Ling-Mei and Frazer darted back along the bank.
‘It’s now or never, guys,’ said Ling-Mei. Then she looked at her husband. ‘Roger, you ready?’ Her voice was tender. ‘Your leg?’
‘Fine for swimming. When we get to the far side, I can start to worry about it again. But in the water I’m a fish.’ Then he turned to his nephew. ‘Frazer, you swim, don’t you?’
‘Of course. Maybe not as good as Amazon, but I can get across that river.’
‘Chung?’
‘Chung like dolphin.’
‘That’s not quite what I remember …’ said Amazon, thinking back to their time as enemies in the South Pacific.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Ling-Mei, her voice urgent and almost harsh with authority. ‘It looks clear now. No time to waste. In we go. Try not to splash. We’ll walk with the raft as far out as we can, then swim along with it. Aim for that fallen tree on the far side. Try to stay together. If anyone gets in trouble, shout to me; the rest go on.’ Then she remembered the dhole pup, still nestling inside Amazon’s shirt. She knew the futility of trying to persuade her daughter to leave the animal.
‘I reckon my raft can carry your pup,’ she said.
And so they carried the green and bushy raft into the slow but powerful waters of the river, with the little dhole atop it, like an emperor being carried in a litter.
Amazon and Frazer both felt their nerves jangling, the fear of the pursuit behind now matched by the terror that waited for them in the river.
The still air was furnace-hot now, which made the water in the river surprisingly chilly, and Amazon couldn’t help but give a little gasp. But soon it was not the river’s temperature but its power that gripped her. The current was strong, and the water soon coursed over their thighs, their waists … The bed of the river was slick with mud, and each of them stumbled or slipped. Once Amazon went down on her knees beneath the water, and feared she might be swept away, but her mother and father pulled her up, spluttering. Soon the water was up to their necks and they were floating, kicking out for the far side.
They were no more than a third of the way across when the raft began to disintegrate. The others all began to swim independently, but Amazon kept a tight grip on the section with the dhole pup, which whined and whimpered each time one of its legs broke through the loose weave into the water below.
‘Keep together,’ cried Ling-Mei again. But it was becoming increasingly hard to swim in the right direction. The current seemed determined to sweep them down towards the crocs, which Amazon knew must by now have finished the remains of the chital and be looking for something more substantial. That knowledge certainly made her kick all the more desperately.
She was halfway. More than halfway. They were going to miss the fallen tree, but that didn’t matter – it was the safety of the far bank that counted, not where exactly they landed.
Her mother and father were either side of her, but she could see the pain on Roger’s face.
‘Mum, help Dad,’ she said. ‘His ankle … he can’t really swim. I’ve got this bit of the raft – it really helps.’
Ling-Mei looked at Roger, just as the current pulled him down and then bobbed him up again. ‘I’ll be right back,’ she said, and kicked towards Roger. At almost the same moment Amazon heard a voice crying out behind her.
She looked back. It was Frazer. He was clearly struggling, splashing in midstream without making any progress. She tried to call out in turn to her mum, but the river swallowed her shouts. She was a stronger swimmer than Frazer, and she should have made sure that he was OK.
She went back, pushing the raft before her, kicking hard against the current to reach him. It seemed to take an age, and her muscles ached. She prayed that she wouldn’t get cramp, which would leave her helpless in the water.
‘What is it?’ she yelled, clinging to his shirt.
‘Foot’s … caught …’ he gasped back. She could see that he was exhausted from the effort to keep above the water.
‘Take your shoe off!’
‘Can’t. Lace … too … tight.’
There was nothing for it.
‘Give me your knife!’
‘What?’
‘Now!’
Frazer reached under the water and pulled his pocketknife out.
‘You hold the raft,’ she said, then took the knife, opened the blade, gulped a lungful of air and went under, still clinging to Frazer’s clothing. She tried opening her eyes under the water, but it was pointless – it was thick with silt and she could see nothing. So she felt her way down to the bottom of his leg and found his hiking boot. She pulled and tugged a couple of times, but the whole foot was caught in some sort of root coming up from the river bed. So, with a couple of savage cuts, she sliced through the laces and pulled his foot free.
She came gasping to the surface, expecting to see relief on the face of her cousin.
But that’s not what she found. It was something closer to panic. His face was white, his eyes wide, a silent scream frozen on his face. Amazon spun in the water and saw why. Swimming towards them from the direction of the opposite bank was a huge hippo. Its massive jaws were gaping obscenely, its teeth huge brown scimitars.
There was no way they could swim on. She saw beyond the hippo that her mother and father had reached the far shore. They were now looking back in anguish at her.
Her father had drawn the pistol. Would that work if it had been submerged? She soon found out – he pointed it and fired twice, aiming, Amazon guessed, just in front of the hippo to scare it away.
It had no effect. The hippo was now only a few metres away, its mouth still wide open. Roger aimed again, this time right at the hippo.
And then the mouth crashed closed, not over them, but over … what? A log? No – it was a mugger crocodile! The hippo bit down and then threw its head backwards, hurling the three-metre-long reptile high in the air.
Amazon could have laughed. Except that she saw what was happening. The mugger was only the first of many. The allure of the chital had gone, and all the local crocs were now coming back to investigate the new commotion.
‘Back,’ Amazon shouted at Frazer. ‘We’ve got to get back to the bank.’
Together they swam, each with a hand on the raft – it was now hardly bigger than a dinner plate. Then their feet found the bottom, with the water up around their chins. Amazon looked back behind her and saw to her dismay that two of the colossal Nile crocodiles – each three times as long as an adult human – were surging towards them. They’d never make it to the bank. They were going to be dragged under and killed by the crocs in the notorious death spin, their arms and legs torn off while they still lived.
And then …
‘Aaaaarghh!’
It was Leopold Chung. He appeared as if from nowhere, hurling himself in front of the attacking crocs. He yelled and splashed, and then allowed himself to be carried away downstream with the current, still kicking and thrashing. The nearest of the crocs, as if mesmerized by the performance, swept their long tails back and forth and surged after him.
It gave Frazer and Amazon the few seconds they needed to beat it to the bank, where they dragged themselves from the water, Amazon clutching the pup which, delighted to be off the raft, buried itself in her clothes.
They looked up to see Chung swimming as fast as he could with the crocodiles still in pursuit and closing rapidly. Neither could bear to watch what they knew must happen next. Amazon squeezed her eyes shut as the sound of Chung’s cries and splashing faded into the distance.
On the other side of the river Amazon’s mother and father stood, helplessly, expressions of utter desolation on their faces. Then Amazon saw Roger very consciously pull himself together, and he shouted across the water:
‘The gunshots will have told them that we’re here. The hunters, I mean. Go now, as quickly as you can, and find somewhere to hide. Remember everything you’ve learned. We’ll get help and be back as soon as we can. Stay alive. Stay
alive.’
Ling-Mei stretched out her hand towards her daughter, almost as if she thought she could reach all the way across the wide river. Then her face crumpled and she turned away. In another moment they were gone, heading into the long grasses, Roger leaning heavily on his wife and still hobbling badly.
Amazon could not believe that she was losing her parents again. But she also felt the will to live well up inside her. She was not going to let these monstrous people destroy her family. Nor did she intend to let them slaughter the beautiful and precious animals in the reserve. She and Frazer were going to stay alive.
And then she thought of Chung.
‘Do you think he stands a chance?’
Frazer shook his head. But then, thinking that he had to be positive, he shrugged. ‘You never know. He’s always seemed like a lucky guy. But I’ll tell you what, that debt is paid. He’s a brave man.’
‘Come on,’ Amazon said, wiping away a tear that might have been for Chung. ‘We’ve got to move.’
Frazer nodded. He only had one boot, but he didn’t complain, and they began to jog along the bank of the river, staying within the shelter offered by the trees.
‘We don’t know if that guy told them that we were in the temple complex, but if he did they’ll have got there early this morning and found us gone. So that means we know they’ll be coming from that direction –’ He pointed the way they’d travelled that morning. ‘All we’ve got to do is keep moving. If we can stay out of their sight for the next few hours, your mum and dad should be able to get a message to the authorities. So I say we track along the river, and try to stick to any wooded or jungly areas we come across. This place is huge and, unless they have dogs, they’ll never find us.’
And at exactly that moment they heard, far off, the faint baying of hounds.
‘Oh nuts,’ said Frazer.
It was proving to be a very tricky time for the giant python. The man she had caught and squeezed until he should have been dead had refused to die. She had found that out when she had temporarily released him because of the attentions of a family of warthogs, which had happened to blunder her way. The mother warthog, assuming that the snake was a threat, had charged her repeatedly, jabbing those tusks maddeningly into her ribs.
When the warthog finally decided that enough was enough, the snake tried to begin her feast, only to discover that dinner had recovered enough to stagger away. She pursued him for a while, but it was no use – even a half-strangled human can outrun a python.
Her neck was bruised and her scales dented, the damage caused by the gorilla now added to by the slashing of the warthog, but her hunger was undimmed. And now she sensed the vibration on the forest floor. It drew her, the way the scent of decay draws flies.
Again she sensed several humans. They were gathered round a dead fire, and they were talking. Of course she couldn’t know that this was the team of hunters on the trail of the Hunts. They had found the scout, half mad with pain and thirst and terror. He had pointed them to the temples, and they’d come to pick up the trail.
She also sensed the yapping and baying of dogs.
The snake couldn’t feel the anger and frustration in the group. But she did sense it when two of them moved away.
She followed them. One was almost as big as the gorilla. The other was smaller. They stood a little apart, making water.
This was too easy. She reared up and hurled herself at the smaller man’s head, her mouth closing most of the way round it. And the coils enwrapped him. He was dead in a minute.
The strange thing was the behaviour of the other man. He just stood and watched, a grim smile on his face. Until, that is, the killing had been done and the snake began to swallow her prey. Then the man began to shout, and the others came running. The man who had first stood by, passively, now kicked her in the stomach, and the others yelled and screamed. The dogs were around her, snapping. One man fired a gun wildly into the shadows.
This was highly stressful to the snake, and so she regurgitated the body, vomiting it up with a coating of slime. And then she was away, angrier and hungrier than ever.
And the pale German, Herr Frapp, was dead.
There is nothing, Frazer found out, that speeds you up like the knowledge that you’re being hunted with dogs. He cursed his rotten luck in losing that boot. The ground was hard and dry, and he kept standing on rocks and roots and thorns, and soon his foot was bruised and bleeding.
‘Got to stop, Zonnie,’ he said. ‘Got to sort my foot out.’
Amazon looked at the foot and had a think.
‘Nasty,’ she said. ‘OK, take off your boot and sock from the left foot and put the sock on your right foot.’
‘What? Oh, double up the sock on my bad foot, you mean? Good idea.’
Then Amazon took her own shoes and socks off and gave both the socks to Frazer. ‘Put these on the bad foot, too.’
Frazer just about managed to get all the socks on – it looked most peculiar. So now he had a damp boot and no sock on his left foot, and four pairs of wet socks on his right.
He stood up and tried it out.
‘It’s a little better,’ he conceded. ‘But, if we weren’t about to get killed, I’d say this was darned funny.’
And then he and Amazon, exhausted, hunted, terrified, began to laugh. But their laughter was quickly silenced when they heard the howling and barking of the hounds once more. The baying was still distant, but definitely nearer. The little pup inside Amazon’s shirt whimpered at the sound.
‘You good to go?’ Amazon said to Frazer.
‘I’ll race you,’ he smiled back. And off they went again.
They were two fit young people, light on their feet, and they knew how to run. It certainly helped that the past few months had been full of intense physical challenges: it meant that they were both at their absolute athletic peak.
The most awkward thing for Amazon was running with the dhole pup. She tried shifting it in various ways, but in the end just ran with it under her arm. It didn’t seem to mind, but just hung limply, like a toy animal. Amazon suspected that dholes were the sort of creatures that often changed their dens, and so the pups had to get used to being carried around.
They followed the river for an hour, covering a good five kilometres, thinking of nothing more than staying out of the range of the hunters’ guns, and stopping only to gulp water from some of the small streams that fed the river. The sun was not yet at its zenith, but it was still hot, and the shade of the trees was almost as welcome as the cover they afforded.
Another time, and in different circumstances, they would both have loved this place. Monkeys – langurs and macaques – leapt above them in the trees. Unseen deer and antelope bounded noisily away as their pounding feet approached; beautiful and gaudy birds flew with iridescent bursts of colour across the river.
Then, through a gap in the trees, they saw looming up before them the great wall of the hunting estate, topped by the ugly new metal of the electric fence. It was still a couple of kilometres away, but its size, even at that distance, was truly daunting.
‘Is there any point us even trying to climb over that thing?’ asked Amazon, as they got their breath back.
Frazer looked at the wall, his eyes straining to see if there were any hope of scaling its smooth, sheer face.
He shook his head. ‘Even if we could climb it – which we can’t – we’d be sitting ducks to those hunters. They’d just pick us off. We’ve got to keep under cover. I think we’re better off trying the river again.’
They still hadn’t left the strip of forest that clung to the river, and it only took them a minute to make their way to the bank. If they were hoping to find the river free from danger, they were sorely disappointed. The brown water was alive with the long, low, drifting shapes of muggers and Nile crocs. And, even if they’d wanted to run the gauntlet of the crocs, they’d have had to get through the hippos that wallowed in the muddy shallows near the bank.
They turne
d away from the river and checked the other side, where the trees gave way to the dusty plain. It was very exposed. There were just a few bushes and isolated trees, and then, in the distance, the jungle area surrounding the temple complex.
And they also saw an approaching dust cloud that could only mean one thing.
‘It’s them, isn’t it?’ said Amazon. ‘The hunters and the dogs …’
Frazer set his mouth in a hard line. ‘We’re staying alive, Zonnie,’ he said. ‘I want to see Kaggs jailed. I want to see all of them jailed. I want them rotting in some Indian prison until they’re bald and toothless old men.’
Then he considered their options again.
‘OK, we can’t get across the river. We can’t get over the wall. We can’t go across the plain – if the hunters don’t get us, the lions will. But look – this line of trees here turns off before it reaches the wall. It looks to me like it may eventually reach back to the jungle – or at least part of the way there. It’s our only chance. Let’s get going.’
Amazon nodded back at Frazer. At that moment she couldn’t help thinking how proud she was to be his cousin. He had one boot and a bloody foot, but he wasn’t giving in. And neither was she.
Merlin Kaggs was now in a foul mood, even by his own grim standards. He looked at the frayed ends of the ropes. The hounds had been useful. They had tracked the blasted Hunt mob from the temple complex down to the river. There he had looked into the brown water, alive with crocs and hippos, and seen that nobody could possibly hope to get across. And, anyway, the dogs had strained at the leash, pulling away along the bank.
And then the ropes, held by the trackers, had snapped. That should not have happened. Had someone failed to check them properly before they set out? If so, there would be a price to pay. Or could someone have deliberately sabotaged them? If so, who and why? Anyway, the dogs had gone. They might stay on the trail for a while, but then they’d head back to the lodge, assuming the leopards, tigers and lions didn’t get them.
Python Adventure Page 11