After the water—just enough to create a thirst—we trudged along, and forgot everything save the hunting. The sun blazed down and scorched us right through the thin stuff of our shirts. Blisters came on our hands and arms, and our skins tingled as though we had rolled in countless beds of nettles. But these things we only remembered afterwards; then we strained our eyes and ears, waded into streams, and pushed through rotten scrub in search of prey.
“We make much too plenty noise,” said our guide after a fruitless two hours’ search. “We must sit down and wait.”
So our party divided, and I went with the black man and squatted against the stump of a rotting tree overhanging the river and waited. Fortunately the hunter did not object to my pipe, and the smoke did something towards relieving me of the clouds of insect pests. Conversation was not permitted. My companion knelt motionless, his eyes straining riverwards; and I, inspired by his eagerness as well as by my own curiosity, watched also.
The spit of mud that separated us from the river was covered by a surface crust of grey-black sediment, hardened by the sun; from where we sat a double line of little pools filled with soft inky slime stretched to the water, and showed the direction of our coming. I examined the surface of mud bay, and noticed that ours was not the only spoor. Ten yards to my right I saw a place where very recently a heavy body had rested—a mark which might have been left if a tree trunk had been removed. I touched the black man on the shoulder and pointed to the spot. He grinned and nodded. Evidently the marks were familiar to him.
I placed my rifle across my knees and waited. The still water of the river showed a slight ripple here and there, and occasionally a splash would mark the place where a fish had risen to a fly. The glare and the strained attention tired my eyes, and I saw things through a slight mist. Once I saw the water dividing as something passed towards the shore, and I jerked my rifle to the shoulder. Then the moving strings of
water turned and ceased. And my companion scowled. The noise of a distant rifle-shot came like the muffled noise of a pop-gun, and then a green-black snout lifted itself above the water in midstream a few yards to our right. Behind the snout a long black body appeared, only partly submerged, and I made out the head and tail of an alligator. Slowly it drifted towards the mud patch on which we were waiting. Presently a long snout and a mud-encrusted head reached out of the water and rested on the bank, and our gruesome enemy was within easy reach of our guns. Not fifteen yards divided us. His little eyelids flickered like those of a nervous lizard, and his sinister jaws were open just wide enough to show the long line of white teeth. I brought my rifle round very slowly, and fired from where I sat. The alligator twisted with the swiftness of a cat and dived. I stood still and waited. The troubled water showed that he had been hit; I could mark the direction of his flight by the fury of his struggle. Once he lifted himself half out of the stream, and I fired again. The result was a mad plunge towards the shore on which we stood. I started back, but ere the beast found land, the water swirled again, and I knew that he had turned aside. I followed him with my eyes, and in midstream saw him churning the water with his tail and then plunging round in circles; then he dived to the right, and I saw him no more.
“Him gone now,” said my guide. “You should have waited until him come right up to the shore.”