10 Gorilla Adventure (4 page)

One more popular idea is that no snake dies before sundown. This is not the case, but there is some reason for such a superstition as the boys were soon to find out.

The rainbow, in the traditions of some tribes, is an enormous python coiled around the globe, and only the most powerful witch doctors can keep it from squeezing the world to death.

The garlic didn’t work. But something was working. Hal, standing about twenty feet away from the hole, began to feel the earth moving beneath him. Hal was not surprised, because this part of Africa, peppered with volcanoes, was subject to violent earthquakes.

A sudden upheaval made him stagger off to more solid

ground.

What a strange earthquake that was. No one else seemed to have felt anything. No tree showed the least tremor. The earthquake had been under him and nowhere else.

The earth squirmed and broke and there was the thrashing tail of the python. It seemed as if the snake, instead of being attracted by the garlic, was trying to get as far away from it as possible.

The tail was beginning to go down again. Hal grabbed it and shouted to the men to come and help.

They took hold and began to pull. But a snake knows very well what to do in a case like that. It braces itself against the walls of the hole. The muscles swell and turn rigid, locking the body firmly in place.

But if the snake could play tricks, Hal could do the same. He knew the snake would try to go deeper and escape. To do so, it must release its grip on the sides of the hole.

Don’t keep up a steady pull,’ Hal said. ‘Now, let up a bit.’ The men stopped pulling. Immediately the python loosened its hold and started down. ‘Now, pull!’ Hal shouted. The men heaved back and the snake instead of going forward as planned, lost ten or twelve inches. Once more it gripped the sides and could be pulled no farther.

Again Hal said, ‘Let up.’ The men stopped pulling. The snake relaxed its hold and started down. ‘Pull,’ Hal ordered, and out came another foot or so of snake.

Again and again the stratagem was repeated. But now there was a new difficulty. The more of the writhing body that was pulled out, the more difficult it was to control the struggling reptile.

More men were called to help. Now the big snake had thirty men to reckon with. The contorting snake flung them back and forth, bruising them against the trees, shaking them off repeatedly - for the python has no convenient handles by which it may be held.

Presently out came a bulge: something the serpent had swallowed and had not yet digested. Then another bulge. Evidently the creature had breakfasted well that morning.

And now the head itself appeared. It was about half the size of either of the bulges. How could a snake swallow something twice the size of its own head?

The secret lay in. its jaws. They are not hinged as ours are. They are connected by something like elastic bands. They can be stretched apart to take in an animal the size of a calf.

Hal and Roger had previously seen a python that had swallowed a red deer - all but the horns. They projected weirdly from the sides of the mouth. But this time the bulges were smaller, only about a foot in diameter, and their nature remained a mystery.

With a violent twist the snake threw off the men who had locked their arms around its neck and turned on one of its enemies with jaws agape.

The man stumbled and fell. The snake acted swiftly. Its teeth closed on the man’s bare shoulder.

The python has no poison fangs. But the sharp powerful teeth can inflict a serious wound. Its long teeth are as sharp as needles. They are curved in like fish-hooks so that once they have taken hold they do not let go.

The men forgot the tail and tried to rescue their companion from the snake’s jaws. At once the neglected tail swung round, beating down several men, then coiled about the body of the man who had been bitten. The man was Toto, one of Hal’s best. He fought bravely but could do little since his arms were pinioned to his sides.

Every time he breathed out. the coils tightened. That is

the constrictor’s favourite method of killing. Often it does not break any bones, but merely squeezes more and more tightly so that the victim cannot breathe. When breathing has stopped the heart also will soon stop.

But don’t believe it if someone tells you that a constrictor cannot break bones if it wants to. A circus performer was killed by a seventeen-foot snake and was found afterwards to have bones broken in eighty-four places.

If the snake succeeded in squeezing all the life out of Toto it would then proceed to swallow him. Whether it could do so would depend upon the size of the snake and the size of the man. There are hundreds of proven cases of the swallowing of humans by members of the boa family.

The boa constrictor, which grows only to a length of some twelve feet, cannot do it. But it is not impossible for the great anaconda or the python. A python more than thirty feet in length swallowed a grown East Indian woman. A boy fourteen years old was swallowed by a snake eighteen feet long. When a Burmese disappeared his friends searched for him, found nothing but his slippers, and near by a gorged python twenty-five feet long. Upon opening it they found the body of their companion.

And yet a python is not a vicious creature. It almost never makes trouble unless it is attacked. It is easily tamed and many an African keeps a pet python in the house to rid the place of rats and other vermin.

Hal was already trying to pull the great jaws apart and the sharp teeth were cutting his fingers. Roger ran to the supply wagon and came back with a crowbar.

‘Good!’ cried Hal, seizing the bar and forcing it between the great teeth. Two men helped him pry the jaws open and free the bloody shoulder. Others had seized the tail and were uncoiling the snake from Toto’s body. Toto knew nothing of all this. He had fainted.

Roger’s crowbar did the trick. The jaws separated and the uncoiled serpent fell away.

But if the men thought the snake was exhausted they were mistaken. Before they realized what was happening the python plunged into one of the holes. It might stay down for hours, or even for days.

Big Tieg had been standing safely in the background. Now he saw his chance to be a hero. He came striding in among the men, who stood no higher than his shoulders. His great yellow moustache whipped about in the breeze, his glass eye stared coldly at the men, and his other eye fixed itself scornfully upon Hal.

‘You’ve made a pretty botch of it, haven’t you,’ he said.

‘You could have done better?’ Hal inquired.

‘Naturally. You seem to forget that I am the guide of this expedition. This is no job for boys.’

‘If you have any plan let’s hear it,’ Hal said. ‘The snake is frightened now. Heaven knows how long it’ll stay down. If you know how to get it up, go to it’

‘Simple,’ Tieg said. ‘Men, get some brush and put it down that hole.’ The men obeyed. ‘Now set fire to the brush.’ The fire was soon blazing fiercely. ‘No snake can stand that. It will come out the other hole. All of you, stand close around that hole and grab it when it comes out’

The men closed in around the hole. Perhaps Tieg was right. The python, dreading the fire, would surely try to escape by this exit

No one happened to notice that Tieg did not join the men around the hole where the snake was expected to emerge. He stood at a safe distance by the other hole where the fire burned.

He was taken completely by surprise when straight up through the flames shot a great yellow head drawing after it a writhing black-and-brown body with two lumps. Like a thunderbolt it struck Tieg in the chest with its nose, tough as a battering ram, and threw its coils around him.

Tieg in a panic drew his revolver and fired into the creature’s open mouth. The bullet passed up through the head. The snake fell away and the thirty-foot body twisted into knots in the death agony.

Hal faced Tieg. ‘I’ll take that gun,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘You knew very well we wanted to take that snake alive. You got scared and killed it. That’s the second time you’ve gummed things up. There’s a gorilla in the woods with a bullet in him because you lost your nerve. Now you can give me that gun.’

Tieg’s glass eye bored a hole through Hal’s head while the other eye studied him from hair to boots and up again.

‘You impudent young whipper-snapper,’ he said slowly. If you want the gun, why don’t you take it?’

His height was several inches more than Hal’s six feet and his cockatoo hair made him seem even taller. His shoulders were broader and his weight was greater by about fifty pounds.

But Hal, though only nineteen, was taller and stronger than his own father and his muscles were hardened by constant use. He looked much less formidable than the man with the great yellow moustache. His men pressed in, ready to back him up.

Tieg laughed. ‘You’ll need all the help you can get before I get done with you.’

Hal motioned to the others to stand back. ‘If I have to take you on I’ll do it alone,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to fight you. I only want the gun. There’s no reason we can’t be friends. But we can’t get along if you shoot every animal we want to take alive. Now, give me the gun.’

‘I’ll give you something but it won’t be the gun,’ Tieg said, and landed a blow in Hal’s midriff that made him stagger.

Tieg, encouraged by this success, lunged forward. Hal with the lake behind him could go back no farther. He stepped to one side, tripped Tieg with his foot and sent him flying into the lake.

Tieg disappeared completely. When he came up, dripping and furious, his moustache drooped like a wet dishrag and his formerly erect hair was plastered down on his scalp. The laughter of the men made him more angry.

‘I’ll get you for this,’ he raged, and came at his opponent like a runaway locomotive. This time Hal did not dodge. He used a bit of the karate that he had learned in Japan. He stooped under Tieg’s fists, seized his ankles, and sent him soaring through the air to land head down in the python hole in the midst of the flames. Tieg’s wet clothes sent up a column of steam.

Hal pulled him out of the hole and removed the gun from his holster. Tieg’s adventure in water and fire had taken all the fight out of him.

‘Better go and change your clothes,’ Hal said. Tieg got up and stumbled off towards the cabin.

Joro slashed off the head of the dead snake with one stroke of his bush knife.

‘We make medicine out of that,’ he said.

Hal was quite willing to let the men use the dead snake as they pleased. They could grind the skull into a powder and sell the powder to the medicine men.

The joints of the backbone could be used by village women as a necklace to strengthen the throat - or as a belt to cure stomach-ache. In some African countries a string of python bones was supposed to protect the wearer against snakebite.

Serpent superstition goes back a long way. Moses set up an image of a Brazen Serpent that was supposed to have healing power. For five centuries it was worshipped as a sort of god. The Greek god of healing, Asklepios, carried a carved serpent wound around a staff. It is still the symbol of the medical profession.

Even today ‘snake medicine’ is sold in China. It is supposed to be a cure for insanity, convulsions, epilepsy, poor sight, colds, sore throat, malaria, earache, toothache, deafness, arthritis, and rheumatism. In Guatemala hot snake fat is used as a poultice for colds. Snake oil is well known in Puerto Rico.

Viper flesh was used as a medicine in France until 1884, and before that in London as a cure for the plague.

Rattlesnake oil was sold in the United States as a remedy for deafness, lumbago, toothache, sore throat, and rheumatism. If you didn’t want to drink it you could just rub it on any ailing part of your body.

‘Is that snake dead or not?’ Roger demanded, seeing that the headless body kept on twisting and squirming.

‘Not yet,’ Hal said.

‘How can it keep on living with its head off?’

‘A snake’s brain isn’t just in its head. The rest is all the way down the spine. Keep away from it. If it catches you it can still squeeze the life out of you. Don’t excite it. Keep your voice down.’

Roger stared at his brother. ‘Are you kidding me? A snake has no ears. Even if it did, it couldn’t hear after its head is gone.’

‘A snake,’ Hal said, ‘has ears all over its body.’

‘Now you are talking nonsense,’ Roger protested.

‘Not complete nonsense,’ Hal smiled. ‘They aren’t ears like ours. They don’t exactly hear sounds. They feel them. Every sound makes vibrations and the snake feels the vibrations. Its nerves are very delicate. It can pick up sound waves that would be too faint or too high-pitched for you to get at all. It can even tell what direction the sound is coming from. Even the light footsteps of a rat would be enough. It can turn and grab that rat without looking for it. The snake’s long body touching the ground all the way from head to tail gives it the ability to detect the slightest vibrations. It’s like a seismograph that is used to record earthquakes. You remember in Japan the newspapers used to say how many earthquakes the seismograph had recorded in a day, sometimes a hundred, and we hadn’t felt one of them. Every snake is a wriggling seismograph.’

‘Speaking of hearing,’ Roger said, ‘do you hear a bell? Every time that snake twists I hear a tinkle.’

Hal laughed. ‘Now you’re the one who is crazy. Snakes don’t tinkle.’

This one does. Listen. Hear it? You’re so good at explaining - explain that.’

Hal heard it. Even with all his training from childhood up as a practising naturalist, here was something he couldn’t explain. ‘You’ve got me there,’ he admitted.

Toto, his shoulder bandaged, came to Hal. ‘You want?’ he said, pointing at the snake.

‘No, I don’t want it,’ Hal said. ‘You and the men can do what you like with it.’

Toto grinned his appreciation and went back to the men. Hal was a good boss. He had made a kind gift to his crew.

The men slit the underside of the body and began to strip oft the skin. It was worth good money. Python hide makes excellent leather. It is waterproof, damp-proof, wear-resistant. It does not crack, chip, or peel.