Page:Jungle Tales of Tarzan.djvu/114

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102
Jungle Tales of Tarzan

searching for food in the clearing and the surrounding trees about him.

No perplexing thoughts of the future burdened their minds, and only occasionally, dimly arose recollections of the near past They were stimulated to a species of brutal content by the delectable business of filling their bellies. Afterward they would sleep—it was their life, and they enjoyed it as we enjoy ours, you and I—as Tarzan enjoyed his. Possibly they enjoyed theirs more than we enjoy ours, for who shall say that the beasts of the jungle do not better fulfill the purposes for which they are created than does man with his many excursions into strange fields and his contraventions of the laws of nature? And what gives greater content and greater happiness than the fulfilling of a destiny?

As Tarzan worked, Gazan, Teeka's little balu, played about him while Teeka sought food upon the opposite side of the clearing. No more did Teeka, the mother, or Taug, the sullen sire, harbor suspicions of Tarzan's intentions toward their first-born. Had he not courted death to save their Gazan from the fangs and talons of Sheeta? Did he not fondle and cuddle the little one with even as great a show of affection as Teeka herself displayed? Their fears were allayed and Tarzan now found himself often in the role of nursemaid to a tiny anthropoid—an avocation which he found by no means irk-