Samba: A Story of the Rubber Slaves of the Congo

by Herbert Strang

  CHAPTER X

  A Trip with a Crocodile

  Samba looked warily round, then began to descend from his perch in thetree, moving as slowly and with as many pauses as a timid batherstepping into the water. Once more he was on the ground. Pausing onlyto throw a rapid glance on all sides, he struck off in a direction atright angles to the course of the stream, and resumed his laboriousmarch through the forest maze.

  Hour after hour he pushed on without meeting a living creature. But hehad heard too much of the cunning and determination of the Congo dwarfsto delude himself with the idea that he had finally shaken them off.Tired as he was, sweating in the moist oppressive heat, he dared notrest, even to eat in comfort the food he had brought in his tin. Henibbled morsels as he went, hoping that by good speed during the wholeday he might get far enough from the pigmies to make his ultimateescape secure.

  Towards evening he heard in front of him the long monotonous rustle ofa stream foaming over a rocky bed. He was careful in approaching it:to meet a crocodile ambushed near the bank would be as dangerous as tomeet a man. Pushing his way cautiously through the shrubs, he came tothe edge of a broad river, flowing in swift eddies from white rapidsabove. It seemed to Samba that this must be a tributary of the Lemba,the river on whose bank he had left the white men, and to which, lowerdown, he must ultimately make his way. Pursuit by the white men mightnow be safely disregarded; Samba thought he could hardly do better thankeep to the stream, taking his chance of meeting negroes at isolatedvillages on the banks. These, if he met them, would at any rate beeasier to elude than the Bambute.

  But the sun was going down, the air becoming chill. He must find ashelter for the night and pursue his riverside journey next day. Alittle search revealed, on a bluff above the river, a boulder having adeep cavity on one side. Here Samba sat down to eat the little foodleft in his tin; then he curled himself up for the night. Nothingdisturbed his sleep.

  In the morning he felt more than usually hungry. His tin was empty; hedid not care to leave the river and go hunting in the forest, perhapsvainly, for berries or roots. A little way down stream he noticed aspot where the dark surface of the water was scarcely disturbed by aripple; was that a deep pool, he wondered, where fish might be? Hewent down to the edge and, leaning flat upon a rock peeped over. Yes;in the depths he caught the scaly gleam of darting fish.

  Springing up, he went to a swampy patch hard by and cut a long,straight, stiff reed. Then he took the hard stick with which he madefire, and, sharpening the point until it pricked like a needle, hefitted the wood to the reed so as to make a spear. With this in hishand he once more leant over the pool. He lay still for a few moments,intently watching; then, with a movement of extraordinary swiftness, heplunged his spear into the depths, and brought it out with a silverytrout impaled. The fish had stopped to nibble at a root in the bank.When Samba had thus caught three he was satisfied. He did not pause tocook the fish. He split them open, dexterously boned and cleaned them,and ate them raw.

  He had scarcely finished his breakfast when he saw, hurtling down therapids above him, a huge forest tree--a mass of green, for most of itsbranches in full leaf were still upon it. Clearly it had not long lostits grip of earth. It came swirling towards Samba, every now and thenstopping as its submerged part was caught by some rock, only to bewhirled round and driven past the obstacle by the weight of waterbehind. It made a zigzag course through the rapids, and then floatedpeacefully down the still reach of water beneath.

  As he watched the tree sailing gently towards him, Samba had an idea.Why not use it as a raft to carry him on his way? It was strong enoughto bear his weight; he could hide in the foliage with at least as gooda chance of escaping observation as if he were moving along the banks.

  By the time he had grasped the notion the tree was past him. He sprangup, raced along until he was level with it, then took a neat headerinto the water. A minute's rapid swimming brought him to the end ofthe trunk, which, he saw, had been snapped clean off and was notencumbered by the roots. He clambered up, and the trunk was so longthat his trifling weight scarcely depressed its end. Smiling withpleasure, he crawled along it until he was in the centre of the leafyscreen.

  This, however, now that he was there, did not seem so dense as when hehad viewed it from the bank; he was not concealed so well as he hadhoped. Every now and again, too, his novel raft gave an ominous lurchand roll, suggesting that the portion above water might at any momentchange places with that below. If that happened, Samba wondered, wouldhe be able to disengage himself from the tangle of branches and swimclear? But these momentary fears were banished by the novelty andexcitement of his position. How delightful it was, after his toilsomeand fatiguing journey through the forest, to float down the riverwithout effort of his own in a leafy arbour that defended him from thefierce rays of the sun! And his voyage had the pleasures of variety.Sometimes the foliaged top went first; then, when the branches sweptthe bottom of the stream in shallow reaches, the trunk swung round andwent broadside to the current. Sometimes the branches stuck fast, thecurrent carried the trunk round in a circle, and when an eddy set itagain in motion, the trunk end became the bow of this uneasy ship.Bump! That was some rock or sandbank; the tree shook, and Samba wasnearly toppled from his perch. Nk'oketo![1] It was all right; thefriendly water had washed the tree clear, and Samba was off again, hisblack eyes gleaming with fun as he peered between the branches.

  It was early in the afternoon, and very hot even for those latitudes.Everything seemed asleep. No breeze ruffled the leaves in the treesalong the banks. The air quivered. Samba was dozing, lulled by thegentle motion of the tree, whose progress had not for some time beenchecked.

  All at once there was a shock. Samba instinctively clutched a branchas he felt himself jerked from his seat. His lumbering vessel wastwirling round; and looking through the leaves, he saw that it wascaught by the head on a sandbank in midstream.

  But next moment he felt a shiver run down his spine, and an eerycreeping about the roots of his hair. Below him, not four feet away, agigantic crocodile was staring at him with his cunning baleful eyes.The swish of the projecting branches upon the sandbank had aroused thereptile from his siesta on this vantage ground, whence, at the lazyopening of an eye, he could survey a long stretch of the river. And hehad awoke to see a plump and tempting black boy at the inconsiderablealtitude of four feet above his snout.

  Those who have seen the crocodile only in his hours of ease, lazilysunning himself on a river bank, or floating with scarcely more thanhis eyes and forehead visible on the surface of the stream, may havecome to the comfortable conclusion that he is a slow-moving andlethargic beast. But see him rushing at the bank to seize in histerrible jaws the unwary antelope or zebra that has come to drink, orto sweep it into the river with a single blow of his mighty tail.Watch him when, roused from his doze on a sandbank, by the sting of arifle bullet on his armour, he vanishes with lightning rapidity beneaththe water. At one moment to all seeming as lifeless as a log, the nexthe is a raging monster, ready to tear and rend any hapless creaturewhich his inertness has beguiled.

  Of the two, Samba and the crocodile, it was the saurian that firstrecovered his wits. His instinct when disturbed at close quarters isto rush forthwith upon his enemy or victim. Thus did the crocodilenow. Considering that he is a beast not built for jumping, the leap heattempted, with a spasmodic wriggle of his formidable tail, was quite acreditable feat. With his teeth he grazed the lower part of the branchon which Samba sat; and the boy, gazing down into the beast's eyes,shuddered and shrank away. Fortunate it was for him that his legs hadnot been dangling. Nothing could then have saved him.

  The reptile, slipping back after its failure, maintained its hold onthe lower branches with its forefeet. Before it could make a secondattempt, Samba had swung himself into the branch above. The treetoppled slightly, and for one moment of terror Samba feared he would bethrown into the very jaws of the monster. But the sandbank he
ld thetree firmly, and that peril was past.

  With thick foliage between it and the boy, the crocodile saw no chanceof securing its victim from its present position. But it wasdetermined not to be balked, and, cunning beast! could afford to wait.It seemed to know that the boy was only safe so long as he clung to hisperch. On the sandbank, or in the water, his end would alike bespeedy. So the reptile slid off the bank into the water, and swam tothe trunk end of the tree, which had been swung round by the currentand was now pointing down stream. If it could not leap, it couldcrawl, and up the trunk the approach to its prey was easy.

  Samba's eyes were now wide with fright, as he saw the beast'sintention. Up a tree on the river bank he could have laughed anycrocodile to scorn; but this sandbank in midstream was groundpeculiarly the creature's own, even though the prey was on a branch tenfeet above it. With its experience of sandbanks the crocodile knewthere was no permanency in this arrangement.

  The attempts of the huge reptile to gain a footing on the trunk had aresult which caused Samba mingled hope and fear. The tree floatedclear of the bank, and the voyage began again. But how different werethe circumstances! In the stern, no longer a cheerful smiling boy,carelessly watching the slow banks glide by, but a boy whose hands andfeet gripped his perch with anxious tenacity, and whose scared eyeswere quick to mark every movement of the unwelcome, the abhorred,passenger amidships. With many a splash of its tail, and many a gruntof impatient fury, the monster at last made good its footing on thebroad trunk, which under its weight was for more than a quarter of itslength invisible beneath the surface of the water. For some minutes itlay still, staring at Samba with unwinking eyes, displaying all itsteeth as if to grin sardonically at its victim. Samba regretted forthe moment that he had not swarmed down from his perch and attacked thecrocodile with his knife while he was still struggling to mount thetrunk. But then he reflected that he had after all done wisely, forthe reptile would have slid back into the water, and before Samba couldgain his retreat, he might have been swept off by one swish of theterrible tail.

  Samba, as he had shown more than once, and notably in the recentincident of the serval, had no lack of courage; but he had never beforebeen at such close quarters with a crocodile, the most terrible of allthe natural enemies of man in the regions of the Congo. And as he satand watched the glassy stare of the hideous reptile now wriggling inchby inch towards him, he felt a strange helplessness, a kind offascination that seemed to chill and paralyse his power of movement asof thought. He had retreated as far as he dared. His weight hadcaused some of the slenderer and more elastic branches to bend towardsthe water; he had even imagined that, as he tested them, the pressurethreatened to make the tree revolve. What his fate would be if thewhirling of the trunk on its axis brought him into the river he wellknew. The crocodile would slip as nimbly as an eel after him; and,entangled in the foliage, which to his armoured enemy would offer noobstacle, he would fall an easy prey.

  The crocodile wriggled on, till it came to the place where the firstbranch forked from the trunk. Scarcely more than its own length nowseparated it from Samba. Apparently it had come as near as it cared toventure; not being a climber, the feat of crawling up the taperingbranch on which Samba was perched was not one to its taste. It laystill, with jaws agape, its eyes half-closed in a kind of wicked leer.

  Samba tried to look away from the hideous beast, but in vain; he foundhis gaze drawn back uncontrollably. He felt even more subject to thefascination now that the crocodile's movements had ceased. Theconviction was growing upon him that sooner or later he would slidedown the branch and fall dreamily into the open jaws. He was fastbecoming hypnotized.

  But he was roused from this dangerous trancelike state by a sudden rollof the tree. Perched high as he was, the motion caused him to swingthrough an arc of several yards and brought him perilously near thewater. The danger quickened his faculties: he clung on with a tightergrip, bethinking himself to look whether his fishing spear, which hehad stuck into the bark, was still safe. He was relieved to find thatit was undisturbed. The tree righted itself, and a gleam of hopelightened Samba's mind when he saw that the crocodile was in the water.Though, stretched on the trunk, the beast had felt the roll less thanSamba above, it had a less tenacious grip and less ability to adaptitself; and first the tail, then the rest of its body had slid off. Itwas violently struggling to regain its position, its jaw resting on thetrunk, its forepaws furiously beating the water.

  The memory of the reptile's former difficulties in mounting inspiredSamba with an idea, which, impelled equally by terror and hate, he wasprompt to act upon. The tree was still rocking slightly beforeregaining its steadiness, and the crocodile, despite its efforts, wasunable to gain a firm grip on the moving trunk. All its attention wasengaged upon the accomplishment of its immediate purpose: it would losethe dainty morsel if it did not once more mount the tree. Samba wasquick to seize the critical moment. Spear in hand he crept downwardsalong the branch on which he had been perched, careful that hismovements should not divert the crocodile's attention. Reaching thejunction of the branch with the parent stem, only five or six feet fromthe reptile, he let himself down noiselessly into the river on the farside of the tree, and swam for a second or two until he came oppositethe crocodile. During these few seconds he had been hidden from thecreature's view by the mass of the trunk, which rose out of the waterto some height above his head.

  The crocodile had now managed to get its forepaws on the tree, and instruggling to hoist itself its snout was raised almost upright,exposing the soft underside, the sole part in which it is vulnerable toanything except a very heavy bullet. Samba caught sight of the tip ofthe snout above the tree; here was the opportunity he had hoped for inmaking this hazardous experiment. Taking with his left hand a firmgrip of a wart on the trunk, he raised himself in the water, and withthe right hand drove his spear twice into the monster's throat. Thecrocodile made no sound; a lash of the powerful tail drove up a wavethat caused the tree to rock violently: then the huge body slippedbackwards into the water.

  The moment he had driven his spear home Samba let go his hold on thetree, and trod water until the current brought the foliage to him.Then he drew himself nimbly up into the branch he had formerlyoccupied. He was breathless, and scarcely yet recovered from hisscare; but there was no sign of the crocodile, and knowing that thereptile when mortally wounded sinks into deep water, he felt that hisenemy had gone for ever. He heaved a deep sigh of relief, but chancingto look back, he noticed with a start of renewed dread that the waterin the wake of the tree was faintly tinged with red. Was it possiblethat the crocodile, though wounded, was still following? He felt ashiver thrill through him, and, bending down from his perch, kept hiseyes fixed in a stare on that ominous sanguine thread.

  The minutes passed. Still the water showed that faint persistenttidge. Samba was becoming more and more nervous. Like the reptile'seyes but a little while ago, that line of red held his gaze in astrange fascination. He was still watching it when the tree suddenlygave a violent lurch, and turned half over. Samba, whose hold hadrelaxed in his nervousness, was flung off the branch into a clump ofbushes at the side of the river, which here began to race rapidlythrough a deep gorge. Scratched and dazed by the fall he pickedhimself up slowly. He rubbed his eyes. What was this? He was in themidst of a group of pigmies, who were pointing excitedly, utteringtheir strange coughing cry, to the branches of the tree. In its lurchit had been turned almost completely round, so that the foliageformerly beneath the water was now uppermost. And there, firmly wedgedin a fork of two boughs, lay the lifeless body of the crocodile.

  The Bambute jabbered to Samba, stroked his arms, patted his back,examined the spear which, though it was broken in his fall, he had notlet go. From the bank they had witnessed the boy's bold fight, andthey had followed the course of the floating tree until it ran ashoreon a jutting bed of rock. Samba made signs that he wished to pursuehis journey on foot; but the Bambute shook their
heads and grunted andcarried him away with them. Once more he was a prisoner.

  [1] Nothing wrong!