CHAPTER X
A Trip with a Crocodile
Samba looked warily round, then began to descend from his perch in the tree, moving as slowly and with as many pauses as a timid bather stepping into the water. Once more he was on the ground. Pausing only to throw a rapid glance on all sides, he struck off in a direction at right angles to the course of the stream, and resumed his laborious march through the forest maze.
Hour after hour he pushed on without meeting a living creature. But he had heard too much of the cunning and determination of the Congo dwarfs to delude himself with the idea that he had finally shaken them off. Tired as he was, sweating in the moist oppressive heat, he dared not rest, even to eat in comfort the food he had brought in his tin. He nibbled morsels as he went, hoping that by good speed during the whole day he might get far enough from the pigmies to make his ultimate escape secure.
Towards evening he heard in front of him the long monotonous rustle of a stream foaming over a rocky bed. He was careful in approaching it: to meet a crocodile ambushed near the bank would be as dangerous as to meet a man. Pushing his way cautiously through the shrubs, he came to the edge of a broad river, flowing in swift eddies from white rapids above. It seemed to Samba that this must be a tributary of the Lemba, the river on whose bank he had left the white men, and to which, lower down, he must ultimately make his way. Pursuit by the white men might now be safely disregarded; Samba thought he could hardly do better than keep to the stream, taking his chance of meeting negroes at isolated villages on the banks. These, if he met them, would at any rate be easier to elude than the Bambute.
But the sun was going down, the air becoming chill. He must find a shelter for the night and pursue his riverside journey next day. A little search revealed, on a bluff above the river, a boulder having a deep cavity on one side. Here Samba sat down to eat the little food left in his tin; then he curled himself up for the night. Nothing disturbed his sleep.
In the morning he felt more than usually hungry. His tin was empty; he did not care to leave the river and go hunting in the forest, perhaps vainly, for berries or roots. A little way down stream he noticed a spot where the dark surface of the water was scarcely disturbed by a ripple; was that a deep pool, he wondered, where fish might be? He went down to the edge and, leaning flat upon a rock peeped over. Yes; in the depths he caught the scaly gleam of darting fish.
Springing up, he went to a swampy patch hard by and cut a long, straight, stiff reed. Then he took the hard stick with which he made fire, and, sharpening the point until it pricked like a needle, he fitted the wood to the reed so as to make a spear. With this in his hand he once more leant over the pool. He lay still for a few moments, intently watching; then, with a movement of extraordinary swiftness, he plunged his spear into the depths, and brought it out with a silvery trout impaled. The fish had stopped to nibble at a root in the bank. When Samba had thus caught three he was satisfied. He did not pause to cook the fish. He split them open, dexterously boned and cleaned them, and ate them raw.
He had scarcely finished his breakfast when he saw, hurtling down the rapids above him, a huge forest tree—a mass of green, for most of its branches in full leaf were still upon it. Clearly it had not long lost its grip of earth. It came swirling towards Samba, every now and then stopping as its submerged part was caught by some rock, only to be whirled round and driven past the obstacle by the weight of water behind. It made a zigzag course through the rapids, and then floated peacefully down the still reach of water beneath.
As he watched the tree sailing gently towards him, Samba had an idea. Why not use it as a raft to carry him on his way? It was strong enough to bear his weight; he could hide in the foliage with at least as good a chance of escaping observation as if he were moving along the banks.
By the time he had grasped the notion the tree was past him. He sprang up, raced along until he was level with it, then took a neat header into the water. A minute's rapid swimming brought him to the end of the trunk, which, he saw, had been snapped clean off and was not encumbered by the roots. He clambered up, and the trunk was so long that his trifling weight scarcely depressed its end. Smiling with pleasure, he crawled along it until he was in the centre of the leafy screen.
This, however, now that he was there, did not seem so dense as when he had viewed it from the bank; he was not concealed so well as he had hoped. Every now and again, too, his novel raft gave an ominous lurch and roll, suggesting that the portion above water might at any moment change places with that below. If that happened, Samba wondered, would he be able to disengage himself from the tangle of branches and swim clear? But these momentary fears were banished by the novelty and excitement of his position. How delightful it was, after his toilsome and fatiguing journey through the forest, to float down the river without effort of his own in a leafy arbour that defended him from the fierce rays of the sun! And his voyage had the pleasures of variety. Sometimes the foliaged top went first; then, when the branches swept the bottom of the stream in shallow reaches, the trunk swung round and went broadside to the current. Sometimes the branches stuck fast, the current carried the trunk round in a circle, and when an eddy set it again in motion, the trunk end became the bow of this uneasy ship. Bump! That was some rock or sandbank; the tree shook, and Samba was nearly toppled from his perch. Nk'oketo![[1]] It was all right; the friendly water had washed the tree clear, and Samba was off again, his black eyes gleaming with fun as he peered between the branches.
It was early in the afternoon, and very hot even for those latitudes. Everything seemed asleep. No breeze ruffled the leaves in the trees along the banks. The air quivered. Samba was dozing, lulled by the gentle motion of the tree, whose progress had not for some time been checked.
All at once there was a shock. Samba instinctively clutched a branch as he felt himself jerked from his seat. His lumbering vessel was twirling round; and looking through the leaves, he saw that it was caught by the head on a sandbank in midstream.
But next moment he felt a shiver run down his spine, and an eery creeping about the roots of his hair. Below him, not four feet away, a gigantic crocodile was staring at him with his cunning baleful eyes. The swish of the projecting branches upon the sandbank had aroused the reptile from his siesta on this vantage ground, whence, at the lazy opening of an eye, he could survey a long stretch of the river. And he had awoke to see a plump and tempting black boy at the inconsiderable altitude of four feet above his snout.
Those who have seen the crocodile only in his hours of ease, lazily sunning himself on a river bank, or floating with scarcely more than his eyes and forehead visible on the surface of the stream, may have come to the comfortable conclusion that he is a slow-moving and lethargic beast. But see him rushing at the bank to seize in his terrible jaws the unwary antelope or zebra that has come to drink, or to sweep it into the river with a single blow of his mighty tail. Watch him when, roused from his doze on a sandbank, by the sting of a rifle bullet on his armour, he vanishes with lightning rapidity beneath the water. At one moment to all seeming as lifeless as a log, the next he is a raging monster, ready to tear and rend any hapless creature which his inertness has beguiled.
Of the two, Samba and the crocodile, it was the saurian that first recovered his wits. His instinct when disturbed at close quarters is to rush forthwith upon his enemy or victim. Thus did the crocodile now. Considering that he is a beast not built for jumping, the leap he attempted, with a spasmodic wriggle of his formidable tail, was quite a creditable feat. With his teeth he grazed the lower part of the branch on which Samba sat; and the boy, gazing down into the beast's eyes, shuddered and shrank away. Fortunate it was for him that his legs had not been dangling. Nothing could then have saved him.
The reptile, slipping back after its failure, maintained its hold on the lower branches with its forefeet. Before it could make a second attempt, Samba had swung himself into the branch above. The tree toppled slightly, and for one moment of terror Samba feared he would be thrown into the very jaws of the monster. But the sandbank held the tree firmly, and that peril was past.
With thick foliage between it and the boy, the crocodile saw no chance of securing its victim from its present position. But it was determined not to be balked, and, cunning beast! could afford to wait. It seemed to know that the boy was only safe so long as he clung to his perch. On the sandbank, or in the water, his end would alike be speedy. So the reptile slid off the bank into the water, and swam to the trunk end of the tree, which had been swung round by the current and was now pointing down stream. If it could not leap, it could crawl, and up the trunk the approach to its prey was easy.
Samba's eyes were now wide with fright, as he saw the beast's intention. Up a tree on the river bank he could have laughed any crocodile to scorn; but this sandbank in midstream was ground peculiarly the creature's own, even though the prey was on a branch ten feet above it. With its experience of sandbanks the crocodile knew there was no permanency in this arrangement.
The attempts of the huge reptile to gain a footing on the trunk had a result which caused Samba mingled hope and fear. The tree floated clear of the bank, and the voyage began again. But how different were the circumstances! In the stern, no longer a cheerful smiling boy, carelessly watching the slow banks glide by, but a boy whose hands and feet gripped his perch with anxious tenacity, and whose scared eyes were quick to mark every movement of the unwelcome, the abhorred, passenger amidships. With many a splash of its tail, and many a grunt of impatient fury, the monster at last made good its footing on the broad trunk, which under its weight was for more than a quarter of its length invisible beneath the surface of the water. For some minutes it lay still, staring at Samba with unwinking eyes, displaying all its teeth as if to grin sardonically at its victim. Samba regretted for the moment that he had not swarmed down from his perch and attacked the crocodile with his knife while he was still struggling to mount the trunk. But then he reflected that he had after all done wisely, for the reptile would have slid back into the water, and before Samba could gain his retreat, he might have been swept off by one swish of the terrible tail.
Samba, as he had shown more than once, and notably in the recent incident of the serval, had no lack of courage; but he had never before been at such close quarters with a crocodile, the most terrible of all the natural enemies of man in the regions of the Congo. And as he sat and watched the glassy stare of the hideous reptile now wriggling inch by inch towards him, he felt a strange helplessness, a kind of fascination that seemed to chill and paralyse his power of movement as of thought. He had retreated as far as he dared. His weight had caused some of the slenderer and more elastic branches to bend towards the water; he had even imagined that, as he tested them, the pressure threatened to make the tree revolve. What his fate would be if the whirling of the trunk on its axis brought him into the river he well knew. The crocodile would slip as nimbly as an eel after him; and, entangled in the foliage, which to his armoured enemy would offer no obstacle, he would fall an easy prey.
The crocodile wriggled on, till it came to the place where the first branch forked from the trunk. Scarcely more than its own length now separated it from Samba. Apparently it had come as near as it cared to venture; not being a climber, the feat of crawling up the tapering branch on which Samba was perched was not one to its taste. It lay still, with jaws agape, its eyes half-closed in a kind of wicked leer.
Samba tried to look away from the hideous beast, but in vain; he found his gaze drawn back uncontrollably. He felt even more subject to the fascination now that the crocodile's movements had ceased. The conviction was growing upon him that sooner or later he would slide down the branch and fall dreamily into the open jaws. He was fast becoming hypnotized.
But he was roused from this dangerous trancelike state by a sudden roll of the tree. Perched high as he was, the motion caused him to swing through an arc of several yards and brought him perilously near the water. The danger quickened his faculties: he clung on with a tighter grip, bethinking himself to look whether his fishing spear, which he had stuck into the bark, was still safe. He was relieved to find that it was undisturbed. The tree righted itself, and a gleam of hope lightened Samba's mind when he saw that the crocodile was in the water. Though, stretched on the trunk, the beast had felt the roll less than Samba above, it had a less tenacious grip and less ability to adapt itself; and first the tail, then the rest of its body had slid off. It was violently struggling to regain its position, its jaw resting on the trunk, its forepaws furiously beating the water.
The memory of the reptile's former difficulties in mounting inspired Samba with an idea, which, impelled equally by terror and hate, he was prompt to act upon. The tree was still rocking slightly before regaining its steadiness, and the crocodile, despite its efforts, was unable to gain a firm grip on the moving trunk. All its attention was engaged upon the accomplishment of its immediate purpose: it would lose the dainty morsel if it did not once more mount the tree. Samba was quick to seize the critical moment. Spear in hand he crept downwards along the branch on which he had been perched, careful that his movements should not divert the crocodile's attention. Reaching the junction of the branch with the parent stem, only five or six feet from the reptile, he let himself down noiselessly into the river on the far side of the tree, and swam for a second or two until he came opposite the crocodile. During these few seconds he had been hidden from the creature's view by the mass of the trunk, which rose out of the water to some height above his head.
The crocodile had now managed to get its forepaws on the tree, and in struggling to hoist itself its snout was raised almost upright, exposing the soft underside, the sole part in which it is vulnerable to anything except a very heavy bullet. Samba caught sight of the tip of the snout above the tree; here was the opportunity he had hoped for in making this hazardous experiment. Taking with his left hand a firm grip of a wart on the trunk, he raised himself in the water, and with the right hand drove his spear twice into the monster's throat. The crocodile made no sound; a lash of the powerful tail drove up a wave that caused the tree to rock violently: then the huge body slipped backwards into the water.
The moment he had driven his spear home Samba let go his hold on the tree, and trod water until the current brought the foliage to him. Then he drew himself nimbly up into the branch he had formerly occupied. He was breathless, and scarcely yet recovered from his scare; but there was no sign of the crocodile, and knowing that the reptile when mortally wounded sinks into deep water, he felt that his enemy had gone for ever. He heaved a deep sigh of relief, but chancing to look back, he noticed with a start of renewed dread that the water in the wake of the tree was faintly tinged with red. Was it possible that the crocodile, though wounded, was still following? He felt a shiver thrill through him, and, bending down from his perch, kept his eyes fixed in a stare on that ominous sanguine thread.
The minutes passed. Still the water showed that faint persistent tidge. Samba was becoming more and more nervous. Like the reptile's eyes but a little while ago, that line of red held his gaze in a strange fascination. He was still watching it when the tree suddenly gave a violent lurch, and turned half over. Samba, whose hold had relaxed in his nervousness, was flung off the branch into a clump of bushes at the side of the river, which here began to race rapidly through a deep gorge. Scratched and dazed by the fall he picked himself up slowly. He rubbed his eyes. What was this? He was in the midst of a group of pigmies, who were pointing excitedly, uttering their strange coughing cry, to the branches of the tree. In its lurch it had been turned almost completely round, so that the foliage formerly beneath the water was now uppermost. And there, firmly wedged in a fork of two boughs, lay the lifeless body of the crocodile.
The Bambute jabbered to Samba, stroked his arms, patted his back, examined the spear which, though it was broken in his fall, he had not let go. From the bank they had witnessed the boy's bold fight, and they had followed the course of the floating tree until it ran ashore on a jutting bed of rock. Samba made signs that he wished to pursue his journey on foot; but the Bambute shook their heads and grunted and carried him away with them. Once more he was a prisoner.
[[1]] Nothing wrong!