10 Gorilla Adventure (13 page)

He laid hold of it and began to climb hand over hand.

He had not made five feet when the vine came loose from the brush above and both vine and boy tumbled to the bottom of the pit.

Still he did not worry. It might be a long wait, but sooner or later someone would come looking for him. Joro knew what path he had taken. He would just sit down and take it easy - and hope that no elephant would be fooled as he had been and drop in on him. He moved over into a corner so that he would be less likely to get mashed if this should happen.

He dozed, in spite of flashes of lightning followed at once by thunder. But what really roused him was a sound like that of a saw going through a hardwood knot. He recognized at once the scream of a leopard.

It came again, but this time at the very edge of the pit.

He strained his eyes to see what was going on. Two dark figures seemed to be engaged in a wrestling match. One of them, he could tell by the screams, was a leopard. The other was completely silent and appeared to be trying to push the leopard over the edge.

It took a good bit of trying. The leopard seemed to be about half the size of its opponent. But the leopard is rated as the strongest animal of its size in Africa. What other animal can climb a tree with a carcass twice its own weight in its teeth?

But this time the leopard had met its match. With an ear-splitting shriek it fell into the pit.

The figure above turned away. ‘Hey, you up there - help me get out of here,’ Hal shouted.

He got no answer. The mysterious stranger was going. Perhaps he didn’t understand English. Hal tried to say it in Swahili. Didn’t the fellow have ears? Yet he calmly walked away and left Hal to deal with a very unpleasant companion.

Daniel in the lions’ den was much safer than Hal in the company of an angry leopard.

As every visitor to animal Africa knows, you may come within fifteen feet of a lion or a whole pride of lions and suffer no harm - as long as you carry no gun and behave yourself. But you take your life is your hands if you come that close to a leopard.

The Hon is a social animal. The leopard is a loner. During an African safari you will see hundreds of lions at close range. You may come away from Africa without having seen a single leopard. It is there and it has seen you, but it doesn’t care for your company.

Particularly dangerous is a leopard trapped in a small space with a human. And this one was already infuriated by its fight with the dark Someone or Something.

Being a night animal, its senses of sight and smell were superhuman. It saw, smelt and hated, and for it to hate was to act. Like a flash of lightning, it charged. Hal found himself trying to stave off a raging, biting, clawing devil. No wonder this creature was called the hellcat.

By instinct it went straight for the eyes. If these could be scratched out, the rest would be easy.

Hal dodged, and the beast crashed into the corner. This did not improve its temper. It turned with a sawing scream and sank its claws into and through Hal’s bush jacket. Hal tried to twist out of the way, but this snake on four legs could out-twist any man. It seemed to coil around him like a python while its jaws groped for his throat. Its own throat was now in Hal’s powerful grip and was being squeezed so tightly that it could hardly breathe.

By a violent contortion it pulled itself free. But Hal was moving at the same instant and managed to turn the cat on its back. He got his knees on its lungs. His elbows planted in its armpits spread its front legs apart so that he could not be torn by its claws.

But he was not paying proper attention to his hands. By a swift lunge the leopard caught his right between its jaws. Hal’s efforts to pull it away were in vain.

Then Hal remembered. Carl Akeley, the man who lay buried near the cabin, had once been in the same predicament. Unable to pull his hand free, he had turned the tables upon his opponent by doing what the leopard least expected. The leopard was used to hanging on to a limb that tried to free itself. But suppose the arm or leg between its jaws went in the opposite direction.

Every time the teeth relaxed their hold for a moment, Akeley, instead of trying to jerk his hand free, actually forced it farther into the animal’s throat. So he actually choked it to death.

Hal followed the example of the master. Each time the teeth eased up on his hand he drove his fist deeper. At the same time his left hand bore down heavily on the animal’s throat. His knees forced the air out of the beast’s lungs.

But how long could he keep this up? Black patches were flickering across his eyes and he felt sick. He was weakening fast.

It seemed for ever. Did this cat, like others, have nine lives? How long could it fight without air? The right fist and the left hand completely cut off its wind, yet it struggled.

A flash from the sky gave light for an instant, and Hal could not believe what he saw. Or rather what he did not see. He seemed to be fighting nothing but a black shadow. He could almost believe that the whole thing was only a product of his crazed imagination.

The flash should have revealed a writhing creature in black and yellow. No animal’s coat is more conspicuous -yet Hal had seen nothing.

Then it was that it occurred to him that he must take the animal alive. For here was no ordinary leopard. This was the very rare all-black leopard sometimes called a panther that every zoo wanted but few ever got.

Akeley had kept up the suffocation technique until the beast died. To take it alive would be more difficult. Hal dared not leave off too soon, and he must not keep it up too long. Just how much was enough? Not being accustomed to choking animals, he had no experience to go by.

The animal stopped struggling and became limp. Its jaws relaxed. The lungs under Hal’s knees stopped pumping. Would the animal promptly revive if allowed to breathe?

Hal withdrew a bleeding arm and fist and relieved the weight on the leopard’s chest. He waited a moment, ready to repeat the choking process, but there was no movement. For all he knew, his prize might be dead.

Where was that liana? He fished about for it, found it, tied the rear feet, tied the front feet, then tied all four together.

He waited anxiously for signs of life. He felt for the heart - it was still beating, but slowly, as if it could not make up its mind whether to recover or quit.

His hand over the animal’s nose detected a slight movement of air. Now Hal was sure. He could have sung and danced - if he had, not been so frightfully tired.

The leopard sawed faintly. It began a snake-like squirming. Soon it was thrashing about violently and Hal thought it best to retreat to the other side of the pit. There he collapsed and, thinking he must remain awake until help came, he promptly went to sleep,

He was roused by his brother’s voice and the glare of flashlights.

‘What are you doing down there?’ Roger demanded.

‘Just putting in time,’ Hal said. ‘Got a rope?’

A rope end was lowered to him. He noosed it around the leopard’s feet. ‘Haul away.’

The men hauled, and were surprised to find at the end of the line not the man they had expected but a sprawling, spitting, growling black leopard.

Again they let down the rope. Hal ordinarily would have swarmed up it like a sailor. Now he had hardly enough energy to make a loop for his foot and hang on while he was hoisted like a bale of hay. He dropped in a heap on the grass.

‘Ill be ready to walk in a few minutes.’

‘Walk nothing,’ Roger said. ‘Anybody who can take on a panther single-handed deserves to ride.’

So Hal and the leopard got equal honours. The leopard was borne on a pole thrust between its legs, and Hal lay on a hastily-made bamboo litter.

Arriving at the cabin, Hal was immediately laid out on his bed where Roger and Joro carefully washed out his wounds, pumped them full of antiseptic, and applied bandages.

Then Roger went out to see to the unbinding and caging of tile leopard. The men marvelled over the trophy. Most of them had never before seen a black leopard.

‘It must be pretty rare,’ Roger said upon returning to Hal’s bedside. ‘What’s it worth?’

‘Five times as much as the yellow-and-black.’

‘Aren’t you exaggerating?’

‘Not a bit. Almost everybody has seen the spotted leopard, or pictures of it. But here’s a novelty - like our white python. Or a white tiger.’

‘Is there such a thing as a white tiger?’

‘Crandon Park Zoo in Miami has a yellow-and-black tiger and white tiger. The first is valued at twelve hundred dollars and the white carries a price of thirty-five thousand dollars - just because everybody is familiar with the regular but not one person in perhaps a million has ever laid eyes on a white.’

‘One thing I don’t understand,’ Roger said. ‘Of course 1 can see why a bonehead like you fell into a hole…’

‘Thank you,’ Hal said.

‘But I wouldn’t think anything as smart as a leopard would fall in.’

‘It didn’t fall in. It was pushed.’

‘Who could have done that?’

‘How should I know? It was too dark to see him plainly. It couldn’t have been Nero - he’s in jail. The fellow was about the size of Tieg - but Tieg was here in camp. At least I suppose he was. It could have been one of the trouble-makers who are out to kill all the whites. Or it could have been Gog.’

‘Why should Gog do that?’

‘Because he thinks we killed his family. And because a festering bullet-wound has made a rogue out of him.’

‘But pushing a leopard in to kill you - that took planning. And we used to be told in school that animals don’t plan. They just act by instinct.’

Hal laughed weakly. ‘That idea is old-hat. Sure, animals do lots of things by instinct, just as we humans do. We chew by instinct, swallow by instinct, do a thousand things by instinct. But we can plan too, and so can the higher animals. Jane Goodall, who lived with the chimps not far from here, gave them problems that were quite new to them and they solved them.’

‘But chimps are smarter than gorillas.’

‘That’s another notion that is not borne out by facts. Chimps seem smarter, because they are great performers. They like to show off, and they love applause. There’s as much difference between a chimp and a gorilla as there is between a comedian and a judge. The chimp does all sorts of tricks for the fun of it. The gorilla sits and thinks. He can do things that need to be done but he doesn’t do them just to amuse you. Schaller, the fellow who lived in this cabin while he was studying gorillas, found that they were very bright, in their quiet way. When they wanted to they could use tools, wash clothes, dig sweet potatoes, open doors, turn a screw to the right to tighten it and to the left to loosen it, eat with a spoon, build bridges over streams, pound nuts with a hammer, dip sugar in water to soften it, use a lever, make rope, drive in a nail, use a knife and fork, ride a bicycle, and even drive a car. But they are shy - they won’t do any of these things just to show off. They have a good memory for what they have done, and plan what to do tomorrow.’

‘So you really think Gog could have covered that pit so you would fall in, and tossed in the leopard to kill you.’

‘I didn’t say that. I just said that if he wanted to, he could. And I wouldn’t blame him a bit - considering what he thinks we’ve done to him.’

There was a banging on the door. ‘Come in,’ Roger said. Joro thrust in his head. ‘You wanted a spitting cobra. We’ve just found one.’

Hal tried to get up, but fell back. ‘Lie still,’ Roger commanded. ‘We’ll get it’

As he went out the door Hal called after him, ‘Watch your eyes,’

It was a strange thing to say, Roger thought He supposed Hal meant, ‘Keep your eyes open.’ Perhaps his brother was a little light-headed, as anyone might be after a tussle with a big cat.

Roger didn’t know too much about cobras. Of course he had seen them in his father’s collection and in zoos, but they had been the sort used by Indian snake-charmers.

The African spitting cobra was new to him. The name itself told him it could spit, but how far, and how well, he did not know.

‘Who cares if it spits?’ he thought as he ran with Joro. ‘It’s the snakes that bite that you have to be afraid of.’

Passing the supply truck, he snatched up a forked stick, lasso, and bag. He had seen his brother use these things and it had not looked difficult. It didn’t occur to him to be afraid. What he lacked in knowledge he made up in nerve.

At the west end of the clearing the men stood in a circle around the snake. It was a wide circle - no man ventured closer than twenty feet to the serpent. It stood five feet tall, its beady eyes and darting tongue warning these meddlesome humans to keep their distance.

It was a beauty, if you could think of snakes as beautiful. Its jet black hood was spread a good eight inches wide. Below the black was a sun-white neck. The rest of the body was a mosaic of round discs in perfect rows as if designed by a fine artist

The men, who had expected Hal, were surprised by Roger’s arrival, but quite willing to leave the capture of the snake to him. They would tackle a non-poisonous python, but had good reason to dread the deadly venom of a cobra. They knew how to kill snakes, but not how to take them alive, and had no wish to learn. If these crazy white men wanted live snakes, it was up to them to take them.

Here again was a snake that ‘walked on its tail’. Not, of course, on the end of its tail, but on the rear part of its body while the fore part stood erect. Actually, such a snake walks on its ribs. Each rib is movable - it slides ahead, takes hold, pulls the body forward, then repeats.

The cobra was doing just that - rib-walking back and forth, always holding its head high, watching for a way of escape.

It was so occupied in watching the enemies around that It. failed to notice the one above. But Roger saw it and was fascinated.

‘What a weirdo!’

The hornbill was indeed weird, a. great, bulky creature nearly four feet long in black, white, red, and yellow. It had a terrible nutcracker of a bill a foot long and on top of the bill was a great hollow helmet that serves as an echo chamber so that every time the creature croaks, laughs, trumpets, or caws, the sound is magnified four or five times as if by a loudspeaker.