Any animal as obviously dangerous as the crocodile is bound to have a thick layer of legend wrapped around its reputation. Of course, a lot of it is marfi, a polite term for droppings. Time and again tales are heard of people who have had an arm or leg removed, “snapped off in one bite,” by crocs. Not so. One look at a croc’s dentures point out that, because of their spacing and rounded design, they are intended for catching and holding rather than cutting. If you have ever tried to carve a London broil with a tent peg, you’ve got the idea. Anything a croc can get down his gullet at one try he will swallow whole, tilting his head back so the morsel falls to the back of his throat. Anything bigger, he must wait for decay to set in and soften the meat so that he can grip it and spin his body, ripping off a healthy chunk in the same way that a Frenchman tears off a piece of bread.
Another myth about the croc is his supposed ability to knock animals into his jaws by using his powerful tail, even from elevated river banks. No way. I have seen at least twenty animals taken by crocs, both on banks and in the water. All were caught with pure speed and surprise. No animal of the size and bulk of a croc could possibly jump in such a way as to get his tail behind his meal and flip it toward him. Yet crocs have been reported as accomplishing this with animals on river banks six feet over them!
I had a good lesson in the speed a croc may generate late one afternoon when I was sitting in a leopard blind along the river. My client and I were watching a small troop of impala wander idly down a path to the water to drink, pausing thirty-one feet, by later measurement, from the river’s edge. Instantly, a twelve-foot crocodile erupted from the water like a Polaris missile, crossing the ground to the nearest impala, a ewe, like a green blur. As she spun to escape, he was on her, grabbing her right rear haunch and effortlessly dragging her to the dark river. In less than a minute there wasn’t even a ripple to mark where she had disappeared. Considering that the impala is one of the fastest of the African antelopes, the speed a croc can crank out over a short rush must be well over thirty-five miles per hour. I can tell you I didn’t walk as close to the river after the demonstration.
The awesome power of big croc has been demonstrated on large game many times. In a Tanzanian (Tanganyikan) game park in the late 1950s, a party of tourists were photographing a black rhino cow as she drank at a water hole. She was fair sized for a female, probably shading 4,000 pounds. As she stuck her odd, prehensile nose into the scummy water, the water exploded and a big croc clamped down on her muzzle. There followed an amazing test of strength between the two armored monsters, the croc trying to pull the rhino into the water and the rhino trying to pull the croc out of it. After an hour of straining, with neither gaining more than a foot, the rhino was actually inched toward the water. Thirty minutes later, her head was held under and, after a final flurry, she rolled over, drowned. The croc was estimated as about fourteen feet by the ranger driving the tour car.
The crocodile is a cold-blooded creature in more ways than one. Like most nonmammals, his ability to hang onto the last shreds of life would make a vampire wild with envy. So tough is the croc that there is an old hide hunters’ maxim quite as valid today as it ever was: A croc ain’t dead until the hide’s salted, and even then don’t count on it! Besides the fact that really large crocs—twelve feet and over—are sneaky as revenuers, the felony is compounded by their anatomy offering only the smallest of targets for a fatal shot. I have heard other professionals claim that a lung-shot Ngwenya will leave the water before he drowns, although I have never witnessed this. But then, to be fair, I have never shot a croc in the lungs. For my money the only way to anchor a crocodile where he lies and thus prevent his certain escape to the river where he will be lost or eaten by his pals is to separate him from his brain. Smaller than your fist, it’s located just behind the eyes, an angle that can almost never be made from dead on or astern without at least 30 degrees of elevation above the croc. The brain is encased in some very impressive bone (I once broke a steel spearhead in two trying to drive it through the skull) and just can’t be reached from a flat angle. The only reliable position for the brain shot is from the side, where your target will be about two inches high by three inches wide. Joe Joubert, a fine professional hunter who had a camp near mine in Zambia, was once shot in the face by a ricocheting .22 bullet when an excited client bounced it off the skull of a big croc in an attempted coup de grace.
* * *
Just how much pummeling a crocodile can absorb came to my definite attention during a safari in Botswana’s Okavango Swamps, which had been pretty well picked over by professional hide hunters years before. Yet, after the market shooting was stopped, the crocs had come back strongly, if warily. I spotted one of a dozen feet sunning himself half out of the water on the base of an old termite heap. He was a good 400 yards out, and open water prevented stalking any closer. But, the croc was a good one for Okavango, and I knew my client to be an excellent shot with his “toy,” a .257 Weatherby Magnum with a variable power telescopic sight, a flat-shooting iron too light for most game but perfect for a long shot like this.
We hunched along through the light mswaki scrub at the edge of a sand flat, the tsetse flies absolutely mobbing us. I have never seen them in greater numbers or more savage. Ignoring the saber-toothed mauling he was getting, my client rested the rifle across his hand on a broken wrist of branch, lined up with plenty of holdover, took his shooting breath, and sent one off Air Mail Special. I was amazed to see the little slug lash out and strike right on the money, a light mist of bone chips and brain matter erupting from the skull. Typical of a brain-shot croc, his prehistoric nervous system jammed in flank speed, his powerful tail whipping the water like a paddle wheeler gone aground.
As I watched through my binoculars, I could see the growing pink cloud in the water and the tail slowed to a stop. My gunbearers and skinners, who very wisely share a common sentiment of loathing anything to do with crocs, dead or alive, decided that they just weren’t getting paid enough to help me drag that one back through open water. I stoked up the .470 with soft-points, removed my wallet, and, in the best Stewart Granger tradition, started wading. The water was only to my waist, and I wasn’t nearly as worried about crocs as I was leery of the small herd of hippos who were eyeing me with some annoyance from seventy yards away. After a few minutes, however, the herd leader finally decided that I wasn’t there to rape any of the ladies fair, and he ponderously ignored me. The big crocodile was lying mostly in the water, just his shattered head on the ant hill, so I was able to work him out into deeper water despite his bulk, which was largely negated by his buoyancy. With the end of his tail across my shoulder, I began to drag him back like a small ant with a dung beetle. I had made about forty yards when I noticed a tiny quiver through his body and began to reflect seriously on the prudence of my position. I didn’t have much time to think about it because, with a tremendous wrench, he flattened me. The fist-sized crater in his head where his brains used to be had lulled me to the hasty conclusion that he was dead, a status he was clearly contesting.
I came up spitting muddy water, trying to get the double rifle free from where it was slung around my neck. He hit me again with his body, and I went back down, stumbling and thrashing to keep away from the jaws. I managed to break the rifle, pour the water out of the barrels and present the croc with 1,000 grains of high velocity tranquilizer right behind the smile. When the little pieces of the rest of his head stopped falling out of the sky, I grabbed him again and completed towing him back to shore. Polaroids appeared as if by witchcraft, and the client and I squatted down in the hero position and opened the jaws, the teeth gleaming like a nest of bloody punji sticks. Just as the camera clicked, there was a sound like an iron maiden being slammed, and people became very scarce. We jumped back as the croc began to thrash around, snapping his jaws and actually growling, a sound I have never heard one make before or since. My client belted him twice more with a .300 Magnum, his head looking like a jam jar somebody had stuck a grenad
e into. That calmed him down considerably. We finished the pictures and three of my men had to sit on the battered body to hold it down from nervous reaction as the belly skin was taken. Hunting back past the spot a few hours later, I was surprised to see the corpse surrounded by a ring of vultures, odd because normally they would have swarmed him and finished him up in short order. As we got closer, they flew off and I noticed something: a dead vulture was clamped tightly between the “dead” croc’s jaws. That boy wasn’t about to quit!
* * *
Paul Mason and I began to hunt the man-eater the same afternoon as the attack on the woman. I hadn’t had much of a look at him beyond his obvious bulk, but that was so exceptional it would give him away if we ever saw him again. From the size of his head and the wake he was throwing, he had to be better than fifteen feet, and there just weren’t many of that size anywhere. I decided to abandon the rule that the professional only shoots in case of a charge or imminent escape of dangerous game and split us into two groups on either side of the big lagoon, which was separated from the Munyamadzi by a sandy umbilical a hundred yards wide. We sat, rifles ready, through the long afternoon, watching the water until our temples throbbed for some sign of the huge croc, but not a ripple betrayed his presence. Crocodiles can hold their breath by only showing the tiniest tip of nostrils. As the last of the light disappeared, we pushed aching, cramped joints into action and returned to camp.
We ate early that night, not saying very much, and after a few belts of man’s best friend went off to bed. It was still full dark when tea arrived and we shrugged off blankets in the chill morning air. Well before dawn, we were picking our way to the lagoon. Even in the growing half-light, I could see that we were too late. Across the sand spit lay a spoor like a half-track; a deep, wide belly mark flanked by huge tracks showed where the killer croc had crossed from the lagoon and entered the river. I said a bad word. We had a good chance of finding him in the limits of the lagoon, but now, in the expanse of river, where he could move at will, things looked much dimmer. Still, I thought, given enough time, hard work and a fifty-five-gallon drum of pure, Grade A, vitamin-enriched luck.…
Paul and I retraced our steps and wolfed down a fast breakfast of the remaining kudu steaks and plenty of sweet, black tea. Before heading for another long day on the river, I thought it best we check the “zero” of our rifles, having decided to switch from the heavier .375 and .404 to Paul’s .25-06 Remington and my .275 Rigby Rimless, reasoning that any shot we might get would probably be a long one requiring the precision of the lighter rifles over the power of the heavier. My .275 didn’t have the velocity of Paul’s superhot Remington, but I had put so many rounds through it that holdover and windage were as indelibly ingrained in my subconscious as Raquel Welch’s bustline. Satisfied that any misses could not be blamed on Messrs. Rigby or Remington, we headed back to the river.
In view of the fact that, considering the size of the area the croc could be in, our best approach would be a saturation campaign, I called all my staff together. There were twenty-six of them, a mixture of Sengas, Awizas, Baila, and even a couple of Ba Tonkas up from the Zambezi. There were cooks, waiters, skinners, trackers, gunbearers, water boys, laundry boys, chimbuzi boys, and firewood gatherers, all my bush family. Leaving only Martin to watch things around camp, I split them up into pairs with instructions to watch for the big croc at various vantage points on the river. If seen, one would stay while the other would come to fetch us. My strategy wasn’t entirely hit or miss: it had been a cold night, and since crocodiles must regulate their body temperatures by alternate sunning and wetting, I was pretty sure that the man-eater would show somewhere within three miles in either direction of my camp. Therefore, I had somebody watching nearly every convenient sand bar.
The sun was an incandescent, white cueball on a blue felt sky when I saw the first smoke a half-mile downriver. Someone had seen the crocodile! I sent Silent to bring Paul, 300 yards upriver from me, and, when he arrived, breathless from running, we started off toward the tendril of smoke. On the way I met Chenjirani, partnered with Invisible, sent to fetch us if we did not notice the smoke. From a bend in the river, I climbed a small bluff and turned the binoculars on the shimmering water. Eight hundred yards away, the dark, water-wet form of a gigantic croc smothered the tip of a sand bar. It looked like we had him. I mentally marked a tree on the bank that was opposite the croc, deciding to use it as a firing point. I motioned to Paul that we should sweep in a large half-circle through the heavy brush so there would be no chance of the croc or his tickbird sentinals spotting us, and we came out at a point a few yards from the grass-skirted tree trunk.
It was a perfect stalk, the soft ground giving no warning that our tiptoe approach would set up vibrations that the animal could feel through the dense medium of water. The tree loomed nearer above the towering elephant grass until we were up to it. Ever so slowly, Mason moved up, slipping into firing position with the .25-06 clenched by the pistol grip ahead of him. We could see the edge of the upper part of the bar through the fringe of grass as I worked closer to Paul, ready for a backup shot if necessary. The croc should be only thirty yards away, sleeping in oblivion, a shot a blind man could make. I slid my hand forward to push the grass away from Paul’s muzzle and we both popped up to find … nothing. Nowhere. Empty.
I was absolutely baffled. What in bloody hell could have spooked him? He must have just changed his mind about the sunbath during the ten minutes it had taken us to make the stalk. Or, maybe he had gotten to grow so big by realizing that to expose himself for any amount of time could mean the hot whiplash of a bullet. Whatever the reason, he simply was not there.
Two days later, our knees raw as minute steaks from crawling along the brushy banks looking for the croc, he still hadn’t tipped his hand. I increasingly feared that, like many of his brethren who had achieved great age and size, he had figured out that safety lies in darkness.
“Paul,” I said that night after dinner, pouring him something to dispel his mood, “we’re gonna have to bait that croc to have any chance at him at all. I’m convinced he just isn’t active during daylight or we would have seen him more than just once.”
“Whatcha got in mind, Bwana?” he asked. “Want me to go fish trapping in the river?”
“Not ’til you pay your safari bill, I don’t,” I grinned back. “I think that big lizard has been hunted before. Shot at. Maybe he came all the way up from the Zambezi. After five months in this camp I’ve never seen him before or even cut tracks that big.” I took a flaming splinter from the fire and lit the tip of a Rhodesian Matinee from the thirty-pack in my breast pocket. “Maybe he’s not even in this section of river anymore, but I doubt that.”
We ghosted the banks of the Munyamadzi the next morning until the sun was high in the cloudless, dry-season sky. September dust-devils swirled black grass ash thousands of feet up to rain back on us in a fine, greasy film until Silent joked that we were now dark enough that he might adopt us. Scores of crocs were basking on sand bars and small beaches, but nothing approaching the size of the man-eater. Then, as I swept the glasses across a stretch of calm water at the head of a pool, I caught two dark lumps that protruded oddly above the slick surface. As I stared, they disappeared without a ripple, as if they felt my stare. From the distance between the knobs, I knew they were the eyes of a monster crocodile, and I would take all bets that he was our boy. I crawled back from the bank and got Paul. We drove the hunting car quietly upriver a half-mile where a hippo herd lay in the tail of the current. Paul wedged himself into the sitting position and slammed a 400-grain .404 slug through the brain of a big, scarred bull, who collapsed without a twitch and disappeared into the black depths.
“How long, Silent?” I asked the spindle-shanked old gunbearer. He knelt down and felt the temperature of the water and glanced at the sun, calculating for a moment. A great poacher in his youth, Silent was never fifteen minutes off in predicting how long it would take a hippo’s body to bloat and
leave the bottom. Finally, he pointed to an empty piece of western sky where the sun would be when the hippo would rise to the surface. At five, we were back with the crew just in time to see the carcass balloon up and drift into a quiet eddy where we were able to rope it. After a long struggle we wrestled his tons into position where the Rover could winch him over in stages. When we were finished, he lay at the edge of a shallow bar beneath our ambush point, a low, riverine bluff thirty yards away and twenty feet high. Powerful ropes of his own hide held him to stakes driven deeply into the mud to prevent the crocs from pulling and tugging him into the current.
I showed Paul the big, wedge-shaped bites in the hide, tooth marks of crocs testing the degree of decomposition of the body. Usually, they would have to wait several days before the hide had rotted enough to be torn away, exposing the meat beneath, but this hippo would be table-ready. Already the skinners were busy struggling to slash away huge patches of the thick skin so the crocs could feed immediately. I suppose I should be able to tell you how crocodiles locate carrion, but I’m not really sure. I believe that they hunt living prey by both sight and sound of water disturbance, but I couldn’t say how good their sense of smell is. Judging by the short time it takes a large number of crocs to find a decomposing carcass, though, they must have fairly decent noses, although whether they discern the odor from airborne scent or from tainted water evades me. Stomach brought over the corrugated ivory arcs of the fighting tusks and the smoother, amber rods of the interior teeth and presented them to Mason. Nearly dark, we drove back to camp and a couple of sun-downers followed by an excellent stroganoff of hippo filet. We were both dead to the world before ten o’clock.
“Vuka, Bwana, tiye!” I tried to drag myself back from deep sleep, the hissing glare of Martin’s pressure lamp searing through my eyelids. I forced them open, taking the big tea mug and pouring the sweet, strong brew down in a few hot swallows. Martin laid out clean bush shorts and jacket for me, then refilled the mug.
Death in the Long Grass Page 21