Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs
Category: Adventure,Short Story
The sixth book of Tarzan, King of the Jungle. This is actually a collection of several short stories all about the times when Tarzan was a young boy and a teenager being raised by the great apes. The young Tarzan was unlike the great apes who were his only companions and playmates. Theirs was a simple, savage life, filled with little but killing or being killed. But Tarzan had all of a normal boy’s desire to learn. He had painfully taught himself to read from books left by his dead father. Now he sought to apply this book knowledge to the world around him. He sought for such things as the source of dreams and the whereabouts of God. And he searched for the love and affection that every human being needs. But he was alone in his struggles to grow and understand. The life of the jungle had no room for abstractions.
TEEKA, STRETCHED AT luxurious ease in the shade of the tropical forest, presented, unquestionably, a most alluring picture of young, feminine loveliness. Or at least so thought Tarzan of the Apes, who squatted upon a low–swinging branch in a near–by tree and looked down upon her. Just to have seen him there, lolling upon the swaying bough of the jungle–forest giant, his brown skin mottled by the brilliant equatorial sunlight which percolated through the leafy canopy of green above him, his clean–limbed body relaxed in graceful ease, his shapely head partly turned in contemplative absorption and his intelligent, gray eyes dreamily devouring the object of their devotion, you would have thought him the reincarnation of some demigod of old. You would not have guessed that in infancy he had suckled at the breast of a hideous, hairy she–ape, nor that in all his conscious past since his parents had passed away in the little cabin by the landlocked harbor at the jungle’s verge, he had known no other associates than the sullen bulls and the snarling cows of the tribe of Kerchak, the great ape.
