“Why don’t we try it out?” said Yohachi, using his pole to bash an alligator as it tried to crawl onto the raft. “It might feel good.”
“Idiot. If it’s a male, your anus will be ripped apart,” I said, then gasped in relief when I saw the opposite shore only thirty feet away. “Thank God! Eleventh-hour crocodiles!”
Slightly larger than the gurgling alligators, groups of eleventh-hour crocodiles were crawling into the lake from swamps near the shore.
Pushed up from below by the alligators’ snouts, our raft continued to tilt wildly. We clung onto our baggage to avoid being shaken off, and waited for the eleventh-hour crocodiles to arrive.
“But it’s out of the frying pan into the fire, isn’t it?” said Mogamigawa, shaking with fear.
“We’ll escape while they’re fighting,” I replied.
The eleventh-hour crocodile at the head of the group snapped at one of the gurgling alligators. The pair corkscrewed their bodies and leapt six feet into the air as they grappled with each other. A massive spray of water flew up, and at last, the mother of all battles started around our raft.
“Now!” I yelled.
We desperately worked our poles to escape from the carnage.
“That’s quite a battle,” said Mogamigawa, turning back to watch the action goggle-eyed. “Many of them will surely die.”
“No. What you’re seeing is a ‘ritual contest’, as they say in ethology. It’s the same as when males of earth species fight over the females. The difference on this planet is that they’re not fighting over females but over the spectators, creatures of other species that simply watch the action from the side. They’re waiting to yield their chastity to the victors.” I was punting along for all I was worth, but let out a cry when I saw the far bank approaching. “Oh no! What a fool I’ve been! There’s a pod of flatback hippos near here!”
Mogamigawa raised his voice in alarm. “Those unearthly creatures?! Good God, it’ll be no joke if we’re ravished by them! Which way should we go?”
“Let’s skirt the shore southwards. Hey, Yohachi – look out!”
Before I could finish, a number of flatback hippos surfaced around the raft, showing only their flat rectangular backs.
“Take that!” I shouted.
“Take that!” yelled Yohachi.
“And take your bestial desires with you!” added Mogamigawa.
We thrust our poles into the backs of the flatback hippos in a mad frenzy. Their soft backs were covered with fine crêpe-like wrinkles resembling the mesh of a reed mat. With each manly thrust, the ends of our poles would penetrate the skin and slide into the thick fat on their backs. But it didn’t appear to hurt the hippos at all, for they continued to close in on our raft undeterred, oblivious of their gaping wounds. A very small quantity of white fat oozed out of the round holes made in their backs by the poles. As I continued to thrust, I wondered if perhaps they actually enjoyed having this done to them…
The hippos’ backs now had so many holes in them that they began to resemble honeycombs, a truly sickening sight. I decided to stop thrusting the pole and started smashing them over the head with it instead. But merely being hit on the head wasn’t going to make these hippos desist. They continued to look up at us ruefully, their eyes bloodshot with carnal lust, some diving down below the raft while others waited for a chance to crawl up onto it.
“Aaargh!” Yohachi had plunged his pole into a hippo’s back with such force that he was unable to pull it out again. As he clung to the end of the pole, he was lifted off the raft and hoisted about three feet into the air vertically above the hippo’s back. “HELPPPP!!!” he cried, eyeballs bulging.
Our raft, surrounded on three sides by flatback hippos, was gradually buffeted along the shore away from Yohachi. The hippo that had Yohachi on its back also continued to chase, but lagged somewhat behind the others under Yohachi’s weight. The gap between us gradually widened as a result, though we remained at the same distance from the shore.
“Is it all right to leave him like that?” Mogamigawa asked.
“The main thing is for us to reach the shore,” I replied. “Then we can throw him a rope.”
At that moment, one of the hippos must have stood on all fours in the shallows directly beneath us, for the raft started to tilt at an acute angle.
“As I thought – we should have made the raft of pine or cedar,” I shouted, frantically gathering up the baggage to stop it falling into the water. “We’ll be up a creek if we fall off now. The water round here is full of fondleweed!”
“But we’re men, and we’re wearing trousers, are we not? We will surely not be fondled so vigorously,” said Mogamigawa. “This is no good at all. We’ll capsize at this rate. You take the machinery and equipment, and I’ll take the food. If the raft capsizes, we’ll wade ashore with the bags on our backs. We’ll just have to force our way through the fondleweed. Audere est facere, my friend!”
“Right.”
The raft moved closer to the shore. Dusk was starting to close in.
With the flatback hippos still standing beneath us, the raft had tilted to an angle of about forty degrees. We slid down its surface with the baggage on our backs, landing thigh-deep in water.
“Run! Run or be fondled!” Mogamigawa hollered as he started to race bow-legged through the water. I followed behind. The flatback hippos were still grouped on the other side of the raft, and as they could only waddle through the shallows with their slow thumping feet, there was no danger of them catching us.
We reached the shore safely without being molested by fondleweed, then turned back in relief to look at the lake. The flatback hippos had given up chasing us. Instead, they were now homing in on Yohachi from all sides. Some started to clamber up onto the hippo that had Yohachi’s pole stuck in its back.
“Quick, fetch the rope!”
I went to get the rope out of the baggage, but it was too late. Yohachi’s trousers, along with his pants, were instantly snapped off by the gargantuan mouths of the flatback hippos.
“That’s it – I’m off!” Yohachi shrieked. He boldly leapt off the pole and bounded towards us, completely naked from the waist down, using the heads and backs of the hippos as stepping stones, then plunged straight into the lake and began to run towards us waist-high in water.
I braced myself. “Hey – he’s running through the fondleweed…”
“Come on, he’s a man! Even if it fondles him, it won’t be that bad.”
No sooner Mogamigawa had spoken than Yohachi started to slow down. His eyes assumed a haunted look, and he gasped oppressively as he walked the next two or three steps. Then a half-smile came over his face as he issued a loud cry, bent his head backwards, and in that pose fell flat on his face in the water.
“It’s got him!” Mogamigawa shouted aghast. “The fool! He should have kept his trousers on!”
As I watched, I shook at the horrible thought of what the swarming fondleweed might be doing to Yohachi under the water. The surface started to bubble feverishly, then Yohachi’s face appeared, followed by his upper body. He started towards us with an expression of complete exhaustion, staggered up onto the shore with white trails of semen hanging from his still erect member, and collapsed at the water’s edge panting furiously.
“I wonder why the flatback hippos remain unharmed by this fondleweed,” Mogamigawa mused as I nursed Yohachi. “They eat fondleweed, so they must always be physically surrounded by it.”
“No, even the flatback hippos are fondled. Or to be more exact, they only know where their food is when it starts to fondle them. Of course, they must have the occasional orgasm while they eat.”
“Really? Now I begin to understand,” Mogamigawa said with a nod. “Once, Dr Shimazaki asked me to test the water quality near a spot where fondleweed grows. There I discovered large quantities of helical bacteria breeding on protein, potassium and calcium. The fondleweed evidently absorbs these substances once they’ve been degraded into inorganic matter and excreted by those bacteria.”