The poor brute struggled, her tail crooked with agony, her two fore-feet stuck out, and bellowing most lustily, whilst the alligator hacked rapidly towards the water, dragging the cow along with him.
“Quick! quick!” shouted Augustus, as the servant blundered along, capsizing a bucket or two in his hurry, and handed up the gun.
“Click,” went the lock—the rifle was pointed, but it was too late: the scaly monster sunk with his prey, as the bullet cracked sharply over the eddy; a few bubbles and a slight curl of the deep waters alone marking the spot where the poor cow had disappeared in a doleful tragedy—her last appearance in public.
“What a ferocious monster!” I exclaimed; “do they often carry away animals in this way?”
“Oh, yes,” replied Augustus, vexed that he had been foiled. “Alligators in the salt and brackish waters of the lower parts of Bengal are dangerous and ferocious; but as you recede from the sea, for some reason or another, they become comparatively harmless, and seldom molest man or beast, confining their depredations to the finny tribe. Near my factory they are continually carrying off the villagers from the ghauts, and I have heard and believe, though I have never witnessed a case, that they sometimes adroitly knock the fishermen from off their dingies by a blow of the tail, and then snap them up in a moment.”
“Why do not the people hunt and destroy the brutes?” I asked.
“They require more salt to be put upon their tails than your sparrows at home,” said Augustus with a roguish smile, which made me think that he had been cognizant of an early attempt of mine in that way. “However,” he continued, “after a good many poor devils have been carried off, blacky’s apathy is a little disturbed, and he does sometimes catch them in the following manner. A party row slowly up the stream, dragging a number of hooked lines after them; when these are arrested by the horny hide of the alligator, as he lies in the mud at the bottom, they slowly raise the torpid brute (who seldom makes any resistance) till he appears above the surface; they then simultaneously dart a number of small barbed harpoons into him, to the heads of which (whence the shafts are made to detach easily) stout cords are fastened, and thus they secure his body; to prevent his doing mischief with his jaws, they present a stick, and when he seizes it with a snap, they belay a cord round those formidable instrument of destruction.”
After the crew had refreshed, we pursued our voyage, plunging into the dreary solitude, intersected by a labyrinth of creeks and rivers; on each side arose a wall of forest, with a thick undergrowth of the most luxuriant vegetation, springing from the fat alluvial soil.
The silence of death was around, broken only at intervals by the distant crow of the jungle fowl, the cry of the deer, or the blowing of a porpoise, and the measured dash of our oars, as we swept along, sometimes on the surface of a broad river, with bright green trees on each side, and black-faced monkeys chattering in the branches; at others, in some lateral creek, where the boughs almost brushed our deck.
There is something solemnly impressive in such a scene, which seems truly to speak in majestic tones of the power and greatness of the Creator. Such a scene in the howling wilderness carries the imagination back to that primeval period when man was not on this earth, when shipless seas broke on voiceless shores, and the mammoth and the mastodon roamed undisturbed amongst its silent forests and lonely retreats.