so he reasoned that the shore line had trended toward the west. All the

second day he continued his rapid course, and when Tarzan of the Apes sought

speed, he passed through the middle terrace of the forest with the rapidity of a

squirrel.

That night the sun set straight out across the water opposite the land, and then

the ape-man guessed at last the truth that he had been suspecting.

The Beasts of Tarzan