01 Amazon Adventure (22 page)

Hal would have liked the cheer and warmth of a camp fire. But there were two good reasons for not making a fire: (1) the Indians might see it; (2) the matches were on the Ark.

So Hal, quite forlorn and miserable, and humiliated by his failure to find food, crawled into his hammock. He was discovering how grim the Amazon can be to those who meet it unprepared.

There was something a little terrifying about barging through the darkness at the mercy of a strong current. What if his hurrying half acre should crash into a point, or a fixed island? He tried to tell himself that it was not very likely. His craft was carried by the current, and the current goes around things, not into them. A lone Indian who wanted to travel night and day, but must get some sleep, would tie his canoe to a floating island and wake up in the morning to find himself some thirty miles further downstream.

It suddenly struck Hal that night travel gave him one great advantage over Croc. Croc would doubtless stop and camp every night. Knowing so little of the river, he would hardly sail it in the dark. Hal listened to the jungle roar. Sometimes it was far away and he knew that they were miles from the shore. Then it would grow louder and louder as they approached a cape or a large island, and die away as they left it behind. Once as they brushed the shore, the thundering voice of a jaguar not fifty feet away raised the hair on his scalp. He prayed fervently that the beast had not stepped out upon the floating island.

The biggest scare of the night came when the island scraped over a sandbar and the tree, with its lower branches rubbing on the bottom, began to revolve like a millwheel. Hal had visions of being neatly drowned if the branches to which the hammocks were fastened rolled under. Before this could happen the tree was in deep water and righted itself.

Hal gave up the idea of getting any sleep. He had no sooner done so than he slept, and did not wake until the sun looked in on him.

He scanned the horizon for the Ark, but there was no sign of it.

A faint call came from Roger. Hal climbed through the tree to his brother’s hammock. Roger, half asleep, was calling for a drink of water. Hal put his hand on the boy’s forehead. The patient seemed a little better.

Roger opened his eyes. He looked about him dully for a moment — then his eyes popped as he saw the swift river and flying shoreline.

‘Hey, what’s going on? How did we get here? Where’s the Ark?’

Tm glad you’re well enough to ask questions,’ Hal said, and told him all that had happened.

Roger tried to rise but gave it up. Tm as weak as a cat. Say, how about some breakfast?’

‘You really are better,’ said Hal with satisfaction. ‘But as for breakfast — I’m afraid there will be a slight delay. I’ll see what I can do.’

He went out into his half acre, determined to make it yield up food and water.

One dare not drink water straight from the river except at the risk of typhoid and dysentery. It must be boiled. But how to boil water without any pan or tea-kettle, and without any fire?

Then he saw his tea-kettle. A joint of bamboo would do the trick. He went to the clump of bamboos and selected one that would not be too hard to cut with his hunting knife. He cut just below one ring and about eight inches above it. At each ring was a partition closing off the hollow interior. So Hal now had a pot three inches in diameter and eight inches deep. If what he had read was true, this pot would not burn when filled with water and placed over a fire.

But how about the fire? The first thing to do was to gather together something that would burn. Everything he touched was wet with last night’s rain and this morning’s dew.

Then he thought of the tree in which they spent the night. He took off some of the seed pods, each about twice as large as a walnut. He broke open the shells and found plenty of dry, fluffy cotton, the kapok used for mattresses. This would do nicely as tinder.

Then he cut through the wet bark of the tree. Sure enough the inside layers were dry. There was a plentiful supply of this material, and he piled all he could use upon the tinder.

Now he needed only flint and steel and he could make a fire. The blade of his knife was steel — but he had no flint. A stone might do. He searched his half acre but found not a single stone. The truth is that stones are almost non-existent in the Amazon flood plain. So the flint-and-steel idea was no good.

Well, he would use the fire-thong method.

Primitive man had made fire that way — so could he. He found a piece of dry rattan that would do as a thong. He planted a stick slantwise in the ground, slit the end of it, put a little tinder into the slit, and then set to work drawing the thong rapidly back and forth in contact with the tinder.

The friction should make the tinder break into flame. It didn’t.

In the South Seas, where he hoped to go, the islanders used the ‘fire plough’. A groove was made in a piece of dry wood and a stick was moved back and forth in the groove so fast that the wood dust broke into flame. Hal rubbed vigorously for half an hour. Nothing broke, except his patience.

He stood with his hands in his pockets, puzzling over the problem. His right hand toyed with something round and flat. He drew it out absent-mindedly and looked at it. It was a lens that he had removed from his camera when he had substituted a telephoto.

‘That will do it!’ he exulted, and held the lens so that the rays of the sun passed through it and came to a point upon the tinder. In two minutes he had a fire.

Roger smelled the smoke. ‘Lucky you had matches,’ he said.

‘I didn’t have any matches.’

‘Gee whiz, don’t tell me you made a fire without matches! You’re getting pretty smart. What did you do, use a fire drill?’

‘No,’ admitted Hal. ‘A Bausch and Lomb Tessar f 4.5. Afraid I’m not such a hot woodsman.’

‘Never mind,’ said Roger. Tm betting on you.’

Hal boiled the water, cooled it, and he and Roger drank.

But they were both hungry. Hal tried plaiting a fishline from grasses, but they broke. Then he discovered a rough piece of driftwood caught on the fringe of the island. Fibres like coarse hair clung to it. It must be the trunk of a piassava tree. This fibre was sold to North America and Europe to be made into brooms and brushes, ropes and cables. If it was good enough for that, surely it would do for a fishline.

While Hal was at work on the line he heard a chattering sound and looked up. A monkey looked down at him from a branch of the tree. Hal seized the weapon that had proved so useless in spearing fish and threw it in approved Indian fashion. It speared the monkey, which fell into Hal’s hands. This was luck.

He postponed completing the fishline and immediately skinned the monkey. He laid aside some bones that would make good fish-hooks. He kept also a number of sinews. They could be used as leaders to fasten the hooks to the line. Then he roasted the monkey over the fire and breakfast was served. The fact that the time was nearly noon made the breakfast only more delicious.

Hal finished his line, attached a monkey-bone hook by a monkey sinew, fastened on monkey’s knuckle bones as weights, baited the hook with monkey meat, and began to fish.

Presently he felt a strong tug on the line and he had immediate prospects of a fish dinner. He pulled up the fish and was astonished to find that it was only a few inches long. He was still more surprised when, upon grasping it to take it off the hook, it began to grow within his hand. It became too big for his hand, too big for both hands, and reached the size of a football.

He showed the curiosity to Roger. Roger tossed it against a branch and it bounced back like any well-behaved ball. Hal pierced it with the point of his hunting knife and it collapsed like a toy balloon. ‘What’s the idea of blowing itself up?’ To frighten its enemies. Just the way a bird in a fight will fluff out its feathers, spread its wings, and raise its crest. Lots of animals act that way. It’s animal nature and human nature. Plenty of men pretend to be bigger and more formidable than they really are.’

He tossed the fish back into the water, knowing it to be poisonous.

His next catch put up a strong fight before he could get it out.

‘It’s a snake!’ Roger exclaimed, as six feet of writhing fury rose into the air at the end of the line.

‘An eel,’ Hal corrected.

But even Hal did not know that it was an eel of the electric variety until he took hold of it. He promptly let go again and slumped down in the grass, a violent pain coursing through every joint. The island faded out. When he came to, Roger was kneeling beside him.

‘You scared me half to death,’ Roger said. ‘What struck you?’

Hal could not speak at once. He saw the eel lying in the grass. Roger was too close to it for safety. Hal tried to warn him, but the words would not come.

Roger, squatting on his heels, presently got his rear in contact with the eel. He brushed it only lightly and his trousers protected him, but nevertheless he went up into the air with a yell of pain. He didn’t need to ask again what had struck Hal.

The paralysis disappeared gradually, but Hal’s joints ached all the rest of the day.

With the true zeal of the collector, he resolved to take home this living storage battery. In the ground he dug a pit which filled with water. Using dry sticks, he pushed the eel into the pit.

That will take care of it for the time being,’ he said.

He got Roger back into his hammock. The electric shock had not helped the convalescent.

Too bad it isn’t a cure for malaria,’ Hal said. The Indians use it as treatment for rheumatism. And two of the big hospitals in North America send planes down here to collect electric eels for use in medical experiments.’

‘How much of a shock do you think you got from that thing?’

1 don’t know. But they’ve measured the voltage and found that the average eel packs a wallop of three hundred volts.’

The bigger the eel, the bigger the wallop, I suppose.’

‘Not always. They tell of one eel only forty inches long that had an electromotive force of five hundred volts.’

‘Is that enough to kill you?’ ‘Well, perhaps not. But if you were in the water it would be enough to paralyse you so that you would drown. A good many cattle and horses have died that way. Humans too.’

If we ever get to the Ark, how are you going to carry this thing on board?’

‘I’ve been wondering about that myself,’ Hal said thoughtfully. ‘Of course an electric eel doesn’t have to shoot the works if he doesn’t want to. The discharge is entirely voluntary. It’s set off by a little trigger in his brain. It’s just possible that if he were handled very, very gently he wouldn’t turn on his dynamo.’

‘You’d be taking an awful chance.’

‘You’re right.’ Hal’s forehead kinked. ‘If I could just remember — I saw an electric eel taken apart one time in the Rockefeller laboratory. The thing that sets off the discharge is a nerve that runs all the way from the brain to the tip of the tail. If you cut that nerve anywhere, then only the part of the eel between that point and the head can shock you. You can take hold of the tail.’

‘And when you try this little experiment,’ said Roger, ‘be sure to give me a seat with a good view. That’s something I want to see.’

‘No time like the present,’ said Hal, and he promptly staged the act. Taking his knife, which fortunately had a nonconductive wooden handle, he made a quick, light slash on the eel’s back six inches forward of the tail. Then he touched the tail, and felt nothing. He took hold of it, lifted the eel into the air, and dropped it back into the pit.

‘Operation successful.’

Hal returned to his fishing and in due course pulled out a paiche. When he opened its mouth, several dozen tiny fish spilled out — for the paiche is the extraordinary fish that carries its young in its mouth. A very good precaution, thought Hal, in a river as full of voracious creatures as the Amazon. Particularly the dogfish loves to feed upon paiche small fry — and as soon as the dog-faced brute comes into the neighbourhood the little fellows make a dash for mother, who opens her capacious mouth to receive them. The big paiche made a very satisfactory evening meal.

The next day Hal saw a distant canoe and waved and shouted and even considered firing Croc’s cartridge as a signal. The men in the canoe did not see the figure on the floating island.

Far more distressing was the event of the day following, when the Ark itself was sighted, moored to the shore. The island serenely sailed by it at a distance of a mile. Hal might possibly have swum to it in spite of a river full of teeth, but Roger certainly could not. There was nothing to do but sail on.

Croc was not visible — possibly he was in the woods foraging for the menagerie. How would he know what to feed the animals? If Hal did not get back to them soon, half of them would be dead. Or suppose Croc did know how to take care of them? Suppose he got them safely to Manaos and on board a steamer and away? Suppose Hal had to go home empty-handed?

Once you started supposing it was hard to stop. Suppose he, too, came down with fever, by turns delirious and unconscious, and they both lay helpless in their hammocks until one of the terrific squalls for which the rainy season was famous broke up their island or rolled the tree over and fed them to the fishes.

The next morning Hal awoke to find that his island home was no longer travelling. At least, it was not travelling downstream. It had washed into a bay, and a back eddy was slowly carrying it around and around.

This was maddening. The Ark under full sail would speed by and be lost to him while he doddered around this bay. Every time the floating island came to the mouth of the bay he tried to pole or paddle it out into the main stream, but it was far too big a ship for one sailor to manage. The wind was upstream this morning and exerted just enough pressure on the high branches of the tree to push the mass back into the bay for another round.

Then Hal, looking up river, saw the Ark. It was not under sail. That surprised him — then the reason occurred to him. The same upriver wind that had pushed the island into the bay was making it impossible for Croc to use his sail. The Ark merely drifted with the current.