01 Amazon Adventure (12 page)

Hal kept looking up river for any sign of Croc and the gang of ruffians that he would bring with him.

There was nothing to be seen but an occasional Indian canoe.

Perhaps Croc had not as yet come this far, or perhaps he had already gone by, hidden from view by islands. If he had passed, there was no certainty that he might not return to make a more careful investigation.

Hal was willing to have a fight if necessary, but hoped to avoid it. His business was to make a collection and get out with it, not to fight. The odds would probably be heavily against him. Croc’s gang would be made up of armed thugs; Hal’s crew were simple boatmen. They had bows and arrows for fishing, and a few blowpipes for catching birds — but no guns.

Besides, Hal did not want any blood on his hands, either his own or that of others. Any killings might lead to arrest, a long stay in jail awaiting trial, and then an ordeal in some Brazilian court. Such affairs sometimes ran on for a year or more.

The expedition would be a failure and his father’s ruin would be complete.

So Hal resolved to keep out of Croc’s way as long as possible. If a gory showdown must come, at least he would not invite it. He would lie low in this cove until dark — then travel again by night.

His men lay on the ground asleep, full of man-eating fish. Hal and Roger followed their example.

So there was no reception committee to welcome the lady who came to call. It was a pity that no one saw her, for she was really a beautiful sight. Her smooth skin was a delicate pale brown ornamented with dark brown spots with light centres. She had a handsome dog-shaped head. She used it to stand on. She was twice as tall as a tall man — in fact the branch around which her handsome red-black-and-yellow tail curled was twelve feet above the ground.

Although tall, she was slender, with a waist measure of no more than twelve inches. Her slim body undulated gracefully as if she were doing a slow dance.

Resting her chin on the ground, she uncoiled her tail from the branch. There she stood for an instant, a muscular column of serpent twelve feet high. Then her body descended to join her head. It did not fall but came down with a smooth balance and poise that an acrobat would have envied.

She raised her head and studied the sleeping forms. How would one of these do for dinner? The boa constrictor, second largest snake in the Americas, is famous for the ability to swallow something three times as big as itself. But the lady in question merely slid over the first Indian, so softly that he felt nothing, then over another and another. Now she reached Roger. She contemplated him long and thoughtfully. Possibly she decided against him because, although he was not so large as the others, even he would take six weeks to digest.

A sound on the Ark attracted her. Specs, the marmoset, was at the top of the mast playing in Charlie’s hair.

The boa slid past Hal’s head, crossed the beach, and glided up the gangplank to the deck of the Ark. She stopped to consider the great stork. Now there would be a good meal — but those long bony legs were a nuisance, and there was no nourishment in that big horny beak. Besides, it was sharp and might punch a hole in her skin from the inside — if indeed she could get it inside before it could peck a hole from the outside. The jabiru stork was no mean antagonist. Stilts was eyeing the intruder with stern disapproval and making throaty threats.

The boa turned her attention once more to the juicy tittle morsel at the masthead. Specs had clambered up the halyards. The boa preferred to use the mast itself as her escalator. It was smooth and slippery but she did not need any projections to climb by. She was not a constrictor for nothing. She could hug her way up.

She spiralled up the mast as swiftly as if it had been lying on the level. Specs did not notice her until her jaws were opening to receive him. He made a wild leap into space and landed on the roof of the toldo.

The boa was confronted by Charlie who was shaking his head gravely in the afternoon breeze. The movement made him seen very much alive and the boa investigated him with evident curiosity. But she was too fastidious a diner to be satisfied with this shrivelled scrap of human leather. Without nibbling even so much as an ear, she turned and went down, using her own body as a staircase.

She had nearly reached the deck when a little whinny stopped her cold. The young tapir in his gay, yellow-striped coat thrust his inquiring nose from the toldo and then trotted out on deck.

The descending boa, her body still coiled around the mast for half its height, stopped and projected her head. She remained so still that she might have been a bronze statue of herself instead of her living self. Nosey, the little nitwit, wandered straight into the face of danger. His feeble eyes were bent upon the deck on the lookout for food.

When he had come within two feet of her, the boa struck. Her soft, silky neck snapped out as stiff and straight as a ramrod. Her jaws opened and the sharp, incurved teeth closed like a vice on Nosey’s nose.

He whinnied to high heaven, at once arousing the sleepers on the beach.

Hal came running, gun in hand. But when he saw the beautiful boa he knew he could not use that gun. He must have this creature for his collection. And yet he could not afford to lose his tapir.

The boa’s first act was to lock her jaws upon her prey. Her second was to let her coils come slithering down from the mast and to whip them around the body of the tapir. Her third, if Hal could not act in time, would be to apply the killing pressure, crushing the bones, reducing the flesh to a pulp, and stopping the heart. Then would come the long pull, the animal being slowly drawn down the boa’s swollen throat.

Hal fired his gun close to the boa’s head, hoping to startle her into releasing her hold.

1 can do better than that,’ shouted Roger, thinking his brother had missed. And Banco came tumbling up with a knife.

‘Don’t hurt the snake,’ Hal warned. ‘We want it alive.’ He jumped into the toldo for some noosing cord.

When he reappeared the situation had changed. A new actor had taken part in the drama. The giant iguana, annoyed by a crack from the whipping tail of the serpent, had sunk its teeth into it. Instantly the deck became a circus for a whirling ball of reptile fury with the innocent little tapir at the centre of it.

Hal and the men stood back. They might as well have tried to stop a tornado. The iguana, looking like a monster of the days before the dawn of civilization, the spines on its back and chin standing out like the hackles of an angry rooster, gripped the snake with its long, sharp claws and held on with its alligator-like teeth. The teeth of the boa had now been transferred from the tapir to her new enemy. But Nosey was so entangled in the

coils that he revolved with them, screaming with terror.

Hal looked on in dismay. The two demons would kill each other. The ugly iguana and the lovely boa were both valuable. It was the battle of beauty and the beast. He must not let either win at the expense of the other. But what to do? He had caught snakes before, but never a boa constrictor. What could one do with noosing cord in a melee like this?

Another idea came to him and he dropped the cord. He noticed that every time the iguana came out to the full length of the leash that tied him to a log of the craft, the whirling dervishes came to a momentary halt. If he could be there just at that instant and get his fingers on a certain nerve in the snake’s neck … Every snake had such a nerve centre, and it was its tenderest spot, its Achilles’ heel.

The next time the line snapped taut Hal’s hand flew to the boa’s throat, the fingers sinking deeply into the undersurface. He was pulled violently about by the thrashing reptile, but he held on. The Indians were dancing about him, trying to seize some other part of the boa’s whirling body.

Then Hal saw that the boa’s jaws had relaxed their hold on the iguana. He felt a surge of triumph. He was Tarzan after all.

The feeling changed to one of horror as the boa transferred her full attention to him. Her coils whipped around his body. Roger seized the end of the tail and manfully tried to pull it loose.

‘Stand clear!’ yelled Hal. One Hunt in trouble was enough. But Roger stuck to his apparently hopeless job.

Hal ground the fingers of both hands into the throat at the back of the snake’s head. The open jaws with their gleaming teeth reached back towards his hands. A grip just behind a snake’s head is supposed to be safe, but some snakes can almost turn in their skins to get at their captor. Hal was thankful that the boa has no poison, but he was aware that its bite can be painful and sometimes fatal.

‘Me kill! Me kill!’ screeched Banco, brandishing his knife. But Hal shook his head. He felt he had already won two points, for the iguana and tapir had retreated to safety.

The snake in its violent convulsions got close enough to catch her teeth upon his shirt and tore it from his shoulder. Blood trickled from a scratch.

More serious was the tightening of the coils. He was beginning to lose his breath. With all his strength he tightened his own grip. Then there was a shout of joy from Roger. He was beginning to have some success. The tail came free but whipped about so savagely that Roger, still hanging on to it, danced a fandango. He kept pulling and walked around Hal, unwinding the serpent. The Indians laid hold and helped him. The jaws and the head drooped. Hal relaxed his grip, hoping fervently that he had not gone too far and killed this superb representative of the world of snakes.

The boa went limp and six men had no difficulty in holding her, stretching out her lustrous brown

body to full length. The men stood there in a sort of daze.

‘Now we’ve got her, what do we do with her?’ came from Roger.

Hal felt bruised and weak. It was as if the wits had been squeezed out of him. Yes, what would they do with the boa now that they had her?

One of the Indians came up with the answer. He pointed to the cabin, or toldo, on the montaria. Sure enough, thought Hal, the Indians were quite accustomed to making a pet of the boa constrictor. In the Indian villages it was common practice to have a boa in the house to keep the place free of rats and mice. This snake had been fighting for its life and had shown its savage nature. But if it were kindly treated it would become tame and even affectionate.

‘Just the place for it,’ said Hal.

Together they carried the weakly squirming boa off the Ark and on to the skiff. They put her into the toldo and closed the door. There she would be apart from the other animals. Perhaps later she would learn to get along with them. If she were kept well-supplied with food, she would have no incentive to gobble up the other passengers. Her first meal was a young peccary brought in by one of the crew. The pig squealed loudly as it was tossed into the toldo. A moment later it still squealed but with a muffled tone, for the squeal was halfway down the boa’s throat.

The men opened the door to watch the proceeding. The boa was too fully occupied to pay attention to them. Her head seemed twice as big as before and her throat bulged.

‘How can she make her head so large?’ puzzled Roger.

That’s because her jaws are not locked together at the back like ours,’ said Hal. ‘They’re only attached to her skull by a sort of elastic. She can pull her lower jaw away from her upper far enough to take in something a lot bigger than the usual size of her own head. But that’s not the most wonderful thing about her. Watch her ‘jaw-walking’!’

The boa was inching the peccary in by a curious movement of her lower jaw — or jaws, for there were actually two of them. They worked separately. The right jaw would grip and pull, and the left one would then do the same, the one on the right would release its grip and move forward to grip again, and so on. Thus the victim was ‘walked’ into the mouth and down the throat.

‘I see where my job is cut out for me,’ said Roger ruefully, ‘getting food everyday for that big girl.’ ‘I don’t think she’ll be much trouble,’ Hal assured him. ‘That meal will last her a week — perhaps two. She’ll just lie in a corner and sleep it off. I don’t think we even need to keep the door closed. She won’t think about escaping until she gets hungry again — and by that time we’ll have some more food ready for her.’

Roger admired his brother’s book knowledge. And it was all to work out exactly as he said except for one unexpected development — something that would provide the expedition with sixty boa constrictors instead of one!

All the rest of day the boa lay asleep in the corner of the toldo. It was possible now to examine her freely. The head could be picked up, the jaws opened, and she could even be turned over on her side.

‘Look!’ exclaimed Roger. ‘Feet! She has feet.’

Sure enough, just where legs would naturally be if it was natural for a snake to have legs, there were two claws.

‘It just shows,’ Hal said, ‘that somewhere away back in the ancient history of the boas, they had feet like lizards and other vertebrates. These are the remains of them.’

‘Why did they lose them, I wonder?’

‘Because they became clever enough to walk on their stomachs,’ Hal guessed. ‘Think what an advantage it is in the jungle not to have arms and legs to get tangled in the underbrush. A snake can slip through a tangle of vines that would stop anything with legs.’

‘But none of the snakes we used to catch had these leftover legs.’

‘No — but I understand all the boa family has them.’

What’s the boa family?’

‘Oh, there are about forty kinds of boa. The python is one. You’d have to go to Asia to find it. But the biggest of them all, in fact the largest snake in the whole world, you are likely to run into any day here in the Amazon.’

‘The anaconda?’

Hal nodded. Roger’s eyes sparkled. ‘Are we going to try to get one of them?’

‘Yes. But we won’t have as easy a time as we had today. Our boa is as gentle as a kitten compared with the anaconda.’

‘Gentle!’ exclaimed Roger, looking at the twelve feet of powerful muscle. ‘There was a while this afternoon when I thought the kitten was going to swallow a mouse, and you were it.’