Страница 11 из 118
The water had receded with the tide, and he was still fifty paces from the edge. With the motion of a man swimming on his back, he moved across the slimy evil, smelling mud, and his leg slithered after him. It was begi
He reached the water at last, and rolled onto his side with the bad leg uppermost in an attempt to keep the wound out of the mud. On one elbow he buried his face in the water, drinking greedily. The water was warm, tainted with sea salt, and musky with rotted mangroves so it tasted like animal urine. But he gulped it noisily with his mouth and his nostrils and his eyes below the surface. At last he must breathe, and he lifted his head, panting for breath, Coughing so the water shot up his throat, out through his nose and dimmed his vision with tears. Gradually his breathing steadied and his eyes cleared. Before he bowed his head to drink again, he glanced out across the cha
It was on the surface, still a hundred yards away but swimming fast, driving towards him with the great tail churning the water. A big one at least fifteen feet of it showing like the rOLIgh bark of a pine log, leaving a wide wake across the SUrface as it came.
And Fly
Belly down, he wriggled in frantic haste from the shallow water back onto the mud bank, dragging himself across the glutinous slime, clawing and threshing towards the papyrus raft where it lay stranded among the mangrove roots fifty yards away. Expecting each moment to hear the slithering rush of the huge reptile across the mud behind him, he reached the first of the mangroves and rolled on his side, looking back, coated with black mud, his face working in his terror and the sound of it spilling in an incoherent babble through his lips.
The crocodile was at the edge of the mud bank, still in the river. Only its head showed above the surface and the little piggy bright eyes watched him un winkingly each set on its knot of horny scale.
Desperately Fly
Unwounded Fly
Wildly now he searched for a weapon anything, no matter how puny to defend himself. But there was nothing. Not a branch of driftwood, not a rock only the ck'black sheet of mud around him.
He looked back at the crocodile. It had not moved. His first feeble hope that it might not come out onto the mud bank withered almost before it was born. It would come.
Cowardly, loathsome creature it was but in time it would Father its courage. It had smelled his blood; it knew him to be wounded, helpless. It would come.
Painfully Fly
There was a tiny ripple around its snout, the first sign of its movement, and the long scaly head inched in towards the edge. Fly
The back showed, its scales like the patterned teeth of a file, and beyond it, the tail with the coxcomb double crest.
Cautiously, on its short bowed legs, it waddled through the shallows. Wet and shiny, as broad across the back as a percher on stallion, more than a ton of cold, armoured flesh, it emerged from the water. Sinking elbow-deep into the soft mud, so its belly left a slide mark behind it. Gri
It came so slowly that Fly
When it was half-way across the bank, it stopped crouching, gri
"Get away!" Fly
Sobbing now, Fly
This time Fly
The deep booming note of the gun seemed not part of reality, but the crocodile reared up on its tail, drowning the echoes of the shot with its own hissing bellow, and above the next boom of the gun, Fly
Mud sprayed as the reptile rolled in convulsions, and then, lifting itself high on its legs, it lumbered in ungainly flight towards the water. Again and again the heavy rifle fired, but the crocodile never faltered in its rush, and the surface of the water exploded like blown glass as it launched itself from the bank and was gone in the spreading ripples.
Standing in the bows of the canoe with the smoking rifle in his hands, while the paddlers drove in towards the bank, Sebastian Oldsmith shouted anxiously, "Fly
Fly