Suddenly the sunlight that had shone down through the water was blotted out. Now he was in complete darkness. The great jaws relaxed and the croc left him.
He was too weak to swim, but the bit of air left in him would bring him to the surface. He felt his body rising, then it struck something hard. It was rather like a ceiling or a roof. He realized that he had been stuffed into a cave in the river bank. That was one of the habits of a crocodile. It would dig a hole in the bank of a river underwater and store its food there until it was tender enough to eat.
Roger could hold his breath no longer. He swallowed what seemed to him to be about half of the river, and fainted. Just as he passed out he was dimly conscious that something, probably the croc, was pulling his leg.
It was the first part of him Hal found as he groped his way into the cave. He hauled the motionless body from the cave up to the surface and out on to the bank. He flopped him face down across the end of the great hollow log that served as a village drum, and drained the river out of him. Then he placed him on the ground, face up, and proceeded to give him artificial respiration, mouth-to-mouth breathing. Captain Ted and most of the villagers looked on. The fierce features of the men softened and some of the women wept One brought a wallaby skin rolled up with the fur side outside and tucked it under the boy’s head. One man faced the tambaran and Captain Ted said he was praying to the spirits that Roger might live. A woman brought a bowl of soup to be fed to him if he should revive. Hal was grateful. These savages were not so savage after all.
Hal breathed air into his brother’s lungs, let it out, and repeated this process over and over again until he was blue in the face.
The body stirred a little. A cry went up. ‘He’s alive!’
Roger opened his eyes. The people shouted and began to dance - not the dance of death, but of life.
The woman with the soup came up and put the hollow quill of a bird into the boy’s mouth - the other end into the soup.
He was almost too weak at first to drink. Then he began to suck up the nourishing broth and grew stronger as he drank.
Painfully, Roger sat up. Every inch of him ached. Blood oozed from the punctures made in his skin by the seventy teeth.
A woman brought a stone pot of hot water and, having no cloth, bathed the gouges with soft leaves.
He smiled at her, and the smile she returned to him was so sweet and tender that for the moment it seemed as if she might have been his own mother. He looked around at the kind faces of the world’s worst headhunters.
Even bluff old Captain Ted was not as grumpy as usual.
‘You young fool!’ he said. ‘When I can get aboard the ship I’ll grab my gun and we’ll put an end to that beast.’
TOo,’ said Roger weakly.
‘No? What do you mean, no? That devil almost killed you. Don’t you think it deserves a dose of its own medicine?’
‘It only did what crocs are supposed to do,’ Roger said.
‘But how about these people? This monster has been making away with dozens of diem. They’re afraid to touch
it. It ought to be killed and I’m going to kill it. You propose to leave it here to keep on doing its dirty work? What else is there to do but kill it?’
Roger was so tired he felt like fainting all over again. He could hardly speak.
‘Dad wants crocs,’ he said. ‘Here’s a beauty. We’ll take it alive.’
Chapter 5
Croc alive
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ objected Captain Ted. These crocs are tough customers. Not like the crocs you’ve been used to.’
‘The captain has a point there, you know,’ put in Hal. ‘Crocodiles are the biggest reptiles on earth. And these inside the Great Barrier Reef and along the south coast of New Guinea are the biggest of all the world’s crocodiles. And the toughest. You might manage to get a .45 bullet through their armour plate. But to take one alive would be almost impossible.’
‘So you don’t want to try?’ Roger asked.
Hal looked at the giant, once more lurking in the reeds, waiting for a chance to snatch another child from the bank or for a woman coming to the river’s edge to get her stone bucket full of water.
‘You’re right, kid,’ he said reluctantly. ‘We can’t leave him there to carry on business as usual. We’ll take him alive.’
‘But if you get him, where will you put him?’ grumbled Ted, looking at the schooner still lying on its beam ends.
‘That’s up to you, Ted. It’s almost high tide - the easiest time to get her afloat. Plenty of men here to help you. I don’t believe any of the strakes in the hull are broken. All she needs is to get water under her keel. The watertight fish tanks haven’t leaked. Take off the lid of the largest tank and make ready to receive His Majesty.’
‘I’ll receive him if you catch him,’ said Ted. ‘You two kids together wouldn’t tip the scales at more than three hundred pounds - that brute is well over two thousand. How three hundred pounds of boys are going to wangle a ton of croc is something I want to see.’
He trudged off to enlist the men in the job of pushing the stranded ship off into deep water.
Hal scratched his head. How were they going to conquer this mass of muscle with seventy teeth at one end and a pile driver at the other? The monster was as long as a living-room and strong as a hundred men. Hal at this moment felt about as small as a frog and his brother was a tadpole.
‘How about laser?’ Roger suggested.
They had previously used that brilliant new discovery in fishing for swordfish and equally large specimens.
Hal shook his head. ‘Our set is too weak to have any effect on a brute three times as long as a swordfish and encased in a suit of armour.’
‘Then what about the electric harpoon?’
‘That’s too strong. It would kill a whale a hundred feet long, so it would certainly kill this beast which is only a third that size. And we want the croc alive, not dead.’
A shout went up from the twenty men who were helping Captain Ted push off the grounded schooner. The ship was scraping over the bottom and, a moment later, she reached deep water. She righted herself, and seemed none the worse for her adventure. The captain mounted to the deck and called to the boys, ‘Bring along your croc’
‘Don’t be in a hurry,’ Hal replied. ‘It will take time.’
Ted laughed. ‘I told you it wouldn’t be easy.’
‘Throw us a coil of rope,’ Hal said.
The rope came whizzing through the air.
‘What do you expect to do with that?’ Roger asked.
Hal said, ‘Tie one end of it to that tree. Then I’ll make a lasso of the other end. I’ll try to get the loop over his honour’s jaws and pull them shut. With his mouth shut he won’t be so dangerous. Then we’ll have only the other end to worry about.’
The plan seemed to work. After a couple of casts that fell short, the noose slipped over the jaws and was pulled tight The great mouth closed with a snap.
Villagers who were watching, cheered/Their congratulations came a little too soon. The angry crocodile, eyes blazing, shot towards the two boys. But they were safe on shore - at least they thought they were safe.
They forgot that crocodiles, though they spend most of their time in the water, are no mean slouch on land. They stood at what they thought was a safe distance, about ten feet back from the river’s edge.
The crocodile covered that distance in one second flat and swung its great tail around to knock the boys into the water. They barely escaped, and took to their heels with the monster in close pursuit. It was amazing how fast it could scrabble over the ground. The villagers who had been watching scattered in all directions.
But Roger had tied the other end of the rope firmly to the tree. When the croc pulled the rope taut it would be stopped in its tracks.
That was how it should have been. But the plunging reptile snapped the line taut and then broke it as if it had been cotton thread and came on lik
e a runaway locomotive.
Roger, between puffs, said, ‘It can’t keep this up. It’ll have to get back to water.’
‘Why so?’ said Hal.
‘Got to get under water to breathe,’ Roger said.
‘You’re forgetting,’ Hal gasped, ‘that the croc is not a fish. It used to be a land animal. It has a fine set of lungs. It can breathe air as well as you can.’
They came to a tree and swung themselves up into it. It was a small tree but the lowest branch was a good twelve feet above the ground.
The crocodile did not give them time to catch their breath. They thought they were safe, but they had had no time to figure things out. The crocodile did the figuring. It stopped, sat on the rear end of its thirty-foot-long body, raised the front end fifteen feet so that its head was three feet above the quaking boys. This was easy picking. It shook off the noose s and opened its huge yellow mouth.
Just in time the boys dropped from the branch and ran on.
‘The tambaran!’ shouted Hal. ‘Up the tambaran.’
Since the roof of the spirit house reached almost to the ground it was not too difficult for two young athletes to scramble up the thatch slope and keep going until they reached the ridgepole some fifty feet above the earth.
They straddled the ridgepole and Roger said, ‘It can’t get up here - that’s for sure.’
The crocodile came up the roof even faster than the boys had been able to do it, its great sharp claws digging into the thatch and scattering straw in every direction. It got halfway to the top before the roof, which had never been built to hold up a ton of croc, broke under its weight and it fell into the dark tambaran.
The boys, terrified when they saw the murderous beast coming so close, had already slid down the other side to the ground. There they hid among some bushes, so weak they could not run farther, and waited to see what would happen.
A great clatter came from the tambaran as the crocodile crashed about among statues and skulls, trying to find a way to escape.
‘It will find the door pretty soon and break through it,’ Hal said. ‘If we could catch it when it comes out…’
Roger was sarcastic. ‘Catch that devil? How? With your bare hands?’
‘No. With a net.’
‘What good would that do? It would bust the net to smithereens.’
‘I’m not so sure. We have that wire net we used to catch the White Death.’
The White Death was one of the largest and most deadly of sharks.
‘What was good enough for that should be good enough to catch a croc’
Roger was doubtful. ‘I don’t believe it. But it’s worth a try. How do we get it?’
‘Sneak around to the ship. The captain can throw it down to us.’
Crash! Bang! Rip! Tear! The crocodile rampaged about inside the tambaran. It had not yet discovered the door.
The boys hurried to the ship and called for the big net. It was tossed down to them. Since it was very heavy, a dozen men helped them carry it back to the door of the spirit house. There they fastened it to the posts on either side of the door.
They finished just in time. With a great splintering of wood the furious beast broke through the door and promptly found itself tangled in the net. Hal and Roger shouted for joy. But the teeth of the reptile which could not chew but could bite began to snip the wires and no metal wirecutter could have done a better job. In ten seconds the sharp seventy had cut a hole big enough to pass through and the crocodile was on its way back to the river. There the animal took its usual place among the reeds and its two blazing lamps swung back and forth daring anybody to come close.
The naturalists were more than ever determined to capture it. They came to the river at a safe distance downstream and sat on the bank puzzling about what to do next.
‘It’s a wonderful specimen,’ Hal said. ‘I don’t believe that even Dad has ever seen one like it. Any big oceanarium would pay thirty or forty thousand dollars for it. We’ve got
to get it.’
Easier said than done,’ remarked Roger.
Chapter 6
Magic of the numbfish
Defeated at every turn, they were about to give up.
Idly they sat looking down into the water. It was Roger who first saw that the river-bottom seemed to be moving.
‘What’s going on down there?’
Hal could see a sort of carpet spread over the river-bottom. But why did the carpet seem to be crawling as if it were alive? And the carpet had dozens of eyes.
‘Flatfish,’ lie said. ‘Perhaps halibut or flounders or skates - no, I think they are rays. They’re only about as thick as pancakes. They’re lying so close together that they look like an all-over carpet. But if you look closely you can see that each one is about six feet long and three feet wide.’
‘They can’t be flatfish,’ Roger said. ‘Rays and such live in salt water. This is a river.’
‘Taste the water,’ Hal said. Roger dipped a finger into the water and then put it on his tongue.
‘It is salt.’
‘Remember the tide that swept us up here? Twice a day the ocean water rolls up a mile or two into the river. That croc we’ve been trying to catch is also a salt-water animal -and the salt-water crocs are the largest and worst of the world’s crocodiles. I’ve got to get one of these flats and see just what species it belongs to.’
He reached into the shallows, grabbed a tail, and pulled. The creature slid up on to the bank. It writhed and twisted and in one of its contortions the underside of the body near the head happened to touch Hal’s hand. He jumped as if he had been shot. Then he felt nothing. His body was numb. It took him some minutes to come back to normal.
‘It’s a numbfish.’
‘What’s a numbfish?’
‘An electric ray. It has electric batteries in front just behind the head. Lucky for me that I touched that spot only very lightly. A really strong jolt would knock a man out, perhaps kill him.’
Roger looked upstream to the crocodile lying among the reeds.
‘Do crocs like flatfish?’
‘I suppose so. Crocs are like ostriches - they’ll gobble down anything within reach. Crocodiles that have been opened up have all sorts of things in their stomachs - not only the bones of many kinds of fish, but human bones, necklaces and bracelets of women they have swallowed, tin cans, pots, dishes and lots of gravel.’
Roger’s eyes were shining. ‘I have an idea. Why don’t we feed that croc an electric ray, wouldn’t that make it numb the way it did you?’
Hal grinned. ‘You have something there. One wouldn’t bother him. But if we can get him to take half a dozen, he’ll be as stiff as a log. Then we can tow him over to the ship and get him aboard.’
Hal seized the tail once more. ‘This brute weighs about two hundred pounds, so I’ll need your help. It will probably do a lot of twisting and thrashing around. Don’t get anywhere near its batteries. Another name for the electric ray is the torpedo, and it can be as deadly as a torpedo, so look out.’
Together they hauled the squirming mass along the bank and then into the water before the open jaws of the crocodile. The boys stepped ashore quickly while the big eyes were still focused on the ray.
There was a swish of the great tail, as powerful as a ship’s propeller, and the croc lunged forward to take in the ray and swallow it at one gulp.
Another ray was brought and devoured with equal relish. Then another, and another. Each time the crocodile moved more sluggishly. When the eighth was set before it, the crocodile’s eyes and mouth were closed and the tail was motionless. The great beast was as stiff as a log.
Gripping the tail, the boys waded and swam to the ship’s side towing their prize. Ted had been watching the proceedings and was ready to put the crane into action, hoisting the scaly log to the deck and into the big tank.
Roger was worried. ‘I hope we haven’t killed the beast. Dad can’t use a dead croc’
‘The crocodile is one of
the toughest things in the world to kill,’ Hal said. ‘I think this one will show some life in ten or fifteen minutes.’
They went ashore and waited. A half hour passed and Hal himself had begun to worry. Then Ted called from the ship, ‘Wide awake and doing fine.’
They heard a tremendous splashing and had something new to worry about - would the steel-lined tank stand such rough treatment?
‘It won’t keep that up long,’ Hal said. ‘The crocodile is more intelligent than people think it is. Feed this one once in a while and pretty soon you can make a pet of it.’
‘I think I’d rather have a smaller pet,’ Roger said. ‘It would be fun to have a croc, about - well, about eight inches long.’
‘Well, what would you say if I could give you just that?’
‘I’d say you’re a wizard.’
Hal got to his feet and said, ‘Kindly follow the wizard.’
Chapter 7
Mystery of imprinting
He led the way to the nearest hut. Outside the door was a stone bowl full of eggs. “There you are,’ he said.
Roger laughed, ‘You think you’re enough of a wizard to conjure a croc out of one of those? I said I wanted a croc, not a chicken.’
The eggs did look like hen’s eggs, but extra large.
Hal took up one of the eggs. ‘There’s no chicken in this,’ he said.
‘And I’ll bet there’s no croc either,’ said Roger. ‘You can’t get an eight-inch croc out of a three-inch egg.’
‘You can if you’re a wizard,’ Hal said.
A woman come out of the door and smiled at the boys. She pointed at the egg in Hal’s hand, then at his mouth.
‘She wants me to eat it,’ Hal said.
‘Don’t tell me they eat crocodile eggs!’
‘They think they’re pretty good.’
‘But why does she have them sitting out here in the sun? They’ll spoil.’
‘No, they need the heat of the sun to make them ripe. Then they’re good to eat. But if they are left in the sun too long, what’s inside will turn into a croc. Perhaps we can find one that has already turned.’
12 Cannibal Adventure Page 3
