Though Chunky and his friends were used to being tossed about in the river, when they played tag and other water games, this motion of the ship was different. It made some of the animals seasick, and the lion, especially, was quite sad and miserable. He grumbled and growled, but he was too sick to roar, and Chunky, too, did not feel as well as when he had been carried through the jungle in the vine cage.
“Still, I suppose I might be worse,” thought the hippo. “I might have nothing to eat or be chased by a crocodile,” and he sort of looked down cross-eyed at his nose, which was scarred by the teeth of the crocodile that had bit Chunky.
Indeed Chunky and the other animals had all they wanted to eat, and were kindly treated, for the men who had bought them from the black hunters wanted the animals to be well and strong when they were taken off the ship. So Chunky, Short Tooth, Gimpy and all the rest were well treated, though of course they were not allowed to go around loose.
On and on steamed the big ship with its load of animals. There was nothing much Chunky could do except eat and sleep and drink water. He wanted a bath, but there seemed to be no way of giving him one.
However, one day, as an animal man passed along the deck and looked in at the hippos, he saw that their skin was very dry and that it was getting hard and cracking open.
“That will never do!” he said to the captain. “We must fix it so the hippos can have a bath.”
“How can we?” asked another animal man.
“Very easily,” put in the captain. “I’ll get a big wooden tank up on deck. We can pump it full of sea water from a hose and let the hippos have a bath in it.”
“That will be just the thing for them!” said the animal man. “Get a tank for the hippos.”