The cat was now swimming directly toward him. Ogga raised his arm. With lightning speed, with the swiftness of a hurled bolt, the smooth missile left his hand and smashed against the skull of the smilodon. It was followed by a rain of others. They crashed upon the creature, they entered its eyes, they tore its skin, they broke its teeth, they opened its back. The water foamed with their rapid impact. The desolated beast, now reduced to suppliance, still pursued its course to the shore. During the short intervals when Ogga searched about him for those water-worn and ellipsoidal pebbles which furnished him with the most effective weapons, the creature, still strong and formidable, gained in its approach. At last its feet touched the bottom, and as if renewed in all its tenacious instincts, dripping and shrunk, its beautiful coat pressed upon its lank and muscular form, it sprang forward, its horrid mouth suffused and vomiting blood.
Ogga sprang to meet it. But he held no rounded stones. Above his head was poised a heavy boulder. As he advanced the smilodon with cowering and subtle evasion crouched; its head lay flat upon the earth, its long tail swept the ground behind it with eager oscillations. Ogga rushed on. The dazed animal did not move, the great rock fell upon its crumbling, cracking skull. The smilodon was dead.
The mastodon had reaped the reward of its nimble strategy. Relieved of its incubus it had turned again to the opposite banks, and when Ogga had despatched its foe, it stood on the plain, suffering from its wounds and wailing in whistling squeaks which sounded incongruously enough when compared with its enormous size. Its bulk was indeed unusual, and Ogga looked at the superb tusks garnishing the huge head, with envy. It was just then browsing, tearing up small herbs, seizing bushes and uprooting them, and with its trunk beating them upon its own body at the spots where its dead enemy had inflicted painful gashes.
Ogga recovered his composure. He dragged the smiloden up from the water’s edge, replaced his shawl, picked up his spear, and hurried on up the stream. About a mile beyond the lake, the river which fed it broadened out in a flat, saucer-like depression full of stones and boulders, over which it rippled and broke with musical cadences. Here Ogga readily crossed the stream, and once over hastened back, hoping to find the mastodon, which it was now his evident intention to secure. The prey was more vulnerable because of its lost eyesight, though its isolation, as Ogga well knew, would add vigor to its self-defence, and its recent experience render it less susceptible to stratagem.