338 EXTRACTS FROM 
astonishment at finding that the large heavy donkey had 
simply vanished! No traces of its having been dragged away 
were to be seen on the ground, nor did the grass appear 
to have been bent down—facts which seemed to show that 
some exceptionally powerful beast of prey must have carried 
off the carcass bodily. 
As some of the small scraps were also gone, we searched 
about and soon found a large jackal not twenty yards off. 
Bigger, longer in the legs, with a shorter and more bushy 
tail than the jackal of Egypt, and of a yellowish colour only 
broken by a bluish-grey saddle, this extraordinary creature 
seemed to me unlike any of the jackals which I had hitherto 
seen or killed. 
We also discovered a trail of blood leading straight to the 
road and to the wall on its further side, where the blood and 
hair that were sticking to the sharp edges of the stones 
plainly showed that the donkey had been dragged over it. 
On the other side the carcass had again been carried, and the 
trail then led towards one of the deep ravines in the direction 
of the mountains of the Jordan valley. 
I now stole cautiously forward, and on looking over a 
hillock I saw a dark object about fifty yards away, and near 
it a small reddish-yellow animal. A lucky rifle-shot laid the 
little fellow low, and on hastening to the spot I found that it 
was one of the extremely pretty Fennecs, or desert-foxes, and 
that it had been comfortably breakfasting off the donkey’s 
head. Carefully examining this great heavy head, which 
belonged to a donkey of the large Asiatic breed, we saw that 
it had been simply bitten off, for the marks of teeth were 
quite visible. Hitherto the wild beast had not dragged but 
carried on its back the entire donkey, and from this point it 
had gone off with the rest of the body. Hyzenas are very 
large and powerful, but I hardly think they are capable of so 
great an effort, nor is it their habit to carry away plunder in 
