“Jesus Christ,” said Paul in a hoarse whisper. It didn’t sound like a curse. Silent, my gunbearer, Martin, and Stomach, a skinner, came running up. A glance at the floating fish trap and at the woman’s sandals on the bank told them what had happened. Wading to his knees, Silent retrieved the cane trap and placed the other effects inside. He started a slow trot that would carry him to the woman’s village, a miserable huddle of mud and dung huts called Kangani. Slowly we turned back to camp, the shock of witnessing the most horrible death in Africa leaving us numb. I took the rifles and unloaded them, placing a cartridge bullet-first into the muzzle of each to prevent mud wasps from starting nests in the bores, a bit of Africana that has cost hunters their sight and even lives when they forgot it. Martin came over to us and spoke quietly in Fanagalo. “There is nothing for it, Bwana,” he intoned with the exaggerated fatalism of the bush African. “It has always been so. Always has Ngwenya been waiting; always will he wait.”
* * *
Ngwenya, the crocodile, has been waiting a very long time. For 170 million years he has been lurking, patient and powerful, in the warmer fresh and salt waters of this planet. Virtually unchanged from his earliest fossil remains, he demonstrates with deadly efficiency the value of simplicity in design. The crocodile is the master assassin, the African Ice Man, combining the ideal qualities of cunning with ruthlessness and cold voracity matched with a reptilian intelligence far greater than his small brain would indicate. He is little more than teeth, jaws, and stomach propelled by the most powerful tail in nature. He will eat anything he can catch and digest almost anything he can eat. Someday, if you spend enough time around the watery haunts of Ngwenya, that may include you or—Lord forbid—me.
In these days of moon landings and lasers, it can be difficult to fathom the fact that crocodiles are still a very substantial threat to human life in Africa. Most Americans, were you to conduct a poll, would probably offer some vague impression that crocodiles are teetering on the brink of extinction in Africa today, hardly any threat to man. I’ve got some big news. By the most conservative estimates of professional researchers, something approximating ten human beings are dragged off to a death horrible beyond description each day in modern Africa. The figure may even be considerably higher since successful croc attacks, unless witnessed, normally leave no trace whatever of the victim, who may have died by any of the methods Africa has developed to make evolution a working proposition. The facts boil down to this: Crocodylus niloticus is the one man-killer who, if he’s big enough and you’re available enough, will eat you every time he gets a chance.
I was taught in Sunday School, I dimly remember, that it’s not nice to hate anything. Nonetheless, I do hate crocs, an opinion shared rather vocally by such ne’er-do-wells as Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt. I do not believe in their being driven to extinction, heavens no, because we find to our infinite wonder that everything in nature has its place. On the other hand, I have not an ounce of regret at having been in on the killing of about a hundred of them, all legally shot, I might add, and not for their hides. I have often wondered what stand the ultrapreservationists would take if we were to stock a few hundred crocs in New York’s Central Park, where their philosophizing might become more than the armchair variety next time they walked their poodles. I’m sure it would lower the crime rate, if nothing else.
As with snakes there has been a great deal of exaggeration as to the length crocodiles may attain and at the same time a lack of appreciation of the weights they may reach. Adventure books are full of vivid reports of twenty-five and even thirty footers, but few realize how truly immense even a twelve-footer is. The Luangwa Valley of Zambia probably has the largest population of crocodiles in Africa, perhaps the world. Never having been hunted for their hides in this area, they have flourished in untold thousands. In a normal afternoon of hunting along the banks of the Luangwa and Munyamadzi Rivers, it is not unusual to see hundreds sunning themselves on the sand bars and banks, their mouths agape in sleep, oxpeckers and tickbirds hopping around their jaws with impunity. Yet of all the thousands I have seen, I must conclude that a twelve-footer is big and one of thirteen feet edging up to huge. The biggest croc I have ever seen, besides the one who killed the woman in the lagoon, went about fifteen feet with three feet of tail missing, fairly common for some reason in very big crocs. That would make him roughly eighteen feet, which is one hell of a lot of crocodile. I’ve owned cars shorter than that! He crawled out to sun himself on a small island 150 yards from my camp one hot afternoon when I was between safari clients. I watched him for about a half-hour, out of film for my camera, of course, and God, but he was immense. He looked like a big, scaly subway car with teeth, that could have taken a buffalo and three wart hogs with one gulp. To tell you the honest truth, I came very close to killing him. Crocs that big are very often man-eaters, learning the habits of native women until they try a couple and find they’re a lot easier to handle than trying to pull a rhino in by his nose. But, I didn’t have a license and knew that the locals would turn me in for the reward offered for violators, so I reluctantly let him go. At least they can’t take away your white hunter’s ticket for what you’re thinking. When the next clients arrived two days later, he was never to be seen.
One famous hunter, shooting years ago in Kenya’s Lake Rudolph, which has some Godzilla-league crocs in it, swatted over one hundred, of which only three beat fifteen feet, and those only by a whisker. The largest crocodile “officially” recorded was killed by the Uganda Game Department in the Semliki River along the Congo border in 1953. It was only three inches short of twenty feet. I have seen a mounted croc in a museum that tapes sixteen feet, and he stands higher than my waist, so you can imagine how colossal that nineteen-footer was. When crocs get over twelve feet or so, they gain tremendously in weight for each inch they grow. You could practically shoplift an eight-footer, but you had best have three strong friends along if you want to even roll over a twelve-footer. I have never weighed a big croc, but I’ll bet you a hangover that a fifteen-foot Ngwenya will outweigh a big buffalo, well over a ton. A croc this size will stand about four feet when walking and have a girth of about eight feet.
Crocodiles never stop growing their whole lives, so the age of an immense one must be very impressive. Consider that one Asian specimen, a salt-water crocodile, has been living in an American zoo for over thirty years and has grown only about four feet since his capture. Conceivably, a brute like the Semliki nineteen-footer may have seen two centuries turn over.
As much, if not more than, the lion, the history of African exploration is written around the crocodile. In fact, there is hardly an explorer or a missionary that doesn’t mention a few squeaks with Ngwenya, Mamba, Nkwena, or whatever his local name may be, often with fatal results. By way of example, let’s look at just one passage of the writings of Sir Samuel Baker on a military expedition in the great papyrus Sudd of southern Sudan:
“Among the accidents that occurred to my expedition, one man had his arm bitten off at the elbow, being seized while collecting aquatic vegetation from the bank. He was saved from utter loss by his comrades who held him while his arm was in the jaws of the crocodile. The man was brought to me in dreadful agony, and the stump was immediately amputated above the fracture. Another man was seized by the leg while assisting to push a vessel off a sand bank. He also was saved by a crowd of soldiers who were with him engaged in the same work; this man lost his leg. The captain of No. 10 tug was drowned [by a croc] in the dock vacated by the 108-ton steamer, which had been floated into the river by a small canal cut from the basin for that purpose. The channel was 30 yards in length and three feet deep. No person ever suspected that a crocodile would take possession of the dock, and it was considered the safest place for the troops to bathe. One evening the captain was absent and as it was known a short time previously that he had gone down to wash at the basin, he was searched for at the place. A pile of clothes and his red fez were upon the bank, but no person w
as visible. A number of men jumped into the water and felt the bottom in every portion of the dock, with the result that in a few minutes, his body was discovered; one leg was broken in several places, being severely mangled by the numerous teeth of the crocodile. There can be little doubt that the creature, having drowned its victim, had intended to return.”
Several months later, sitting in the cool of the evening with Lady Baker and Commander Julian Baker, RN, Sir Samuel was accosted by one of his men, panicked almost into incoherency. To let Baker tell it:
“The man gasped out, ‘Said, Said is gone! Taken away from my side by a crocodile, now, this minute!’
“‘Said! What Said?’ I asked: ‘There are many Saids!’
“‘Said of the No. 10 steamer, the man you liked, he is gone. We were wading together across the canal by the dock where Reis Mahomet was killed. The water is only waist deep, but a tremendous crocodile rushed like a steamer from the river, seized Said by the waist and disappeared. He’s dragged into the river and I’ve run here to tell you the bad news.’
“We immediately hurried to the spot. The surface of the river was calm and unruffled in the stillness of a fine night. The canal was quiet and appeared as though it had never been disturbed. The man who had lost his companion sat down and sniffled aloud. Said, who was one of my best men, was indeed gone forever.”
One can only hope that those of Baker’s men working the No. 10 steamer got hazardous duty pay.
Arthur Neumann, the same chap who got the fifteen-minute battering from a bull elephant referred to earlier, was the horrified witness to a classic croc attack on New Year’s Day, 1896, on a river near Lake Rudolph in modern Kenya:
“Late in the afternoon, I went down for another bathe, with Shebane (my servant) as usual carrying my chair, towels, etc., and did the same thing again. It is a large river and deep, with a smooth surface and rather sluggish current; its water dark-coloured and opaque, though hardly to be called muddy, deepens rapidly, so that a step or two in is sufficient at this point to bring it up to one’s middle, while the bottom is black, slimy mud.
“Having bathed and dried myself, I was sitting on my chair, after putting on my clothes, by the water’s edge, lacing up my boots. The sun was just about to set behind the high bank across the river, its level rays shining full upon us, rendering us conspicuous from the river while preventing our seeing in that direction. Shebane had just gone a little way off (perhaps a dozen yards) along the brink and taken off his clothes to wash himself, a thing I had never known him to do before when with me; but my attention being taken up with what I was doing, I took no notice of him. I was still looking down when I heard a cry of alarm, and, raising my head, got a glimpse of the most ghastly sight I have ever witnessed. There was the head of a huge crocodile out of the water, just swinging over towards the deep with my poor Swahili boy in its awful jaws, held across the middle of the body like a fish in the beak of a heron. He had ceased to cry out, and with one horrible wriggle, a swirl and a splash all disappeared. One could do nothing. It was over; Shebane was gone … A melancholy New Year’s Day indeed!”
Because there are far more blacks than whites in the range of the Nile Crocodile, it follows that the preponderance of victims are black. Most are women, the traditional duty of that sex being to draw water from the river bank where they are most vulnerable. However, crocs are equally partial to white meat, as the grisly case of William K. Olson, a Cornell graduate and Peace Corps volunteer attests. Olson was recovered in large chunks from the stomach of a thirteen-foot one-inch croc who killed and ate him while he was swimming—despite warnings—in the Baro River near Gambella, Ethiopia, on April 13, 1966. The croc was shot the next day by a Colonel Dow, a safari client of my friend, Karl Luthy, a Swiss white hunter operating in Sidamo Province. I have seen the photos taken by Luthy of removing the body from the croc’s stomach, and if you are interested to see what Olson looked like after twenty hours in a croc’s paunch, you may see one of them reproduced on page 200 of Alistair Graham’s and Peter Beard’s book, Eyelids of Morning (New York Graphic Society, 1973). I don’t recommend it, however, unless you considered The Exorcist light comedy.
The inside of a croc’s stomach is sort of an African junkyard. I have found everything from human jewelry to whole wart hogs to Fanta bottles and three-pound rocks inside them. One ten footer I shot in Ethiopia even had a four-foot brother tucked in his belly. According to a reliable writer-hunter, one east African man-eater contained the following horribilia: several long porcupine quills, eleven heavy brass arm rings, three wire armlets, an assortment of wire anklets, one necklace, fourteen human arm and leg bones, three human spinal columns, a length of fiber used for tying firewood, and eighteen stones. I wasn’t there, but that sounds just a touch exaggerated if only for the simple amount of the inventory. Stones are commonly found in the stomach of crocs, but whether they are picked up accidentally when the croc lunges for a fish or whether they are meant as an aid to the digestive process like the grit in a bird’s crop is unknown. Maybe they’re used for ballast.
The collections of indigestible items found in the stomachs of crocodiles points out their fantastic digestive powers. I have found good-size antelope leg bones that were almost dissolved; they would have to be since they were far too large to be passed through the normal process. The arm bracelets are worn by African women very tightly on the bicep, and the only way for them to be found free would be for the arm to have been digested.
The Nile crocodile holds the unquestioned title as the most accomplished of Africa’s man-eaters. Some individual crocs have been credited with hundreds of human victims and since the species is more or less limited to water, there is only one factor that makes this possible—the incredible sense of fatality that the African holds toward the crocodile.
There are innumerable cases of scores of women being taken by crocs at the same spot every few days as they draw water for their families. Crocs easily learn where to wait and, apparently, the fate of the last person who filled her jug from a particular place has no effect whatever on the next one who may have even been present when the last victim was taken. I have lived with Africans in the bush for many years, but I have found it impossible to understand their total indifference to horrible death. I have seen this phenomenon from Ethiopia to South Africa, so it is not a matter of one particular tribe but a continent-wide indifference that defies explanation. Ask a woman why she takes her water from the same place where her sister was killed the week before and she will just shrug. It’s weird.
I was once crossing a river in Mozambique by cable pontoon, which is a raft drawn across the stream by cables operated by government personnel. One man jumped off near shore to unfoul a line and was immediately taken by a croc in a swirl of bloody water and never seen again. Yet when I returned the following day, the surviving raft operators were happily splashing and washing not twenty yards from where their fellow worker was killed!
* * *
Crocodiles are considered “saurians” by science (as in dinosaur) and are available in a wide variety of flavors. Among these are their cousins, the alligators, gavials, and caimans. With the exception of the African or Nile crocodile (the same animal, even though found nowhere near the Nile) and the salt-water crocodile of the warm Asian islands, most of the clan is relatively inoffensive. Of course, the American alligator has caused some deaths and injuries, including a fully documented fatal attack that took place in Sarasota, Florida, in August 1973. A sixteen-year-old girl was taken by an eleven-foot gator and, despite efforts of onlookers to prevent it, partially eaten. Between 1948 and 1971 there were an additional seven unprovoked attacks, which produced various injuries but no fatalities. Although rare, there is an American crocodile reputedly as dangerous as the African breed.
The salt-water crocs of Asia are lumped under several types, including the marsh or mugger crocodile and estuarine types, all considered very dangerous. In fact, one of the greatest clashes between man and croc took
place during World War II. At the time that Burma was being retaken by the Allies, about 1,000 Japanese infantrymen became caught between the open sea and the island of Ramree, deep in mangrove swamps crawling with crocs, expecting to be evacuated by ships that never arrived. Trying to retreat, they found themselves cut off by the British Royal Navy in such position that they could not regain the mainland. When night came, so did the crocodiles. Witnesses on the British ships have told of the horror of the mass attack on the men, of the terrible screaming that continued until dawn when only 20 men out of 1,000 were left alive. Certainly, some were killed by enemy fire and others by drowning, but all evidence points up that most were slaughtered by the big salt-water crocs.
Death in the Long Grass Page 20
