blade

Over the laughter of a nearby waterfall, over a long roar the distant herds of bison that crowded the prairie, and over the oily creak of his knife on a sharp stone on his knee, his keen ear knew the sound of her light stepped as she crawled out of the pines into a sunny glade on a bluff. He didn’t turn around, he only dropped the stone, threw back the thick locks that retreated, his long black hair,...

The fisherman loosened his knife in its scabbard. The gesture was instinctive, for what he feared was nothing a knife could slay, not even the saw-edged crescent blade of the Yuetshi that could disembowel a man with an upward stroke. Neither man nor beast threatened him in the solitude which brooded over the castellated isle of Xapur.

One of Max Brand’s worth reading as an alternative to his western stories. Michael Clovelly might not have been the greatest swordsman ever to come to London town during the reign of the Merry Monarch, Charles the Second, but if a better man ever wielded a blade, he had not yet stepped forth to claim the distinction. Seeking gold with which to elevate his beggarly fortunes, Clovelly chances to encounter...

If you read the stories of The First Jungle Book, you remember how, attaching the skin of Sher Khan to the Council Rock, Mowgli told the surviving wolves of the Zion pack that he would hunt one from now on, and how his brothers - four wolves - announced that they would hunt with him. But it’s hard to change life in one minute, especially in the jungle. The flock dispersed in disarray; Mowgli went to...