The Most Dangerous Game

Sanger Rainsford and his companion Whitney are traveling speedily to Rio de Janeiro to hunt the big cat of that region, the jaguar. After a discussion about how they are the hunters instead of the hunted, Rainsford hears gun shots in the night, drops his pipe, and falls off of their boat and into the Caribbean Sea while trying to retrieve it. After he realizes he cannot swim back to the boat, he swims to the nearby Ship-Trap Island, which was notorious for shipwrecks. He finds a palatial chateau inhabited by two Cossacks: the owner, General Zaroff, and his gigantic deaf-mute servant Ivan. The General, another big-game hunter, has heard of Rainsford from the book Rainsford wrote about hunting snow leopards in Tibet. After inviting him to dinner, General Zaroff tells Rainsford of how he became bored with hunting because it no longer challenged him. Thus, Zaroff says, he decided to live on an island where he could capture shipwrecked sailors to send them into the jungle supplied with food, a knife, and hunting clothes to be his quarry. After a three-hour head start, he would follow them to hunt and kill them. If the captives eluded him, Ivan, and a pack of hunting dogs for three days, General Zaroff would let the man go, but no one had eluded him that long thus far. Zaroff invites Rainsford to join him in his hunt but Rainsford refuses upon being appalled by Zaroff's motives. Zaroff then tells Rainsford that he can choose whether he will be the next person to be hunted or be whipped to death by Ivan. Rainsford chooses the former.

 Rainsford lays an intricate trail in the forest and climbs a tree. Zaroff finds him easily, but decides to play with him like a cat would a mouse. After the failed attempt at eluding the General, Rainsford builds a "Malay man catcher", a weighted log attached to a trip wire, which injures Zaroff's shoulder causing him to return home for the night. Next, he sets a Burmese tiger pit which kills one of Zaroff's hounds. Finally, he sets a native Ugandan knife trap, which impales and kills Ivan. To escape the General and his approaching hounds, Rainsford dives off a cliff. Zaroff returns home. Zaroff locks himself in his bedroom and turns on the lights revealing Rainsford who had hidden by the bed curtains after having swum around the island. Zaroff congratulates him on winning the "game" but Rainsford decides to fight him calling himself "a beast at bay." The General accepts the challenge saying that the loser will be fed to the dogs and the winner will sleep in his bed. Though the ensuing fight is not described, the story ends with Rainsford observing that "he had never slept in a better bed," implying that he defeated and killed Zaroff. ~ source