01 Amazon Adventure (5 page)

Then there was a deep grumbling cough. Instantly all other noise was hushed. That was the honour accorded to the tigre, king of the forest.

An earsplitting yell broke the silence.

Dad woke with a start and turned on his flashlight. Again that wild yell. It seemed to be Roger’s voice.

Both dad and Hal beamed their lights on the trail. They fully expected to see Roger in the jaws of a tigre. But there was no sign of either animal or boy.

‘Help! Help!’ screeched Roger’s voice. The lights swept around and focused him.

He had gone stark, staring mad. He was doing a combination of the samba and the Highland fling, and splitting the welkin with his cries. He clawed himself furiously, tearing off his shirt and trousers and, quite naked, continued to leap and prance, slapping and grabbing at different parts of his anatomy.

‘Hey, can’t you do something?’ he wailed.

John Hunt climbed out of his hammock, chuckling.

‘I think you’ve found just the right thing to do,’ he said. ‘Dance boy, dance!’

He played his light along the ground.

‘There they go. Get out of their line of march.’

A black band was moving across the ground. It was about a foot wide. The procession seemed to have no end in either direction.

‘What are they?’ asked Hal.

‘Army ants. Sometimes they make a procession a mile long. They eat everything that comes in their way — boys included. See the officers.’

Along the edges of the column were ants that did not march steadily forward with the others, but kept running back and forth as if to keep the privates in tine.

He went to the fireplace and got a stick that still glowed at one end.

‘All right, Roger. Here comes the doctor. But I hope you won’t think that the remedy is worse than the disease.’

With difficulty Roger stood still as his father went over him, applying the hot coal to the rear ends of ants which had sunk their enormous pincers into his flesh. The ants thus attacked from behind relaxed their hold and dropped off.

Roger’s wild antics had already broken off many of the bodies, leaving the heads and jaws firmly transfixed in the flesh. More drastic means had to be used to dislodge these. They must be picked out with the point of a knife. Then the wounds were spotted with merthiolate until Roger looked like a pink-and-white leopard, or perhaps an Indian in his war paint.

‘But how did they get at you in the hammock?’ his father asked.

Roger was sheepish. ‘Well, I wasn’t in the

hammock. I fell out. I was too sleepy to get back in, and anyhow the ground felt better than the old hammock. But I can’t understand why they didn’t go after Napo.’

They hadn’t thought of Napo. They played their lights on the spot where he should have been. There was a little mound of fresh earth and the ants streamed over it. The experienced Napo had gone completely underground.

Roger fingered his wounds. ‘How those fellows can bite!’

‘Did you know that the Indians use an ant of that sort to stitch wounds? They make the ant bite the edges of the wound together. Then they cut off the ant’s body. The jaws stay locked and keep the wound closed until it heals.’

‘An Indian village must have a merry time of it when one of these armies bears down upon it,’ Hal speculated.

‘The best thing to do is to move out and leave the village to the ants. The Indians stay at a safe distance in the jungle until the army has passed. The ones whose houses were in the line of march are lucky. Their places are cleaned of vermin and insects.’

The tail of the procession went by. Napo seemed to know when this happened and his head cautiously emerged from the ground. Roger, however, had had enough of Mother Earth — he put on his clothes, wrapped himself in his blanket, and climbed back into the hammock.

Again, darkness and silence. The forest, disturbed by the commotion in the camp, kept the peace for a while. Then one sound after another invaded the stillness until the boiler factory was going full blast once more.

Hal lay awake now, hoping that some of the denizens of the woods might get thirsty. But they had evidently been thrown off their routine by the strange doings in their forest. Only the most dull-witted of them would come tonight.

At last he arrived — the big half-wit of the woods. Hal heard a crackling of the underbrush as if some very heavy animal were approaching. He waited until he felt sure that it had left the brush and was crossing the camp site. Then he turned on his flash. The animal stopped and stood peering into the light. Hal’s flash bulb flared, and he had a photograph of a tapir.

A good animal photographer takes his picture first and then makes observations. If he should make his observations first the animal might be gone before the photograph could be taken. With the tapir safely tucked away in his camera, Hal proceeded to study the beast.

It was the first of its kind that he had ever seen, but he knew it from the pictures in the many natural-history books that he had studied. And yet, he could not help being astonished by the real thing.

Here was the largest wild animal in South America. This specimen must weigh twenty stone. It was some five feet high and six feet long. It seemed to have been put together with spare parts of other animals. It had the body of a huge pig, the mane of a horse and the trunk of an elephant.

Hal knew that some scientists contend that this is the elephant’s American cousin. The beast’s trunk was very short but it was evidently used in exactly the same way as the trunk of an elephant, to gather food and tuck it into the mouth beneath.

Fascinated by the light, the horse-pig-elephant stood quite still. The Cincinnati Zoo wanted just such a specimen. Hal was helpless. Even if they could catch the animal they could not transport it in a treacherous canoe down a boiling river. If only these beasts came in smaller, more portable editions.

As if in answer to his prayer, there was a rustling in the brush and out came the pocket edition. Well, it would not exactly fit into a pocket but it might be accommodated even in a crowded canoe.

It was a baby tapir, not a dull brown colour like its mother, but gaily marked with yellow stripes and white spots. It made a whimpering noise as it waddled to its mother and proceeded to help itself to some liquid refreshment.

Hal was about to prod his father awake with the butt end of his rifle when it occurred to him that it would be a great feather in his cap if he could capture this little specimen singlehanded. After all, it shouldn’t be much of a problem. Surely the mother would not make too much trouble.

He tried to remember what he had read about the tapir — some authority had said that it was a very mild-mannered beast. And it was extremely nearsighted. Perhaps he could get almost up to it without its realizing what was going on.

He slid softly out of his hammock and crept forward, still keeping his light shining full into the tapir’s weak eyes.

He tried to calculate his chances. If he frightened the tapir, which way would it probably run? He knew that tapirs habitually take refuge in rivers. Probably this animal, if alarmed, would make straight for the water. The little fellow could not move so fast and might be easily captured.

But the best-laid plans of mice and men and boy naturalists gang aft agley. A twig crackled underfoot. The tapir started, but not towards the river. Lowering its head, it plunged straight into the light. Hal was about to learn that even a mild-mannered mamma will defend its young.

The charging tapir gave voice, but it did not make the thunderous roar that one might expect from an animal of its size. It screamed like a mad horse, the scream ending in a shrill whistle.

The other campers awoke with a start. Dad and Roger tumbled out of their hammocks and Napo rooted up out of his burrow like a hedgehog at the first call of spring.

None of them had time to act before the three-hundred-pound battery reached Hal.

Hal had the presence of mind to leap for a branch in order to let the brown torpedo pass beneath him — but the branch broke and he landed squarely on the tapir’s back. Something else that he had read flashed painfully into his mind. The jaguar attacks the tapir by leaping on to its back; but the supposedly stupid tapir knows enough to tear its way through thorny underbrush or under half-fallen logs or low branches by which the jaguar is crushed and brushed off, a bleeding, mangled mass of pulp.

Horrified by this thought, Hal lost no time in tumbling from his mount. He breathed a sigh of relief as he lay on the quiet earth. But if he had thought that the tapir was done with him, he was mistaken. Even without the light, it knew where its enemy lay. A tapir’s eyes may be poor, but its senses of smell and hearing are acute.

Hal heard it coming like an express train, its whistle wailing. He struggled to his knees and threw himself out of the way. As the lumbering beast hurtled past, two flashlights suddenly spotted it and then there was the roar of a gun.

Even the thick-hided combination of horse, boar and elephant with a touch of rhinoceros could not resist a 130-grain expanding bullet from dad’s .270 Winchester. The tapir turned a heavy somersault and lay still.

Hal hurried to the scene. He must find the youngster. That was not hard. The baby was already running to its mother. Reaching her, it settled down and began to take its last drink.

Hal had a tinge of regret. His companions looked on and nobody had anything to say for a moment. They let the little fellow drink his fill.

Hal stooped to stroke the smooth, colourful skin of the little orphan.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘We’ll make it up to you. We’ll take you to a nice zoo where you can have the best of food and a swimming pool all to yourself. And no tigres to bother you. That’s a promise.’

Next morning there were more rapids, and then a great fall. They had to portage around it, first carrying the gear, and then the canoe. When the canoe was repacked at the base of the fall they all stepped aboard again — all except Napo.

He stood on the shore and looked stubborn.

‘Me go back,’ he said.

Dad argued with him, but it was no use. This fall marked the end of the country that he knew. Beyond was the unknown, filled with mysterious terrors. He did not know the people. His only comment upon them was that they were very bad.

He would walk back home by a trail bordering the river. It would take him about two days to make his village.

Hunt paid him and Hal offered him a supply of provisions. Napo smiled his thanks but refused.

‘Me eat,’ he said, tapping his bow. He could get what food he needed from river and forest.

After helping to push off the boat he lingered on the shore as if sorry to see his new friends go. As the canoe was swiftly borne downstream he called some sort of a goodbye in his own language and started to climb the steep, rocky slope beside the waterfall.

At the top of the fall he turned and waved, then was gone.

It seemed foolish for three men to feel lonely when one had gone. They still looked back at the edge of the waterfall. Napo was the only one of their party who had really known this jungle. Now they were starting into country from which no foreigner had ever come back.

Roger was the first one to snap out of it; he was not old enough to realize how much it meant. He had more confidence in his father and brother than they had in themselves.

1 think Nosey wants something to eat,’ he said. Because of its prominent proboscis and its way of poking its inquisitive trunk into everything and everybody, the little tapir had been nicknamed Nosey. ‘What does a tapir eat?’

‘All sorts of leaves and shoots and juicy vegetable matter,’ dad said. ‘But a baby tapir should have milk. Since there is no milk, you might try some very tender grass.’ They passed close enough to the bank for Roger to seize a handful of fresh young grass and he offered this dainty to Nosey.

Nosey turned up his nose at it, or would have, except that the nose was of the permanently turned-down variety.

‘Now, you’re not going to be a problem child,’ John Hunt said reprovingly. Nosey at once proceeded to be a problem child by attempting to jump overboard, but was drawn back by the harness that had been made for him out of lianas.

‘Perhaps we’ll just have to let him live on his own fat for a while until he decides to eat,’ said dad, and he turned to something of more immediate importance. He took out pad, pencil and compass.

‘Going to map the river?’ Hal asked in some excitement.

‘Yes. Would you like to help?’

‘Let me do it and you help,’ Hal ventured. He could think of nothing more thrilling than to chart the course of an unknown river.

John Hunt smiled indulgently. ‘Well, I’m sure you can do it,’ and he passed over the materials.

Hal’s eyes sparkled. ‘Now, we begin with the fall — right? Has it a name?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘What shall we call it?’ He thought of it as they had seen it, with Napo on its crest waving goodbye. ‘Napo Falls. How’s that?’

‘As good as anything.’

Hal made a mark at the top of the pad and wrote ‘Napo Falls’. Then he began to trace the river. The paper was blue lined in squares, each representing a square mile. Hal estimated the distance back to the waterfall and the distance forward to the next large bend. He consulted the compass to get the direction correct. He had often watched surveyors at work.

‘I wish we had all the proper instruments,’ he said.

They’d be too bulky to take on a trip like this. If we come out with a roughly accurate map, that will encourage surveying parties to come in and complete the job.’

Every time a hill or mountain could be seen it went down on the map together with its estimated altitude. Marginal notes recorded stands of trees, particularly those of commercial importance such as cinchona and rubber trees, or trees valuable because of their timber.

Dad continually contributed suggestions out of his former experience, but Hal made the map.

The changing width of the river was indicated, and the depth of it, and the character of the various rapids.