Then he brushed at the flies trying to land on his gashed head, and he was into the green maze. But not for long. It struck him after a few minutes that he was not going to catch anything here except through sheer luck. He did not have the strength or patience now to look for a long time and, having found, to wait, to creep up slowly, to hurl himself, or his knife, at the last moment. He did try to entice a few curious monkeys close enough to him to throw his knife, but they refused to be attracted, even though he went through all sorts of antics to draw them near.
He went back through the jungle toward the river and once stopped to listen to a strange sound. Then he realized that it was Eeva moving about in the brush near the point where he had left her. He went on and presently was squatting behind a bush and peering out at the mud of the gently sloping riverbank. If the season had not already ended, he would have gone out to look for buried crocodile eggs.
The only life in sight was a kingfisher on a branch projecting from a tree near the water on the opposite bank. Ras called out softly, "O mamago, mamago, mamago!" This was the Wantso word for crocodile, which Ras hoped would go out over the waters and to the flesh-buried ears of a crocodile and so bring him to the caller. But when, after a half hour, no saurian appeared, he began to use the Sharrikt word. This was Sharrikt territory, and it was to be presumed that crocodiles would respond better to a familiar language.
"Tishshush! Tishshush! Tishshush!" he said softly. After a while, he left his hiding place and went down to the water. He dipped his hand in the water and cupped it up and poured it over the wound on his head. When the blood was leaking again, he bent his head into the water and let some of the blood flow out into the river. It was dissolved swiftly, but he knew that it was being carried downstream, and that even this dilution would not be weak enough to sieve unnoticed through the nostrils of a crocodile within half a mile or perhaps more. After a few minutes he raised his head from the river and let the sun dry out the hair and the wound. Flies buzzed around his head as if he were dead or dying, and when they found that he did not swat at them, they settled down on the wound as if he were dead. He lay on his front with his head turned so he could see downstream, and his right hand held the knife by his right thigh. When the stinging of the flies in the raw flesh seemed unendurable, and he was considering giving up, he saw the water at the bend of the river bulge brownly, divide, and slide off in two directions. The nostrils, like emptied eyes, and the knobs, like nostrils containing the eyes, were briefly broadside, and then he could see only the blunt, almost square, snout thrusting through the water straight toward him.
He watched it through half-closed eyes and, knowing crocodiles, was not surprised when it was suddenly gone, as if dissolved into the water. If intelligence was a firmament, and a man's skull housed many stars, the skull of a crocodile was a dark, dull arch containing only a few tiny, coldly flaming stars. But there were enough to shed some light, and the crocodile was not dumb enough to charge straight at the seeming corpse on the bank. It would approach stealthily, under water, suddenly emerge at a point so close that the human, even if playing dead, would be surprised and would, soon enough, be not playing. Or so it seemed to Ras.
He shifted enough so that he could see the crocodile when it would come up out of the water, knowing that, if he could not see it in the brownish waters, it could not see him while he was moving. So it was that he did not start when the water a few feet from him boiled and then reared up and hurtled in two parts down the head and back of the crocodile. He did not move until the long snout and many teeth were only three feet away from him. They moved swiftly; old Mamago looked slow as butter on a cold winter morning, but he was not slow when he was warm, and the sun was hot at this moment. He came up out of the water as if the river were suddenly rejecting a diseased portion of itself, as if it were vomiting the loathsomeness. Through his half-closed eyes, Ras saw the darker brown of the crocodile hump out of the lighter brown. Then the bellow followed, and, immediately thereafter, a shadow fell on him. Hot on the tail of the shadow was the bulk of the reptile. Water cast by the beast splashed and fell coolly on his arm and head. The jaws, which had been a few inches above him, lowered as the beast drove them into the mud with the intent of digging them in and under so it could catch Ras's arm or shoulder between the two jaws.
Ras moved then. He rolled away just a little; the jaws slammed shut with a clinking almost like that of metal. The left eye was even with his head; its lidless, slit-pupiled fishbelly-fleshed eye slid by. He rolled back then toward the crocodile, because he did not intend to let the tail break his bones. The five-toed paw hissed as it went by his nose and slammed into the mud, spraying mud on his chin. The crocodile bellowed again as it began to turn away from him and then at once turned toward him. Its snaky motion may have been designed to act as a brake. Whatever its reason for writhing, it continued on in the mud, digging a main trough with its body and four smaller ones, two on each side, with its paws.
As the foreleg went by, Ras continued his roll and brought his right arm, the knife in the right hand, up and over the back of the animal. He clamped down on it and then was dragged forward. His other arm came up and squeezed down on the juncture of leg and body. This grip enabled him to pull himself up to the point where he could throw his right leg up over the body. By then, the crocodile had managed to halt its forward motion.
It was possible that the animal did not know where the dead-meat-suddenly-come-to-life had gone. Ras did not think so. Though the hide on the upper part of a crocodile looks as dead and unfeeling as any armor, it must be sensitive to pressures. But it was possible that the beast did not feel Ras on it because it did not think of such a possibility.
Whatever the reason for its immobility, it remained still for perhaps thirty seconds. Ras waited like a fly that has settled down on a fresh wound but expects the swatting hand. He expected anything, including an effort to roll over on its back and so crush him. And what might have happened then was up to chance or to the behavior the beast had established, although that might not have governed it, since it was in a situation new to it.
New to Ras, too, who knew that he wanted to get the beast on its back so he could stick the knife into the relatively soft underpart, but at this moment did not know how he was going to do it.
Ras could hear his own breathing, a faint rasp, and the loud grumble of the crocodile and the yayaya of the kingfisher, now a blur of dark blue against light blue and ascending upward and at a tangent, a stone from the sling of terror. Then he heard the chuttering, which he would have heard long before this if the crocodile and kingfisher had not been so noisy.
The copter came around the bend with a flashing of sun and a roar. The crocodile bellowed, rose up on its legs, its decision made for it, turned, and ran toward the water. Ras clung to it for reasons that he was able to analyze only later. He could have fallen off and then jumped up and run for the shrubbery, but the men in the copter would surely have seen him. If he stayed on the back of the beast, he might not be seen. Or, if seen, not believed. The men in the machine would surely think they were mistaken, that the sun had played tricks on their eyes. What would a man be doing riding the back of a crocodile?
Stronger than this was the stubbornness and hunger of Ras. If he let the crocodile get away from him now, it would not be back. And he and Eeva had to eat.
The crocodile went into the water with a lurch and splash that almost unseated him with its force. It went under the surface and dived deeply at once, but, just before the waters collapsed over his head, Ras saw the machine dropping toward him. Then he was hanging on most comradely to the reptile, with one arm around its neck. This situation lasted for perhaps ten seconds, after which he slid around and under the body and began to drive his knife into the belly. It was not easy, because the water softened the blows; he had to overcome the resistance of liquid and armor-plate hide. But the knife did go in, and now the beast rolled over and over in an effort to throw him off. Presently, it had succ
eeded; despite all his frenzy, Ras could not hang on and was lost in water that was black with absence of sun and with blood from a dying reptile.
He did not believe the Wantso story that the crocodile could smell its prey under water, but it must be able to hear through water. For this reason, he stroked slowly, not away from the beast, though he had no way to know which direction was which, but toward where he hoped the beast would be. A little fright was near him but not touching him, and panic was even more distant. He was angry because he had lost his food, and he did not intend to let it go. Nevertheless, he felt as if the beast were moving toward him from his rear or coming up from the blackness below or perhaps even from the blackness above. He had to restrain himself from turning around and around, one arm extended as a feeler to detect the crocodile or perhaps the movement of water pushed ahead by its body. Six strokes, and he touched with the fingertips of his left hand the knobbled hide. He broke the sweep of his hand to bring it back into touch, but it went unopposed. The beast had gone to left or right, up or down. A sweep around and a slant down or up (he did not know which) touched only more water.
By then, he had to have air. After a few strokes, his ears hurt; he turned and went in what he hoped was the opposite direction. If he were going at only a slight slant, and not directly at right angles to the river bottom, he would soon drown.
It seemed that he would have to breathe and so die, when he saw the black become brown. A few more strokes and kicks brought him through brown to yellow and then to the white of the sun, bright blue of sky, harsh green of trees on the brownish-yellow mud. And a reddish-brown cloud drifting to the surface from that black world below. The copter was out of sight around the bend, its chutter becoming fainter. The kingfisher was on a branch about thirty yards upstream and braying indignantly. The river smelled fishy and reptilian and clayey, and faintly of dead wood and soaked leaves. There was also a very weak scent, ghost of a puff of stink, of reptile blood, and of bird crap in the water. Ras had always thought--no one had told him--that birds and reptiles were somehow linked closely. The monstrous, heavy-armored crocodile and the light, beautiful-feathered kingfisher were cousins and could claim as grandfather some squat cold-blood living in the days just after Creation. Now he knew it even more strongly. The bird crap was assuredly not only that of a bird; it was the crocodile's as much as the blood was the crocodile's. But it was also a bird's.
Presently, as Ras trod water, floating downstream, and regained his breath for a second dive, he saw the blood boiling a few feet upstream become even darker. Then whiteness showed in the heart of the black, and the belly, pale as the eyeball of a man, lifted water and blood aside as it heaved up from under. The four legs stuck a little in the air, as if the crocodile were indicating that it had given up--do with me what you will.
Ras had to work hard to row the beast into the bank and harder to drag the two hundred and fifty or so pounds up onto the mud and then into the bush. He was weakened by the blow on the head the night before, by lack of food, and the excitement and stress of the fight with the beast. While he was heaving and hauling and puffing, he heard several bellows from down-river. They became stronger as the reptiles followed the liquid winds of blood.
Always, every moment, he had to make a choice. Deciding which way to go, which thing to take, actually created time. Without the necessity of picking this or that course of action above others, he would not know time. He would be suspended in forever.
Now he either had to drag the crocodile with much labor through the jungle to higher land, where he could butcher and cook it in relative comfort and safety, or he could prepare it here, where leopard, crocodile, or scavenger could approach him in any direction and where, if he built a fire, the smoke might bring the Sharrikt, who were only a few miles away, or might attract the copter.
He wanted to eat a big meal now and smoke enough meat to keep them going for several days. The large animals, crocodiles, buffaloes, elephants, hippos, and leopards were not as easy to kill as they were to find. And they were not easy to find.
The bellows and rumbles became closer, and soon the brown-gray snout of a bull crocodile appeared, and then the long, tapering bulk suspended on the four short legs moved slowly into view from the brush. Ras did not expect any of the great reptiles to attack him, but it was possible that one might lose its fear when the odor of blood from the butchering became too much for it. He shrugged and began the task of hoisting the body onto his shoulder, preparatory to walking off with it. Once on his shoulder, it sagged before and after him, the snout digging into the mud before him and the tail dragging in the mud behind him. He had to lift it so he could get the snout clear, and this required an effort that he knew he could not keep up for long. Moreover, branches of trees, vines, and bushes seemed to want the carcass even more than he did. After a few yards of stopping to tear the body loose and twice almost falling down with the heavy body on top of him, he eased it to the ground. Thereafter he dragged it by the tail.
Eeva was sitting on a decaying, punky tree trunk and weeping. At her feet was a mass of white worms and grubs, still squirming, half-squashed beetles with kicking legs, a pale-green-and-bright-red-spotted tree frog whose bulging eyes looked as if she had choked it to death, and a brownish lizard on its back, its legs sticking up, its belly whitish. It looked like a miniature and short-snouted version of the beast Ras was dragging into the little clearing.
"I'm crying because I feel sorry for myself," she said. "To be in such a pitiable state that this disgusting mess almost looks appetizing. To eat this... this!"
Her shoulders shook with her sobs.
Ras said, "You ought to be crying with joy because you were lucky enough to get all this. I'm happy. If I'd come back without this, we would have had to eat your catch and we would've been glad to have it."
He let the tail fall with a flop on the wet earth. Eeva quit weeping and asked him what had happened. Although she could see the bloody wounds on its belly, she seemed to think that he had found it dead on the riverbank and that it might be in the last stages of decay. She said that she had heard the copter, of course, and had been terrified that he might be seen. But when it had kept on its course without hesitation, she had known that he was safe.
"Safe!" Ras said. "I rode that crocodile into the river and went to the bottom with him, and then he dislodged me, and Igziyabher only knows what would have happened after that if I had not been lucky! I kill a crocodile with a knife in dark and deep waters, and you say that I was safe! All this meat, good meat, and you think nothing of it!"
"I'm really sorry," she said, but she did not sound as if she meant it. "I know that it must have been a heroic feat, and any other time I'd want to hear all about it. But I'm so tired and hungry that nothing but food excites me."
"Then you ought to be coming with joy," he said. "There's enough meat here to ground a flock of vultures for weeks."
He had changed his mind about dragging the beast up to the foot of the hills and there butchering it. He would cut out as many steaks as both could carry, wrap them in the leaves, and then walk to the hills. While he cut and sawed with his knife, she staggered off to collect the leaves. From time to time, he sliced a thick piece of the dark meat from a steak and ate it raw and bloody. By the time he was finished, he was stronger than when he had started.
Eeva, to his surprise, did not refuse to eat the raw meat he offered her. She had some trouble chewing it to her satisfaction and made several faces, but when she had downed the first piece, she asked for more.
Ras put the tree frog and lizard in leaves, and they started off toward the hills. By noon they were at the foot of the hills, and a half hour later they were on a ledge of rock halfway up a cliff. Pieces of fur and excrement and the chewed and cracked bones of small animals, plus a hangover of stink, told Ras that baboons used this place at night. The thrust of rock overhead made a shelter that could be leopard-proof if the baboon sentries were brave enough, and they usually were.
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nbsp; Eeva, hearing this, became worried, but he told her that the place could just as well be defended by two humans against baboons, and that they wouldn't be likely to try anything anyway, especially with a fire going. Besides, baboons did not make bad eating.
Ras had hesitated about building a fire, because the Sharrikt might be searching for him. But it seemed to him that it was unlikely that Gilluk and the others would be out in force after him. He did not think that they had enough men left after the battle near the river's mouth. What their casualties had been he did not know, but they must have been relatively devastating. The machine-gun fire from the copter had hit every boat, or almost every one. The total number of male Sharrikt, the divine ones, the aristocracy, was about twenty, and he had killed two before he escaped from the castle. Surely, at least half of the eighteen had been killed or wounded. The survivors would think of vengeance, of course, but they would be in no position to do much about it at this time. The burning of the castle and the town, and the deaths of so many Sharrikt males, would present problems demanding all of Gilluk's energies for some time. He was the king, the keeper of his people, and as such he had to take care of them.
Besides, even if there was a chance that they would be in this neighborhood and looking for the refugees, Ras wanted to build a fire and cook the meat. He just did not feel like putting in another cold and shivery night, and he seemed to have lost his taste for raw flesh.