Next day we hiked as planned. We saw more dicynodonts, in fact whole herds. When we had finished our lunch and were plowing on a little farther before turning back, Inez Alvarado said:
“Reggie, would you mind taking the rest on without me for a bit? I’ll catch up.”
“All right,” I said, knowing that ladies, too, have calls of nature. We set out at a leisurely pace but had been out of sight of Inez for not more than ten or fifteen minutes when we heard her shriek:
“Help! Help!”
We raced back through the brush. She was standing before a little group of cycads, swinging her rifle—the nine-millimeter Mannlicher I had rented the Alvarados—by the barrel at a group of three quadrupedal flesh-eaters, which Ngata identified as rauisucbids. They were the size of a large dog, with thicker limbs and a body that tapered lizardwise into a thick tail. They had beads like carnosaurs of that size, with a mouthful of fangs.
Carlyle proved the fastest runner. When I puffed up after him, he already had his gun up. At the first bang, one rauisuchid flopped over, writhing and snapping. Bang! Down went another. The third seemed to get the idea, because it ran off. When I came up, I said:
“For God’s sake, Inez, why didn’t you shoot?”
“When I reached into my ammunition pouch, I found I’d left all my cartridges back at the camp. I’m sorry to be so stupid.”
I just sighed. This is the sort of thing one has to put up with in my trade, and fussing and fuming won’t help. “Oh, well, it’s time to start for home anyway. Want a trophy, Desmond?”
“You bet!”said Carlyle, and got to work on one of the carcasses with a big sheath knife.
Pretty soon, with help from the Raja, he had the head off. We set out with him carrying it in a scarf he wore. The scarf got blood-soaked; but since the animal lacked hair and external ears, there wasn’t any other easy way to hold it.
I suppose he could have put his fingers into the open mouth; but reptiles don’t die all at once. This fellow’s jaws kept snapping now and then for at least a quarter-hour after its head had been cut off. Or he could have whittled a point on a stick and impaled the head on it. The thought, when it came, reminded me unpleasantly of those French revolutionaries who made such a point of carrying people’s heads around on the points of spears. Bad taste, eh?
This time everybody was tired enough by cocktail time so that it was a subdued safari that sat around drinking our medicinal whiskey. The camp helpers had packed the rauisuchid’s head in salt.
Alvarado gave us a song. Carlyle told how he’d almost been eaten by a great white shark off an Australian beach. I know from the way he described the beach that he had never been near the place, but I thought it better not to say so. If he entertained the others, it didn’t much matter whether his tales were true.
This time there was no problem with getting everyone tucked into bed early. As usual, the Raja and I took watch-and-watch through the night. When the sky was lightening before dawn, who should pop out of Inez Alvarado’s tent but young Willard Smithl
“Hey!” I said, “What the devil . . . ?”
“Just me,” said Smith, “getting up to take a piss.” (Excuse me, Ms. Brownlee.)
“But what were you doing in that tent?”
He scuffed his feet, twisted his hands, and generally acted as if caught in the act of breaking all ten commandments, including worshiping graven images. If the light had been stronger, I’m sure I should have seen him blushing.
“Ah—Mr. Rivers,” he choked out at last. “There wasn’t anybody in that tent.”
“You were,” I said.
“Sure. But that was just because Mrs. Alvarado asked me to trade places with her. So I—well, what else could I do?”
“You could have asked me before making any change,” I began, “and let me as leader decide—”
Just then an angry shout aroused the camp, followed by yells and curses. Some sort of commotion was going on in and around the tent assigned to Smith and Carlyle. I got there in a dead heat with the Raja, who had been taking his turn to sleep.
The tent was heaving like a hooked fish, and as we arrived it collapsed. Out from the wreckage crawled Tom Alvarado and Desmond Carlyle, both in their underwear. No sooner had they cast off the folds of canvas than Alvarado sprang at Carlyle, grabbing for his throat.
As I said, Alvarado was a bit on the corpulent side, while Carlyle was in whipcord-tight physical shape, being in fact something of a fitness fanatic. Carlyle blocked Tom’s attempt to strangle him and knocked him down. Alvarado landed on something hard. He felt around beneath his body and came up with Carlyle’s big sheath knife. In no time he had it out and was lunging at Carlyle.
Meanwhile, Carlyle grabbed an edge of the canvas and threw it back, reaching for his rifle. In casting off the canvas he also uncovered Inez Alvarado, curled up on one of the bunks and naked as a frog. Before Alvarado got within stabbing distance, Carlyle stood up with his rifle.
The Raja tackled Alvarado, while I grabbed Carlyle’s gun and twisted it to point up. It went off with a bang, fortunately without hitting anything, and with another wrench I got it away from him.
I stepped away to cover both. The Raja had wrested the knife from Alvarado, though he got a cut on the arm in doing so.
“All right, you idiots!” I said. “Stand with your hands clasped behind your necks, or by God I’ll shoot off a member or two! Now, what’s the story? You first, Tom!”
Tom was so enraged that for the moment he forgot his excellent English. “¡Este cabrón coge a mi mujer!” he shouted, waving his fists and dancing about. He followed it with a translation, which I won’t trouble a lady’s ears with. Then Mrs. Alvarado, who stood up with a sheet wrapped around her, screamed:
“¡Ya no estoy su mujer! Hago lo que quiero!”
The two kept shouting until they ran out of breath. She argued that as a single woman she had the right to a trot in the sheets whenever and with whomever she liked. Besides, Tom had been pestering her to marry him again, and she wanted to sample the field to have a standard of comparison.
When his turn came, Carlyle shrugged the whole thing off. “What do you expect?” he said. “I knew they weren’t married. Even if they had been, what normal man would turn down such an offer?”
The Raja and I agreed on the following judgment: that everyone should thereafter stick to his or her own tent. If we found any more trading beds, we would tie up the culprits and leave them in camp while the rest of us went exploring. Ngata said confidentially:
“I’m just as glad, Reggie, that she never got down her list to me. I don’t know that my hot Polynesian blood would have let me turn her down!”
Most of the rest of the trip went off in a routine way, with nothing notable on the part either of my sahibs or the rest of the fauna. Alvarado and Carlyle were formal with one another, calling each other “mister” when they had to communicate. Ngata collected and dissected more pseudo-lizards.
Carlyle shot a big knobby-headed anomodont with a parrot-like beak and hauled its head back to camp. Smith and the Alvarados took scads of photographs. We got soaked by a heavy thunderstorm, but that was all in the game.
Towards the end, I led our lambs westward, down a long slope to the water we could see in the distance. The Raja, whose arm was still bandaged from that cut, stayed in camp to supervise the packing up for departure.
The water proved a bend in a big river, which meandered through flat country with a lot of swamps and oxbow lakes alongside it. The going got really bushy, with masses of ferns as high as your head to hack your way through, and squilchy mud underfoot. If our sahibs thought they had got hot, sweaty, and dirty before, they soon learned it was nothing compared with this.