The Dorylus, or siafu, as it is called by the Bantu, can sometimes have colonies of fifty or sixty million. Like a foraging army, the colonies live on the march, attacking anything they come into contact with, including animals and sometimes children. Death often results from asphyxiation-when the flood of bugs crawls down the victim's throat. I cringed as I looked at the shiny, squirming black carpet extending into the distance. It was truly incredible.
Then I turned away and went to the river.
Chapter 26
I HAD JUST made it back to the trail when I heard a scream. It was hard to make out over the wind and splashing water, but it was definitely a human scream, coming from the direction of the river dock.
Apparently I was not alone out here.
I heard it again, and then once more as I ran back across the field, away from the ants. It sounded like a woman. I remembered the bloody clothes from the massacred animal-spotting safari and picked up my pace.
I arrived at the end of the dock and stopped short at the edge of the riverbank. There was a white woman with dark hair clinging to a large rock in the middle of the river. What the hell she was doing up there was a mystery. She was wearing khaki pants, but was barefoot. Her clothes were soaked flat against her skin. She clung to the pinnacle of the rock, scrambling for balance with her feet and hands.
I cupped my hands and shouted across the water: "Can you move?"
In retrospect it was a strange thing to say.
She glanced over at me, seeing me for the first time. The look she gave me was as if she'd never seen a person before. I didn't know whether she knew English or not. Then she let loose another scream, pointing upriver, to my right.
I followed the direction of her point with my eyes and saw what looked like a fifteen-foot-long clump of grayish mud appear on the surface.
It wasn't mud. This thing had more teeth than the average mud clump.
It was a Nile crocodile: the largest and most aggressive species of crocodile in Africa. As I watched, its scaly, spiny, and very powerful tail flicked, and it began floating out into the middle of the stream toward the woman clinging to the rock. I didn't know how the hell she'd managed to get herself into this situation, but I ordered myself to help her out of it.
I had four rounds left. Make them count, Oz.
I dropped to one knee and lined up the Mauser's sights with the crocodile's paddle-shaped head. I balanced the barrel against my arm, held my breath, and pulled the trigger.
The gun cracked and kicked hard into my shoulder, and I saw a splash in the water in front of the crocodile. I'd missed.
I sighted again and squeezed off two more shots. There was no splash. I'd nailed the son of a bitch, twice. I couldn't see where, but I'd heard bullets hitting meat.
But it didn't die. That would have been too easy. All it did was turn toward me with a quick sideways jerk of its surfboard-size head, as if I'd tapped it on the shoulder.
I blasted one more bullet at it and got the sucker right on the crown of its head. That did the trick. It stared out from the muck a moment, then sank and flopped over, belly-up, in the river.
I looked to my right again: a second crocodile, racing downriver in our direction.
Then I noticed the rest of them. In a lagoon some distance upriver was a bask of at least four crocodiles, and another three sunning themselves on the shore. No wonder they were riled up. It looked like the woman had entered a nesting area.
I aimed at the next approaching croc. It was coming at us like an animated hunk of driftwood. I pulled the trigger.
On nothing. I'd spent my last round, and the gun clicked on an empty chamber.
Chapter 27
HMM. THE CROCODILES glided through the water toward the woman while I sat on the bank with an unloaded gun. A lightbulb appeared over my head, and I threw down the gun.
I cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted across the water: "Be right back!"
I turned tail and began running back the way I'd come, into the field behind me.
I peeled off my wet shirt as I ran into thrashing brown grass. Just to clarify: I was about to dive into a horde of army ants with my shirt off. I ran through the glittering black carpet, feeling ants crunch under my boots with each step, to the corpse of the Cape buffalo calf. With my wet shirt I slapped ants from its gnarled, stiffened hooves, grabbed the body by the leg, and began dragging it back toward the river as fast as I could.
The ants went mad. A softly clicking, chattering swarm of ruby-dark ants followed after me. I could see the column shift and darken as millions of insects got new marching orders to deal with the intruder. I saw the message spread through the colony, borne on pheromones from one pair of antennae to the next. The only advantage I had was my legs.</ol>
The calf was lighter than I'd expected, as it had already been hollowed out some by the ants. The ants scampered up my arms and I swatted them off as best I could. I had ten or fifteen bites throbbing on my arms and chest by the time I made it back to the river dock. The pain was no big deal-it was only like being shot repeatedly with a staple gun.
The black swirling column had fallen a long way behind me by the time I arrived back at the riverbank.
Two crocodiles were swimming circles around the woman on the rock. I ran out onto the creaking wooden dock with the buffalo calf.
"Hey!" I shouted. "Dinnertime! Here!"
And I heaved the buffalo calf into the river. It splooshed into the slow muddy current below me like a fat kid doing a cannonball.
One of the crocodiles turned when it saw the heap of floating meat. A bird in hand is better than one on top of a rock, he probably thought. But the other one lingered, swimming a languid circle around the woman.
I snatched up the rifle and heaved it by its barrel at the crocodile. The butt of the rifle splashed next to its tail. Then it, too, turned and went toward the buffalo calf, following the other crocodile, who was now ripping into the dead meat. Confused ants stippled the thrashing water around them, flailing crazily on the surface of the river as the two crocodiles tore apart the carcass.
I ran along the shore until I was opposite the dark-haired woman. "Swim to me!" I shouted. "You have to swim to me now!"
She shook her head and closed her eyes, hugging the rock tighter.
"It's okay. You have to. You're running out of time. It's your only chance!"
She looked at me for a moment. She looked at the crocodiles, not far upriver. She climbed down into the water and pushed herself away from the rock.
She wasn't a good swimmer. Granted, conditions weren't ideal. Her arms slapped the water and her feet flailed. She seemed to take a day to paddle across the twenty-odd feet of calm water to the bank.
"Come on! Come on!" I said, my eyes flicking back and forth between her and the crocodiles.
I almost had to stifle the urge to clap when she finally arrived on shore. She stumbled when she tried to climb up the steep embankment onto the clearing, and fell to her knees in the mud.
"No, no! You've got it. Come on, take my hand."
I was lying flat on my belly, reaching my hand down to her. And then I felt a tickling cloud of insect legs skittering up my bare back.
"Hurry! Hurry!"
My backside was already flaming with pain.
The woman grasped my hand and I nearly ripped her arm off dragging her to her feet, up the embankment, and onto the clearing.
"Move!" I screamed, yanking her into a run with one hand as I slapped at myself with the other.
The ants were everywhere. On my neck, in my hair, my ears. I spat one out that had crawled into my mouth. The sound that involuntarily rose out of me was what I might call a shrill shriek of revulsion, like a woman standing on a chair screaming at a mouse.
I didn't stop running until I tripped over the tire tracks and fell to the ground. Clear of the pulsing red-black column, I threw off my backpack and rolled over in the dust as though I were on fire, spitting and slapping at myself. I very literally had ants in my pants. With panicky, fumbling fingers I jerked at my boot laces and kicked off my boots. I tore off my pants and leaped out of them, yelping as I hopped up and down, flapping my pants as though they were a flag, ants flying out of the legs like flung pebbles.
After swiping them all off my legs, I thumbed the waist of my boxers for the most vital check of all. Clear.
"Thank God!"
Ant-free now, I squeezed my feet back into my unlaced boots and went about stomping the little bastards as they tried to scatter.
"Not so tough without your friends, are you?" I screamed at them, hopping like a crazed leprechaun, doing a little ant-killing jig in the dust. "Die! Die! Die!"
When the last ants scampered away, I caught my breath and inspected my arms, my legs, my chest, and back. My flesh was pebbled with welts, welts on top of welts, each about as red and juicy-looking as a maraschino cherry.
Suddenly, as though shaken from a dream, I remembered the woman. I turned and looked at her up close for the first time. She was petite-tiny as a child, with slender, birdlike bones. Even covered in river mud, she was undeniably good-looking-olive skin, bitumen-black hair slightly dusted with premature gray, sharp brown eyes, and high, distinct cheekbones.
"You saved my life," she said softly. She was still gazing somewhere into the middle distance. Her English had an elegant European lilt, what I thought was a French accent-vowels in the front of her mouth, consonants brushed with feathers. She hugged her knees, her body a seesaw anchored on her tailbone, rocking back and forth in the dirt. She definitely wasn't all there yet, but the lights were coming on.</ol>