I put down my rifle in disgust, and took up my revolver. I had no idea of wasting
a hundred and ten grains of powder on a baby. I took careful aim and fired. The
revolver was a self-cocker, and yet before I could fire again, he had whirled
about and was out of reach. He was gone and I drew a long breath. The Malays
said I struck him. If I did, I had no means of proving it.
The only way to bag crocodiles is to kill them outright or nearly so. If they have
strength enough to crawl into the river and die, they will come to the surface
again two days later; but the chances are that they will get under a root, or that in
some way you will lose them. Out of forty or fifty big and small ones that we hit
only five floated down past the Residency.
I also soon found out that my hundred and ten grain cartridges were none too
large for even the smaller crocodiles. As for those eighteen and twenty feet long,
it was necessary that the Chief Justice and I should fire at the same time and at
the same spot in order to arrest the big saurians in their wild scramble for the
water.
We had tried some half-dozen good shots at small fellows, varying from two to
five feet in length, when I began to lose interest in the sport; so I turned to watch
a colony of little gray, jungle monkeys, that were swinging and chattering and
scolding among the mangrove trees.
One of them picked a long dart-shaped fruit off the tree and essayed to drop it on
the head of his mate below. I was about to call my companion’s attention to it,
when I heard a crash among the roots near where the missile had fallen, and a
crocodile, so large that I distrusted my senses, turned his great log-like head to
one side and gazed up at the frightened monkeys. I raised my hand, and the
launch paused not over twenty yards from where he lay patiently waiting for one
of the monkeys to drop within reach of his great jaws.
The sun had dried the mud on his back until the entire surface reminded me of
the beach of a muddy mill-pond that I used to frequent as a boy.
“Boyah besar!” (A royal crocodile) repeated our Malays under their breaths.
The Chief Justice and I fired at the same time, and the massive fellow who, but a
moment before, had looked to be as stiff and clumsy as a bar of pig iron, now