10 Gorilla Adventure (9 page)

He led the lady to his door and through it into the room, then closed the door.

Hal lay on his bed, half asleep. He woke with a start

and sat up to stare into the great black face of a gorilla not three inches from his own. At first he thought he was dreaming and this was his brother who had really turned into an ape. Then he scrambled out of bed and retreated to the far side of the room.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ Roger said. ‘She’s a perfect lady. And I’m hoping she’s a good mother.’

The gorilla noticed the two little fragments of apedom in the bed. She ambled over to get a closer look. They gazed up at her with eager, hungry eyes.

Would it work? Both Hal and Roger knew that grownup gorillas loved all gorilla babies whether they are their own or not. In fact the real mother often has trouble keeping away the aunts, uncles, and friends who want to pet her infant. Roger was depending upon this fact of gorilla nature.

He was not mistaken. The babies were already scrambling up into the arms of their foster-mother. She gathered them close in her hairy embrace. Presently there was a suckling sound. The babies had found their milk. The feeding problem was solved.

Hal looked on, smiling. ‘Well I’ll be darned. Now you really have turned this room into a zoo.’

‘Oh, I’m not quite done yet,’ Roger said. Tm going to bring in Snow White too.’

‘Not in here,’ exclaimed Hal.

‘Where else? She was nearly stolen last night. Whoever or whatever chewed up that lock may be back tonight’

‘But doesn’t it occur to you,’ Hal said, that there’s nothing a python would like better than to gobble up those two gorilla babies?’

‘Gee, I hadn’t thought of that,’ Roger admitted.

Here was a new problem. This time it was Hal who solved it.

Hal called Mali. He was the chief of the ten men who had stayed in camp during the day to guard the gorilla, Lady Luck, and the beautiful white python with the blue eyes, Snow White.

‘Did you feed them?’ Hal asked.

‘We fed the gorilla,’ Mali said.

‘What did she eat?’

‘Bananas, carrots, pineapple, and bamboo shoots.’

‘And how about the python?’

‘She wouldn’t take a thing. We offered her a warthog that we had just killed this morning. She wouldn’t even look at it’

‘Perhaps she had eaten before we caught her.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Mali said. ‘If she had swallowed an animal there would be a bulge in her hide. But she’s as slender as a dancing girl. Besides, if she had eaten, she would have been sleepy when we tried to take her. She wouldn’t have fought the way she did.’

‘You’re right,’ Hal said. ‘Get enough men to help you and bring her in here.’

Mali’s eyes widened. ‘You don’t mean here - in this room?’

‘Yes, in this room. You’ve guarded her all day. I don’t want you to have to guard her all night too. And she ought to eat. Bring me that warthog - and a balling gun.’

Hal was not surprised that the python had refused food. Any animal when captured may be so upset that it will not eat. Sometimes it is only a matter of hours, sometimes the fasting will go on for days until the creature dies of starvation.

Mali went out on his errand. It was half an hour before the door opened again to admit a strange procession. Snow White’s darting tongue and blazing blue eyes came first, then Mali, firmly gripping the snake’s neck so that the head could not turn and bite. Then came a parade of fourteen men, seven on each side of the snake, holding it tightly so that it could not coil.

Hal took Mali’s place, and Mali went out to fetch the warthog and the balling gun.

The thing known as a balling gun is not a gun. It is an instrument used to force-feed an animal that refuses to eat. It consists of a long metal rod ending in a cup-shaped depression. You put a ball or chunk of food or medicine in the cup and push it so far back into the animal’s throat that it must swallow it.

While the men firmly held the unwilling snake, the jaws were forced open and the cup in which the warthog had been placed was pushed far back into the throat. Snow White did her best to spew it out, but it was no use. The swallowing muscles went into action and down went the warthog into the creature’s stomach. The balling gun was withdrawn.

The huge bulge in Snow White’s midriff did not add to the snake’s beauty.

‘All right,’ Hal said, ‘let her go.’

The men laid the snake on the floor and stood off, half expecting her to attack. But nothing was farther from her mind. All she wanted to do now was to go to sleep.

How long would she sleep? That would depend upon how long it took to digest her meal. It might be a matter of days, or weeks. After a very large feeding, snakes have been known to lie dormant for several months.

One thing was certain. The two baby gorillas were perfectly safe in the same room with the great snake that usually had an excellent appetite for baby gorillas.

The door was locked and all the members of the ‘zoo’ including Snow White, Lady Luck, the two baby gorillas and the two humans were safe for the night. Or so it seemed.

Lady Luck was content to sleep on the floor. ‘Her long hair will keep her warm,’ Roger guessed.

‘Probably,’ Hal said. ‘But just to make sure I’ll give her one of my blankets.’

He laid it over her, and the way she snuggled into it showed that she appreciated it.

Roger crawled in between the two infant gorillas. At first they sleepily protested. But when they discovered that what was between them gave off a pleasant heat they wedged themselves as close to it as possible. They frequently wriggled to get into a better position, and talked in their sleep. Roger was going to have a rather uneasy night.

He envied Hal who had a whole bed to himself. Hal went blissfully to sleep but woke with a start an hour later when he felt a cold something sharing the bed with him. Now he had a sleeping partner. Snow White had crept in under the blankets.

Unlike other animals, a snake has no heating system of its own. It takes on the temperature of the surrounding air. Even though Mount Mikeno is near the equator, the night air is chill at an altitude of ten thousand feet. Ordinarily the snake would be spending the night deep in its hole where some of the warmth of the day still remained. Lacking a hole, it would crawl under heavy brush.

Lacking both hole and brush, Snow White sensibly crept under Hal’s covers. However, there was one good thing about ber. She didn’t wriggle and she didn’t talk. Slowly

digesting her warthog dinner, she could be trusted to be a silent partner in Hal’s bed.

So Hal thought. He was a little disturbed when he woke later to find that the snake had thrown a coil of her body over his own.

What should he do about this? If she chose to constrict, she could squeeze the breath out of him and he would die in a few minutes. Should he struggle to free himself? That would excite the snake and make matters worse.

He tried to look at it from Snow White’s point of view. She couldn’t have done this with any idea of attacking him. He was too big to swallow. In fact, she had no appetite. It had been necessary to force-feed her. She would certainly want nothing more until her present load was digested.

By the slight moon-glow that came in through the window he could see her head on the pillow beside his. This gave him a moment of panic. He controlled himself with difficulty. There was no danger. Her great jaws were closed. All that he needed to do was to keep quiet. He must not even call Roger - that might awake and excite her.

There could be only one reason why she had wrapped herself around him. He was something warm.

But in spite of all bis experience with animals he couldn’t help being a little nervous in this situation. He knew he wouldn’t sleep another wink that night. But he was young and had had an active day. In five minutes he was as sound asleep as the python.

When the screams of elephants broke the night silence, the first to be disturbed by the noise was the creature without ears. Snow White felt the sound waves in her hundreds of nerve-ends. Frightened, she slid out of Hal’s bed and retreated to the farthest corner of the room.

Only a hard pounding on the door woke the other occupants of the Hunt zoo. Hal recognized Joro’s voice.

‘Fire, bwana, fire!’

The boys tumbled out. Their end of the cabin was ablaze. The dried-out boards of the cabin wall burned

fiercely.

The men were already bringing buckets of water from the lake and dousing the flames. But there weren’t enough buckets for thirty men.

The fire seemed to light the whole sky. That was strange. This blaze alone couldn’t give out so much light. Then Hal saw the reason.

‘Look, the volcano!’

Ten miles away to the south-east, Nyiragongo Volcano was in full eruption, spitting out rivers of red-hot lava, and throwing aloft a column of fire a mile or more high. The wind was blowing towards the cabin. Had it carried sparks that had started the cabin fire?

Hal’s first thought was of the animals - Snow White, Lady Luck and the two small gorillas. Would they be burned alive? He flung the door open to let them escape.

With sinking heart, he looked for the loss of the valuable animals he had worked so hard to obtain.

But the animals did not come out. Terrified by the fire, they felt safer in the dark room than in the blazing light outside.

How to get them out? It would be easy to remove the babies, but it would require many men to bring out the powerful female gorilla and the great snake. And the men were busy fighting the fire. Those who had no buckets were trying to suffocate the flames with blankets and canvas.

Help came from an unexpected quarter. The elephants became firemen. There were three of them and they had formed the habit of coming every night to visit the lake and roam around the cabin. They would stand near the camp-fire and enjoy its warmth. The men had made friends of them, feeding them bamboo shoots, stalks of sugar cane, and wild celery.

Now the elephants paid back all they owed. With an intelligence matched in the animal world only by the great apes and the dolphin, they repeated a performance reported many years ago by the man who was buried here, Carl Akeley, in his book In Brightest Africa. He observed the ability of an elephant to put out a fire by shooting a stream of water from his trunk.

The great beasts heartily dislike grass fires and have checked many in this way. H they had not been checked they would have become forest fires and elephants could have done nothing to stop them.

All this flashed through Hal’s mind as he saw the great animals fill their huge fire hoses with water at the lake, and then trundle over to quench the blaze. Every trunkful was equal to a dozen or more bucketfuls. Another half hour of hard work and nothing was left of the fire except a few plumes of smoke from the wet boards.

Now that the danger was past the precious animals might escape. Hal hastily closed the door of his bedroom menagerie.

The elephants were still drawing water, but only to toss over themselves to wash cinders and ash from their hides. At a suggestion from Roger the men took them two large hands of bananas as a reward for their fire-fighting services.

Hal was talking to Joro. ‘What do you think started that

fire? Sparks from the volcano?’

Before Joro could answer, Tieg, who was standing by, said, ‘Of course. What else?’

Joro looked at him doubtfully. Then he looked up at the volcano smoke passing overhead. ‘I suppose hot cinders from the volcano could be blown ten miles,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t seen very likely.’

‘Likely or not, that’s what happened,’ Tieg asserted. He trudged off to his room to catch up on sleep. Joro’s eyes followed him.

‘Perhaps. Perhaps not’

‘You have some other explanation?’ Hal asked.

‘Maybe. We were sleeping in the shed. The camp-fire was outside in the open place. I was half awake. It seemed to me I saw someone take a burning stick from the fire and walk away. I didn’t think much about it A few of the men sometimes get up during the night and get fire to make coffee.’

‘You couldn’t see who it was?’

‘No. The smoke almost hid him. It was more like a black shadow than a man.’

‘How large was - was this thing?’

‘Big.’

‘As big as - Tieg?’

‘Yes. As big as Tieg. Or as big as the gorilla with the bullet in him. You call him Gog. But of course it couldn’t have been the gorilla. He wouldn’t have been that smart.’

Hal was not so sure. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Apes are very imitative. He may have seen one of the men take a brand from the fire. I’m sure he’s been watching the camp, waiting for a chance to get back at us because he thinks we murdered his family. And he must be a pretty angry beast with that bullet wound driving him half crazy with pain. I wish we could catch him and get the bullet out of him. But that fire - there’s one other rascal who might have started it.’

‘You don’t mean one of our own men?’

‘No, no. I mean the man we didn’t see yesterday. But we’ve seen his handiwork - those sixty dead gorillas. Nero can guess that we are going to report him to the commandant. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this morning.’

His words were almost drowned out by the roar of thunder over the volcano. Fork lightning played around the burning mountain. This was no ordinary thunderstorm. Not a drop of rain was falling. The thunder and lightning were caused by the high electric tension produced in the air by the eruption.

Suddenly Hal and Joro were bathed in purple flame. Their bodies gave off sparks. There was a crackling and fizzing noise, as if they were being burned alive. Purple flashes leaped from the tip of Hal’s nose, his ears, his fingers, and toes. Joro put on an equally fine display. Their heads were surrounded by flashing purple crowns. Still neither of them felt any electric shock.

‘Even the god of the volcano is against us,’ Joro said.

Hal laughed. ‘It won’t hurt you. It’s St Elmo’s fire.’

‘What’s that?’

‘An electric discharge caused by the fire between the heat rising from the volcano and the cold air around it. It disturbs all the air within a radius of twenty miles or so of a volcano.’