Fearless Master of the Jungle (A Bunduki Jungle Adventure (32 page)

xix
As Protectress of the Quagga God, Charole’s garments had
been made from gold lame mesh and her female adherents wore sandals
with silver colored straps.

xx
Told in:
BUNDUKI AND DAWN.

xxi
The
Brelefs
were an early type of Neanderthal Man,
Homo
Neanderthalensis.

xxii
Duas unicas in puncta mortalis est:
advice given to Ancient
Roman legionaries,
roughly translated as, ‘Two inches in the right
spot is fatal.’

xxiii
Spear point: one where the double cutting edges of the
blade come together in symmetrical convex arcs.

xxiv
A
description of some of the methods employed by
mustan
gers
in the Old West can be read in:
.44 CALIBER MAN
and
A
HORSE CALLED MOGOLLON.

xxv
In Texas during the mid-1870s, catering for outlaws and
being fugitives from justice themselves, the citizens of the
town
called
Hell had taken similar precautions against discovery. See:
HELL IN THE PALO
DURO
and
GO BACK TO HELL.

xxvi
Czdkan:
a type of war-hammer used by Polish horsemen during
the late Sixteenth
and early Seventeenth Centuries.

xxvii
Bongo:
Boocercus Euryceros,
the largest of the African
jungle-
dwelling antelopes, a deep chestnut in color, with numerous
white stripes, a well developed spinal crest and large, smooth
horns which form an open spiral.

xxviii
Honda: the ‘business’ end of a lariat. A knotted,
or spliced,
eyelet about two inches in diameter and usually lined with
smooth
leather, through which the ‘end’ of the rope is passed to
form a ‘running’ noose.

xxix
Stem: in roping terminology, the portion of the lariat
which is
outside the honda and so does not form part of the
‘noose’.

xxx
Examples of how tracks can be concealed are given in
Part
One,
‘The Half Breed’ of
THE HALF BREED.

xxxi
Riposte:
in fencing terminology, a return thrust or cut after an
attack.

xxxii
Matador:
in the terminology of bullfighting, the man who dispatches
the bull with a thrust of his sword.

xxxiii
The incident to which Dawn Drummond-Clayton was
referring is recorded in
BUNDUKI AND DAWN.

xxxiv
The first occasion when the blond giant had been compelled
to intervene and defend Joar-Fane from a family of
Australopithecus
is told in
BUNDUKI.

xxxv
Nemenuh:
the phonetic spelling of the Comanche Indians’ name for
their nation, meaning ‘The People’. Most other Indian nations
referred to them as the
Tshaoh,
the ‘Enemy People’, because of their propensity
towards horse-stealing—called ‘raiding’
by the Comanches—and warfare. Some
details of the
Nemenuh’s
methods of horse catching and training are given in
COMAN
CHE.

xxxvi
Being caught in such a manner crippled General Jackson
Baines ‘Ole Devil’ Hardin C.SA. for life. Told in the ‘The Paint”
episode of
THE FASTEST GUN IN TEXAS.

xxxvii

‘
Chinning the
moon’: in rodeo parlance, when a mount rears high on its hind legs
and paws the air with its front hooves.
A
dangerous tactic because the animal
might overbalance and fall backwards on to its rider. Some even
learn to do this deliberately.

xxxviii
Kichwa Mkubwa:
Swahili for ‘Big Head’, literally ‘Head
Big’.

xxxix
The modern materials, excellent design and great strength
of Dawn Drummond-Clayton’s and Bunduki’s sophisticated archery
equipment provided the power required to penetrate the Mun-Gatahs’
hitherto invulnerable breastplates. This was because even the
seventy pounds draw weight of the girl’s composite—fiberglass and
wood—weapon was almost double that of the strongest all wood ‘self’
bows of the other archers on Zillikian. Another contributory factor
was that the Earth couple employed the more efficient ‘cheek’ draw
and not the ‘chest’ draw practiced by the local bowmen. Full
descriptions of the methods used by the girl and the blond giant
are given in the earlier volumes of the ‘BUNDUKI’
series. For
comparison, an explanation of one style of Japa
nese archery and its equipment
can be read in the authors
‘OLE DEVIL HARDIN’
series of biographies.

xl
Details of the Amazon nation are given in APPENDIX FOUR
of
SACRIFICE
FOR THE QUAGGA GOD.

xli
The throwing stick used on Zillikian is similar to that
employed by the Hopi and related Indian tribes of North America, or
the war and hunting
boomerangs
of the Australian aborigines, but—unlike the latter—is not
expected to return to the thrower if it should miss its target.
This does not make it any less lethal or effective as a weapon.
American author, Daniel Mannix, describes in Chapter Seven, ‘The
Boomerang, The Stick That Kills’, of his book,
A SPORTING
CHANCE
—which
covers the subject thoroughly—how he has thrown one a distance
of
five
hundred and forty feet
and it still retained sufficient momentum to crack
an inch thick branch of a tree.

xlii
Fence cornering: rodeo terminology for bucking in a zigzag
fashion. So called because it was said to resemble the meanderings
of the kind of wooden rail fences sometimes erected during the Old
West days of the United States of America.

xliii
Manadero:
the Spanish-Mexican term for the master stallion of a band
of horses.

xliv
While the author realizes that in this present ‘permissive’
society, he could record Dawn Drummond-Clayton’s exact words, he
sees no valid reason to do so.

xlv
‘Sunfishing’: a bound during which the animal twists its
body
into
crescents alternatively—at least, most of the time—to left or
right, seeming to be trying to touch the ground with first one and
then the other shoulder, as if wishing to let the sunlight hit its
stomach in the process.

xlvi
‘Crawfishing’: pitching backwards instead of to the
front.

xlvii
‘Pinwheeling’: undoubtedly the rarest and, arguably, most
le
thal kind
of bucking. The animal leaps forward and upwards, turning with its
feet in the air and alighting on its back.

xlviii
Carvel-built: in shipbuilding terminology, where
the planks of the hull are laid edge to edge and form a smooth
surface; as opposed to ‘clinker-built’, where they are fitted so
that they overlap one another.

xlix
A ‘gaff’ is a pole, or ‘spar’, extending from the after
side of the mast to support a fore-and-aft sail.

l
A ‘lug’ is a four-sided sail without a boom, or lower
yard,
attached to an upper yard which hangs obliquely on the
mast.

li
A Missouri River ‘bullboat’ twenty-five feet in length,
with a width of fifteen and a depth of three feet could carry up to
six thousand pounds’ burden. Although smaller, those of the
Cara-Bunte were proportionately as effective.

lii
A
‘lateen’—a European corruption of the word, ‘Latin’—is
a
right-angled triangular sheet laced to a long, sloping yard
and controlled by a system of blocks and tackles which allows the
ship to sail against, as well as with, the wind.

liii
When employed for legitimate purposes such as
pearl-diving,
the
zaruk
is sometimes called a
‘garookuh’.

liv
The principal difference between the
zaruk
and the
badan
is
that the stem piece of the latter is almost
perpendicular and lacks the extreme rake which is characteristic of
the former. The author is unable to say which style of bow is most
advantageous, as each kind of vessel is equally seaworthy. We
suspect that the choice
was made on the personal prejudices of the
respective clans’ war
lords and dictated by past traditions. It is
noticeable that none of the Tansha clans rivals used the
zaruk.

lv
Although it has no bearing on the present volume, the
Cara-
Buntes
made their voyages to raid the northern, southern and
western shores of
the mainland in replicas of Arabian
sambuks.
Graceful, carvel-built, lateen-rigged,
square-sterned and weath-
erly, these large vessels have two forward raking
masts, a built-up
poop deck and offer far more adequate accommodation for
the
crews
than either a
zaruk
or a
badan.

lvi
The
Yung-Libs
are a very early type of Cro-Magnons.

lvii
The occasion is recorded in
BUNDUKI.

lviii
In addition to the entire coastline of the Telongas’
territory being fringed by swampland after the fashion of the
Florida Everglades, the Cara-Buntes’ failure to penetrate the
region was induced by the ‘Suppliers’.

lix
The occasions are described in
BUNDUKI AND DAWN.

lx
The larger ‘plains’ sub-species of African elephant is
classi
fied
Loxodonta Africana Africana.
Up to twenty-four inches taller
than
L.A.
Cyclotis,
their ears are less rounded and the tusks which
are bulkier and
longer, curl upwards instead of being straight and
parallel; an
adaptation making it easier for the ‘forest’ elephants to move
through thick undergrowth.

lxi
The smaller sub-species of African buffalo,
Syncerus Caffer
Namus,
known
as the ‘dwarf forest buffalo’ was also very aggressive and
dangerous, but it did not inhabit the jungle in the Telongas’
territory.

lxii
Although the Telongas had a predilection for making love,
they also held strong views regarding babies being born out of
wedlock. So, to allow the former and avoid the latter, they had
obtained very effective oral contraceptive tablets for use by the
maidens from the ‘Suppliers’.

lxiii
Cowhands in the American cattle-raising States always used
a ‘burro’ if available. Should one have to leave his saddle on the
ground, he placed it on its side or stood it on its head, but never
laid it on its skirts.

lxiv
Pike-characin:
Boulengerella Lateristriga:
one of the
Cyprini-formes,
carp, group of fish
orders: Native of north-eastern South America, particularly the
Amazon region, it attains a length of twenty inches and is a
predator. Often lying in wait at the surface
before attacking its prey, the
species was a favorite quarry of the
Wurka-Telonga bow-hunters.

lxv
Dwarf crocodile: only surviving member of the genus
Osteo-
laemus, O. Tetraspis,
inhabits streams of the West African
forests
and
is an inoffensive creature which seldom exceeds six feet in
length.

lxvi
‘False’ gavial: sole specimen of the genus
Tomistoma, T.
Schlegeli,
attains a length of more than fourteen feet, feeds
exclu
sively
on fish and is found in Borneo, Malaysia and Sumatra. It is
replaced by the
‘true’ gavial,
Gavialis Gangeticus—
which differs in
some anatomical points and grows larger,
but also eats little other than fish—in the rivers and large lakes
of India and Burma.