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astonishment at finding that the large heavy donkey had 

 simply vanished ! No traces of its having been dragged away 

 were to he seen on the ground, nor did the grass appear 

 to have heen 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. Hyaenas 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 



