“Have a care! look! Avast! A bite’ll be death, an’ no mistake!” cried Disco, pointing to the reptiles.
Harold fired at once and brought them both down, and the natives, attacking them with sticks, soon killed them.
“No fear,” said Antonio, with a chuckle. “Dem not harm nobody, though ums ugly an’ big enough.”
This was true. They were a couple of pythons, and the larger of the two, a female, was ten feet long; but the python is a harmless creature.
While they were talking, smoke was observed to rise from an isolated clump of long grass and bushes not far from the banks of the river, much to the annoyance of Kambira, who feared that the fire might spread and scare away the game. It was confined, however, to the place where it began, but it had the effect of driving out a solitary buffalo that had taken refuge in the cover. Jumbo chanced to be most directly in front of the infuriated animal when it burst out, and to him exclusively it directed its attentions.
Never since Jumbo was the size of Obo had that laughter-loving savage used his lithe legs with greater energy than on this occasion. An ostrich might have envied him as he rushed towards the river, into which he sprang headlong when the buffalo was barely six feet behind him.
Of course Harold fired, as well as Disco, and both shots told, as also a spear from Kambira, nevertheless the animal turned abruptly on seeing Jumbo disappear, and charged furiously up the bank, scattering its enemies right and left. Harold fired again at little more than fifty yards off, and heard the bullet thud as it went in just behind the shoulder, yet strange to say, it seemed to have no other effect than to rouse the brute to greater wrath, and two more bullets failed to bring him down.
This toughness of the buffalo is by no means uncommon, but different animals vary much in their tenacity of life. Some fall at once to the first well-directed shot; others die hard. The animal the hunters were now in pursuit of, or rather which was in pursuit of the hunters, seemed to be of the latter class. Harold fired another shot from behind a tree, having loaded with a shell-bullet, which exploded on hitting the creature’s ribs. It fell, much to the satisfaction of Disco, of whom it happened to be in pursuit at the time. The seaman at once stopped and began to reload, and the natives came running forward, when Antonio, who had climbed a tree to be out of harm’s way, slipped down and ran with great bravery up to the prostrate animal.
Just as he reached it the buffalo sprang up with the activity of a cat, and charged him. Antonio turned and ran with such rapidity that his little legs became almost invisible, like those of a sparrow in a hurry. He gained a tree, and had just time to climb into it when the buffalo struck it like a battering-ram, hard enough almost to have split both head and tree. It paused a few seconds, drew back several paces, glared savagely at Antonio, and then charged again and again, as if resolved either to shake him out of the tree, or give itself a splitting headache, but another shell from Harold, who could hardly take aim for laughing, stretched the huge animal dead upon the ground. Altogether, it took two shells and five large solid rifle-balls to finish him.
“That wos a pretty good spurt,” said Disco, panting, as he joined Harold beside the fallen beast. “It’s well-known that a starn chase is a long ’un, but this would have been an exception to the rule if you hadn’t shot him, sir. He pretty nigh made short work o’ me. He was a’most aboard of me w’en you fired.”