by Karen Prince
“You got the hat, I have dibs on the middle,” he said, clambering over Ethan and planting his buttocks firmly in the centre of the tube. As the sun rose over the treetops, one powerful crocodile towed Salih and the hyena through a gap in the rapids and lead the flotilla downstream.
~~~
“Do you think they could go faster? Like skiing?” Tariro said, eyeing the two crocodiles that pulled them downstream. Amun and Darwishi, Salih had called them. Ethan was not that worried that he’d been unable to convince Tariro of his ability to communicate with the crocodiles via Salih, but it was a bit disconcerting that Tariro chose to see them as pack animals. He had cut himself a switch from a low-hanging branch to chivvy them along.
“I wouldn’t push your luck,” Ethan said. “Unless you want to lose an arm.” They had drifted peacefully behind the crocodiles so far. The river, about twenty-paces wide in places, was calm, deep green and shadowy, fringed by dense forest.
Jimoh sat on the tube propped up by Ethan’s backpack, pointing out wildlife as they went. “There,” he said, just before a plum-coloured starling took flight, its feathers shimmering with iridescent purple where they caught the sunlight.
“Shoo!” Tariro yelled, a moment later, firing a pebble from his slingshot at an ungainly ground hornbill as it strutted along the riverbank. It was ugly, black with vivid red patches of bare skin on its face and throat. He missed it, but the bird lumbered into the air, showing off a surprisingly large expanse of wings.
“Leave bird alone,” Jimoh said, giving him a black look.
“Why? It’s so ugly,” Tariro said. He settled back comfortably on the tube. “If I wasn’t so worried about Joe, I could grow to like this lifestyle.”
Both Jimoh and Ethan gave Tariro a skeptical look. “You probably wouldn’t last a day without the crocodiles,” Ethan said.
“Shh,” Jimoh whispered, nudging both boys on the shoulder and pointing a little upstream. A python swam along the shoreline. They watched as it slithered into the lower branches of a tree, revealing a long length of strikingly patterned coils. It hid there among the leaves, so perfectly camouflaged that they would never have spotted it if they had not seen it swimming. Ethan shuddered. It was so huge, one of the boys themselves could have been a tasty snack for the creature if they had drifted below it.
Salih and the hyena kept up a heated exchange on the other tube. Ethan grew used to the feeling of the warm and cool waves of their conversation whenever they drifted close enough.
Tariro pointed out a mother warthog, with four ugly piglets, wallowing in the mud on the narrow strip of riverbank. “They’re so hideous they’re cute,” he laughed, then loosed off another pebble from his slingshot. Their little tails stuck straight up in the air like antenna as they ran, panic stricken, for the cover of a nearby burrow. Ethan looked at Jimoh to see if he would tell Tariro to stop that.
Instead, Jimoh shrugged. “Also good for eating, if you can hit them.”
Gradually the cliffs grew closer together until they found themselves floating through a narrow gorge. The water, which had seemed calm enough before, suddenly felt deeper and swifter as it pushed its way past large, smooth rocks. Ethan sat up in the tube, cocking his head towards the sound of turbulence downstream.
Rounding a bend in the river they came upon a powerful-looking vortex, beyond which the river seemed to vanish around the flank of a cliff, thundering off into the unseen distance.
The crocodiles towed the boys, Salih and the hyena into an eddy beside the cliff, to one side of the vortex, and deposited them on a narrow rock ledge.
Amun produced a low gravelly sound from his throat that was just as disconcerting as the leopard’s own resounding purr, and the leopard cocked his head to one side to listen. He looked puzzled for a moment, and then rose up and padded over to the crocodile, where he looked into its eyes and listened intently while it continued to growl in a slightly higher pitch.
“Um. The leopard is finding out from the crocodile what’s the safest way to pass,” Ethan told the others. Jimoh’s eyes widened, obviously still in awe at the idea that Ethan could communicate with the leopard, but Tariro wasn’t having any of it.
“Don’t be stupid, Ethan, we are just stopping for a break before going round the mountain,” he said. “If these animals could talk to someone, why the hell would they choose you?”
“Suit yourself,” Ethan said, turning his attention to Amun, who rested his jaw on the ledge, waiting expectantly for the leopard to convey his message.
“He says that the water over there will suck you down under,” Salih said, eyeing the sinister-looking vortex whirling menacingly below the sheer cliffs. Ethan saw how you could get caught in it, and go round and round until you drowned. No wonder no one passed this way.
“Well, I could have told you that!” Tariro sneered, when Ethan interpreted.
Salih ignored him. “Then the river squeezes through a narrow gap between the cliffs and runs swiftly over the rocks to a pool below,” he continued. “You cannot see the fall until you get around the corner, by which time it’s too late; the current will force you over. The crocodiles will lift two of you on their backs through the vortex to look so that you can make your own judgment about how to proceed.”
“How do we know the crocs won’t just take two of us down the river and eat us?” Tariro said once Ethan had told him.
“There’s no other way, Tariro. We cannot climb walls of cliff here to go round and if we go home this will not help Joe,” Jimoh said. “If leopard for Ethan says we do this thing then we do. Ethan trusts leopard.”
“Ethan, I swear, if you are making this all up so that you can be in charge, I am going to smack you,” Tariro grumbled, but given the choice between riding on the back of the crocodile and waiting, he agreed to wait on the ledge. He sat beside the hyena and scratched its back nervously, working his way up its scraggy coat towards its ears while the hyena wiggled and giggled.
Ethan wasn’t sure if he actually sensed the hyena’s pleasure or if it was just obvious from its giggling. Either way, he wished Tariro wouldn’t touch the animal; there was always the chance he might touch Ethan – or worse still, something that Ethan had to eat – without first washing his hands.
Jimoh did not look afraid to go into the vortex. He untied the floating tubes from the crocodiles, securing them to a low hanging branch, and climbed onto the back of Amun. Keeping a strong grip on the harness with one hand, he forced his hat down tighter onto his head with the other like a cowboy, and they pushed off from the ledge.
Ethan had never been this close to a crocodile apart from the biting incident. As gnarly as the creature was, it had beautiful eyes. They were a mottled mossy green, like a shady pool, with a vertical black slit. He could have sworn they crinkled into a smile as he approached Darwishi, but he couldn’t help suppressing a shiver when he thought how close he had come to poking Darwishi’s eyes out when he went for the amulet. The crocodiles would not have been quite so keen to help if he had succeeded. He hoped Darwishi was not just biding his time till he got him on his own before paying him back. Shifting his weight gingerly onto the animal’s back, he clung on to the rope harness. The crocodile was not as bumpy as he had expected, and not slimy at all.
Darwishi struggled against the current as he swam into the vortex. At first the water tore at Ethan’s legs, threatening to wash him off the crocodile, but he gripped the rope harness more tightly with his hands and flattened himself along Darwishi’s back the way he had seen Jimoh do it, hooking his feet up as far out of the water as he could.
They reached a spot on the edge of the vortex, from where they had a good view of the way ahead, just in time to see Jimoh fumble for a better footing, then wash off the back of Amun and go hurtling down the rapids, Amun following close behind.
Ethan gripped Darwishi more tightly, holding his breath as he waited helplessly for the boy to surface. Eventually he caught a glimpse of Jimoh’s red shirt tumbling down the rapids at a terrifying sp
eed, his beloved hat flying off his head as he swept through a narrow gap between two rocks and came to rest about halfway down the rapids.
Ethan’s sigh of relief was short lived. The water where Jimoh came to a standstill flowed over a submerged rock, endlessly tumbling back upon itself, trapping Jimoh in its grasp. Flashes of red shirt and an occasional arm waved above the foam. Searching desperately for Amun, Ethan found him, about ten meters upstream from Jimoh, but he was just as caught up as the boy, tumbling over and over as he struggled to unhitch a piece of his rope harness caught between two rocks.
Ethan was going to have to go down by himself and help Jimoh. He could not go down on Darwishi because the rest of them needed the crocodile to drag them beyond the vortex to the top of the rapids.
As Ethan was about to slide off Darwishi, Amun broke free at last and caught up with Jimoh, nudging him towards an eddy, where the boy was able to drag himself up onto Amun’s back. Ethan was not sure if Jimoh was injured or just exhausted but he slumped, unmoving, across the back of Amun for the rest of the trip down.
Ethan’s hands shook by the time he got back to the ledge. He was not entirely sure what to do. “The rapids are extremely dangerous and now we are down to one crocodile, and separated from Jimoh so there is no going back,” he told Tariro. “Jimoh must be injured or the crocodile would surely have left him below and come back for us.”
“How hard can it be?” Tariro said with the benefit of not knowing what they were in for. “We should be fine as long as we keep our feet out in front of us and fin our hands out by the side of our hips to push off from the rocks. We did this at Outward Bound Leadership Camp at school,” he told Ethan pointedly.
Ethan fixed him with a baleful look and described how fast the descent was, and how Jimoh had gotten stuck in the hydraulic. “I think you and I will be able to stick to the plan and ride the rapids using the spare tubes,” he said, “but the animals will not be able to hold on to a tube. They will each need help from a crocodile. One crocodile will have to make two trips–”
“The hyena will have to change,” Salih interrupted. He stalked up to the hyena and stood before him expectantly, a dangerous glint in his sparkling yellow eyes.
The hyena looked up from his grooming, which consisted of sitting on his lower back with one leg pointing in the air and licking his genitals. “Errr. Don’t tell them. It’s a secret,” he said.
“We will leave you here, in this world,” Salih retaliated. He looked as if he would do it too. Ethan interpreted for Tariro, who forgot, in his shock, that he didn’t believe Ethan was able to understand the conversation between the two animals.
“What the hell is he going to change into? Hyenas don’t wear clothes,” he said, before his eyes opened wide in disbelief. “Ethan, you are shitting me! He is not going to change into another thing!” He stared at the hyena, and moved a couple of steps closer to Ethan.
The hyena writhed in embarrassment. “Okay, I will do it, but you are not allowed to look,” he grumbled.
Ethan agreed and the boys turned their backs, but Tariro peeped out of the corner of his eye. “Bloody hell!” he shrieked at the sound of a wet plop. He grabbed Ethan by the arm.
Ethan was too flabbergasted himself to do much more than stare. A young man stood where the hyena had stood. He looked a little older than the boys. In sharp contrast to the ugliness of the hyena, he was almost impossibly handsome: all sleek gymnast’s muscles and pecan-nut brown skin, with perfectly symmetrical features set in a square face with high cheekbones. His hair, a glossy patchwork of auburn, black and gold, looked much like his fur had looked before, making him look still slightly hyena, as did his dark hazel eyes. The smell of swamp still clung to him like his own brand of perfume.
He picked his nose with nonchalance and inspected it, before popping it into his mouth. A bandana that looked like his own pelt dangled around his neck, but otherwise he was stark naked.
Tariro was the first to recover. He snatched up a kanga from Ethan’s backpack and handed it to the youth, who accepted it with a smile showing even white teeth.
“So what? Is he human?” Ethan said quietly to Salih.
“Not quite,” Salih said. “His name when he takes this shape is Fisi. But don’t let the pretty face fool you – he is also a hyena. He is just as likely to attack you as befriend you.”
“The leopard is joking,” the hyena guy laughed, in strangely accented but surprisingly good English. It was a moment before Ethan realised the youth could still understand what the leopard said, even though he had changed. With a smug grin at Tariro, Ethan wondered if he regretted scratching the animal’s back now, but Tariro hardly seemed to remember. He stared openmouthed.
When they were ready to go, they left Salih waiting on the ledge and Darwishi dragged all the tubes towards the narrow gap in the cliff. Ethan, Tariro and Fisi bobbed up and down, their backsides firmly squashed into the centres of the spare tubes with no hessian on them. While Darwishi struggled to hold everyone at the top of the rapids, Ethan untied the transport and equipment tubes and posted them one at a time through the gap, watching them as the current caught them and they hurtled over the rapids, bouncing from rock to rock on their downward journey.
Fisi settled his buttocks further down into his tube and Darwishi nudged him out of the vortex. He gave a half-giggle, half-grunt of excitement and plummeted down the rapids.
“Don’t forget to try and keep your feet in front of you!” Tariro yelled after him as the river took him. There had been no time for him to get over his shock at the youth’s change because of their rush to get down to Jimoh, but Ethan thought he looked quite excited at the idea of a hyena who turned into a man. At least he was willing to take instructions from the leopard now, even if they were relayed through the hyena.
Ethan watched Tariro struggle against the current to line up his own feet with a gap in the middle of the channel, and then he too surged forwards and raced through the jagged rocks, the water spraying up all around him.
Checking one last time that his hat was tied securely to his tube – he did not want to lose it like Jimoh had – Ethan pushed away from Darwishi into the cataract. He was surprised by his rush of excitement as he surged through the gap.
Bouncing straight out of the tube at the very first hurdle, he tumbled into the water. It frothed and churned around him till his lungs burned, eventually spitting him out into a dark channel. Jagged rocks and branches whipped passed him in a blur of black and green. Ethan reached up to catch an overhanging branch to slow himself down, then shrieked in agony as he was hurled with bone-shattering force against unseen debris, trapped beneath it. The force of the water passing through the trapped debris pinned him there, quickly piling up behind him, pushing him under the water. He wrestled himself up and onto the branch where he clung for a moment, his heart beating painfully in his chest.
About twenty metres downstream his tube floated in the same eddy Jimoh’s had, and he decided to retrieve it if he could because it had his hat. Letting go of the branch, he surged forward, water washing over his face. Miraculously, he made it to the gap between the two rocks. Pointing his feet out in front of him, he passed through with no room to spare, threw out an arm and snatched the tube up as he went. Using all his strength, he forced the tube under his bottom and hurtled down the rest of the rapids. Six feet from the bottom his tube took flight over a small waterfall and then crashed back into the water, throwing Ethan headfirst into the deep pool below.
I did it! I actually did it! he thought as his feet touched the bottom of the pool. Oddly, he felt no aching, smarting, tenderness or anything. Nothing was sore at all. Perhaps the witch had been right about the self-healing. Or it could be excess adrenalin, a little voice at the back of his head warned him.
He turned to push himself towards the nearest shore. There, he came face to face with what he knew was one of the most aggressive creatures in the world, certainly one of the most dangerous animals in Africa.
11
A Vicious Encounter
If Joe shut his eyes, he could imagine himself in the bush near his home. The forest smelled of moist earth, compost and wood smoke, but the resemblance ended there. Everything seemed to be oversized, as if the plants were on steroids. He squatted on his haunches, poking at the ashes of his fire with a stick. Without the protection of a shirt, he shivered in the early morning chill. The fire had gone out in the night, soon after the tiger left him.
At least the tiger had left him, he thought. It had been a traumatic night. For most of it he lay against the tiger for warmth – and because the cat had insisted – but he had hardly dared to breathe in case the strange animal’s mood of conviviality wore thin. One swipe of its irritated paw would have broken bones, if not killed him. Eventually he had fallen into an exhausted sleep, and was only half-aware when the tiger slipped out from under him sometime before dawn, and slunk off into the forest.
I hope it’s gone for good, he thought, checking the surrounding forest in case it hadn’t.
A purple crested lourie rustled in the canopy far above Joe’s head, its scarlet flight feathers flashing as it glided the short distance from branch to branch. His hand moved absently to the slingshot around his neck but he did not pick up a pebble. He easily could have shot it down, but he just didn’t feel hungry enough to kill such a beautiful bird.
“I’ll probably regret that when I’m starving later,” he muttered out loud. He knew he had to size up his situation as soon as possible. First evaluate his physical condition, then take stock of his surroundings, and then make a survival plan. According to Jimoh’s dad, who had been teaching him to hunt since he was little, you had to find water, then food, and then shelter. He wished Jimoh was with him now – he would know what to do – then dismissed the thought; there was no point in both of them being lost.
I suppose I’d better get on with it, he thought, pulling himself up to his feet. As long as he kept busy, he didn’t have to consider just how dire his situation was. And how lonely he felt... At least he was in good shape. His fingers, when he held them out before him, were quite steady, and he had no injuries. The strange weakness of the night before seemed to have worn off. He knew there was no point in questioning why he was here; all he had to do was figure out how to get back home.