Peck's Bad Boy in an airship

by George W. Peck

CHAPTER XII.

All Kinds of Climates in South Africa—Pa Hires Men to Capture Wild Animals—The Boy and His Pa Capture Some Tigers and a Big Lion—They Have a Narrow Escape from a Rhinoceros.

I don’t know whether I like the climate of South Africa or not, but you can have any kind of climate you are looking for, from the Alaska kind to the tropical kind, the same day.

I think it is the climate that makes all the animals so mad. One minute a lion or a tiger may be lolling with his tongue out, fighting flies and scratching fleas, and the next minute there are icicles on his moustache, and he has to crawl into a hole in the ground to keep from freezing.

These natives beat me. They do not wear any clothes except a doily, made of bark or grass, over their loins, and from the doily, above and below, their skin is bare, and they ought to be arrested for disorderly conduct and exposure, but their skin is thick and warty like a rhinoceros, and when it freezes it looks like pickled pigs’ feet.

One man we have hired to help capture animals is a native chief with sixty wives, and he has brought them all to camp with him, and we have to feed them, and it is rumored the women all have their caps set for Pa, if the husband dies, and Pa is afraid they will kill their old man and select Pa to fill the vacancy, that being the unwritten law that a man’s wives can select a husband.

Gee, if I had to be a stepson to all those sixty senegambians that look like monkeys in the face and when on dress parade like oxen, I should die, or they would, if I could find chloroform enough to go around.

Well, Pa is trying his best to save the life of that husband of the sixty wives, and every time one of the wives pats Pa on the back or chucks him under the chin he has a chill, and I know he will do something desperate if they get after him in flocks.

I suppose I ought not to have done it, but I told one of the wives who understands a little English that Pa liked to be hugged and squeezed, and held on the girls’ laps, so when we get through work at night and sit around the camp fire they take turns holding Pa on their laps, and he thinks one of the women broke one of his ribs hugging him, cause they are strong as giants, and have a terrible squeeze.

I told one of them she could make herself solid with Pa if she could get him a nice long snake, so she went off into the jungle alone and came back dragging a snake more than twenty feet long, and put it in Pa’s tent when he was asleep. When Pa woke up in the morning and found the snake coiled upon his blanket he threw a fit and went to the doctor and got some medicine for chills and fever, and we put the snake into a cage to sell to a menagerie.