Jamrach's Menagerie (20 page)

‘That’s it, al right,’ Tim said. ‘Fucking monster.’

‘It’s not a dragon,’ I said. ‘It’s like he always said. A big crocodile.’

‘Big though.’

‘Stil , not a monster.’

‘I never saw anything like it. It’s like—’

‘Ugly, horrible-looking thing. Did you see those claws?’

‘And the teeth?’

‘Jesus, how we going to—’

‘Slow though. Not nifty.’

‘Didn’t you see it run? Before? Back on the path. Didn’t you see that?’

‘It shifted, al right.’

‘It’s only an animal,’ I said.

‘What were you expecting? Saint George and some girl tied to a rock? Of course it’s only an animal.’

‘It’s just a wild animal. We can catch it. Dan’s caught a tiger, he can catch this.’

‘That’s what he does, he brings them back alive.’

Dan came tramping over and told us we were camping here for the night, and tomorrow we’d move on a little further and find a place to set the trap. Here? With those things roaming about? Come tomorrow al there’d be left of us would be our packs, lying forlornly among our scattered bones. But Dan said, no, here was fine, we’d light a fire and set a watch, and so we did, and it was in fact quite comfy and sweet the way we al sat round that warm glow of a fire in the midst of the dense black wild al about us. Dan passed around a smal flask of brandy and we drank and smoked our pipes, and the Malay with blue tattoos told what sounded like jokes in his own language and made us al laugh even though we didn’t understand a word. It was just his face and the way he talked. And in the end I slept wel , waking only when the others were already moving around and the sudden morning light was about to break.

We ate a little hardtack, packed up and moved on. I thought we would have made the trap soon, but Dan was in no hurry. That fierce-looking beast and everything that happened last night seemed a dream as we plodded on and on, the sun rising higher and higher and hotter and hotter, the clouds clearing above some high ground ahead. In front of us a baldy crag rose up, and water came down the face of a rock, splitting round a jutting spur of jungly growth much further down. We were walking into a lusher part of the island, at least in these low places. Low, I say. I had forgotten how high we’d climbed from the beach. Up here the air was sharp and ripe like a bursting plum. Why didn’t we set the trap? I didn’t like this, walking on into a territory of good cover. As wel as the long grass in which any low thing might lurk unseen, we now had a growing shrubbery on our left-hand side, a patchy place of scattered bushy clumps, behind any one of which a dragon might lurk, two dragons, three, who knows, there could be a dozen of the things out there.

Why not lay the trap now? Wasn’t one place pretty much as good as another? But no, not so, says Dan, God knows why.

What good if we’re al exhausted when we have to face it?

So on and on, til we sensed a foulness on the air and came to an edge no one expected and looked over and saw …

A mess of them like eels slipping wormily over one another in a muddy tussle over a foul carcass, a red and pink rag trailing festoons, the grinning head of which, half severed and hanging back, revealed it to be one of their own.

Another watching, a huge thing, solid and impassive as a rock, huge, trunk-like legs planted before it. Yet one more, smal er, flicking its flat forked tongue as it slowly crawled away, ful . Six, seven, eight, nine, ten dragons, I don’t know.

They were messy feeders, worse than sharks, drooling as they ate, dragging and shaking and ripping, snapping greedily, lifting their great gulping throats to swal ow. At some point the big one at the side began swinging its head heavily from side to side, then waded in like a burly bul y of a drunk and soon was pigging it with al the rest. Such weary majesty this one had, and so much bigger was it than al the rest, that it very quickly became centre of the scene, with al the others writhing around it respectful y while scarcely touching it. So it was able to eat more or less undisturbed, taking huge bites with wide-open mouth – the size of it, the way its jaws stretched horribly wide, snake-like, the way a shining pink membrane of blood-hued saliva stretched between upper and lower jaw, and more dripped down from between its sharp little razor teeth. It stopped after a while, closed its mouth and raised its head, turning a little sideways in our direction, darting its tongue. We’d taken cover, but I swear it looked at me. Straight at me with a demon bright red grin. Gave me the chil s. There are worlds between the animals of Jamrach’s and the animals of the wild, worlds between a croc in an enclosure and a dragon free. I’d been nearer to wild animals thousands of times, but here there were no barriers. This was real fierce beasts in the real wild and nothing between me and them. A cold gush of fear pierced through me, starting somewhere deep in my bel y like sickness, and invading al of me, right down to the extremities within a second or two. I thought the monster would come leaping up the cliff face to eat me as it was eating the dragon carcass, which was now scarcely more than a few ribs and some savaged hide. But instead it closed its mouth once more and returned to the last leisurely pickings with an air of boredom.

We watched til there was nothing left. They downed the lot, bones and al , and one by one moved heavily away into the scrub, al apart from one that headed off up the straight side of the cliff face opposite, like a gecko up a pane of glass, climbing quickly and graceful y with its huge curved claws outspread.

It gave me a fright to see it climb like that. Imagine climbing, chased, slipping, sweating.

‘See that,’ Dan said, when we had drawn back from the rocky edge and regrouped. ‘It could climb a tree easy, I’d say.’

‘No need to sound so fucking cheerful about it,’ said John Copper. ‘I’m shitting myself here.’

‘We al are, John,’ said Dag, and slung an arm about his neck roughly for a second. ‘Aren’t we?’ he appealed to the rest of us.

I nodded vigorously. Tim said nothing.

Dan became serious. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I didn’t bring you out here as lizard food. What’s the matter with you al ? This is a hunt, it’s no different from going after a whale. You do as you’re told and no one comes to any harm. Look,’ he took out his gun and pointed it at the sky, he smiled, ‘you’re al armed. Any doubt at al and you shoot. No second thoughts. I won’t let any one of you be harmed, so stop whining.’

‘But there’s so many of them!’ John wailed.

‘So there are,’ said Dan. ‘That’s good.’

‘Good,’ echoed Dag, and a huge grin spread madly across his face.

‘Yes,’ repeated Dan, with emphasis. ‘That is good. I know what to do now. Now I know what to do.’

Dan kil ed a boar. We trailed its bloody carcass a mile or more til we came to a place where the trees thickened. Here he set us to making a hide and banging in stakes in a ring, weaving them round with rope lashed fast. The smal er of the Malays, deft as a squirrel, shinned up a tree with another rope in his mouth. At the top he held on with the strength of his legs, tying the rope with his hands before sliding back down to join us, hauling down the sappy branches. They spread like a sheltering fan over the trap. We hacked clear a doorway wide enough for the thing to get in, and Dan set up a rope contraption that went round the doorway and back to the hide. So we watched and waited, taking shifts.

We waited half a day and the sun went down. We moved from the hide and set up a camp not far away, lit a fire again, but there were no jokes tonight. Dan said we had to keep quiet. We were in no danger, he said. If it comes, it smel s the bait and goes for that. We’d hear it if the trap was sprung, believe me. Oh, believe me, he said. No fears, lads.

I’ve done this a mil ion times. So we sat around whispering to one another and chewing hardtack and thinking of the others down on the beach gorging on meat, and wondered if they were wondering about us, where we were and if anything terrible had befal en us. My bel y was getting sore.

When it was my turn to lie down I didn’t sleep, just drifted into a peculiar place in which the island had become a vast ship sailing on through hot darkness, and I twitched and murmured til it was growing light again.

In the fading dawn, the island birds whistled and chattered and carked in the forest beneath us. Blue Tattoo had gone scouting. The smal er Malay sat cross-legged, picking sleep out of the corners of his eyes with patient zeal. I went out for a pee and saw how dark the sea was on the horizon. Indigo.

You could see islands from here. And how stil it al was, just for a moment, til I was joined by Tim.

‘Shouldn’t come out on your own,’ he said, peeing beside me.

So the morning rol ed on as the day before, waiting, watching, seeing centipedes the size of worms come out of the rough thatch of the hide, thinking of the crawly bodies in the mud like a bunch of maggots at a bit of liver. Nasty things. Muddy things. The dragons of stories were beautiful, flying the sky wonderful y winged, deadly but magnificent. But these – these were massively ugly, with a brutal, careless power more nightmare than fairy tale. Their eyes lacked anything a human could comprehend. More so than a whale, more so than a snake, more so than a frog. That one had looked at me. I was sure it had. It looked at me and it was like being seen by a demon.

Blue Tattoo, our silent scout, came silently beckoning, two hours after sunrise. ‘Dragon,’ he said, the first English word I’d heard him speak. Dan, pul ing up his breeches as he emerged from the bushes, nodded once sharply. You’d have thought he was just strol ing back from the privy. The rest of us went in twos, having a horror of being disturbed in the middle of a shit by a big scaly head with evil teeth emerging from the undergrowth. It was hard to go, even with Dag keeping watch and saying ‘sure, no dragons’ in a hearty whisper every twenty seconds. Dan was mad though. Maybe you had to be mad to prosper in his line of work. Mad or stupid or in possession of a sixth sense; al three perhaps.

‘So, lads,’ he said, calm as can be, ‘this may be the one’, and set off with a worried-looking Tim in tow. I knew Tim was worried not because he showed it but because he’d gone very quiet and was keeping away from everyone as much as possible, apart from Dan, with whom I was vaguely aware he’d been going off into little huddled conferences al night long.

Stealthy as cats, licking our lips and squaring up bravely, the rest of us fol owed.

The hide was cool and green, out of the sun, tamped down flat from the watches. Through the overhanging leaves we saw the dragon edging along the fringe of grassland, then striking across open scrub towards the trees. It was a big beast, mightily draped in skin, a syrupy drool dripping from its closed jaws. It had seen the boar, or at least smel ed it. I could hear the buzzing of lively early morning flies from here.

The dragon approached steadily, with purpose. There was something of the elephant in the stolid girth of its legs. A few feet away from the trap it stopped, one foot slightly in front of the other. So close. So big. The brows hung over, the smal stil eyes not dead, but ful of a sharp alien consciousness. It looked straight at the hide and us.

And so, a frozen moment that went on and on, long enough for a mil ion itches to come and go and for the long red crawlers to wrap themselves unimpeded round your cringing shanks like the worms of Thames mud. Long enough for us to note the curved cruelty of the creature’s claws, the slippery roundedness of the snaky tongue, the sheer mass and bulk and power of the thing. It would be like tackling a rhinoceros.

Half an hour it stood, ineffable. Then everything happened very fast.

It turned once more to the buzzing meat and nodded slowly once or twice, raising itself high, then charged. Dan let go the trigger, the tree sprang up, the rope pul ed tight round the dragon’s bel y and it went mad. It was supposed to go al the way in the trap but it had got caught half in and half out of the doorway, and it kicked and bucked and twisted there like a salted slug, snapping dementedly and hammering the earth. A thick purplish-brown clag of half-digested slime spewed from its jaws. They were out the side of the hide, Dan and Tim and the two Malays, but they couldn’t get near.

The stakes were cracked and bending, the dragon sliding in its vomit, rol ing in it, the four of them stalking it round, keeping back. The tail beat like the flukes of a whale and made thunder, the long sharp claws clenched wildly at anything within reach. It was a kil er, and it was furious and terrified.

It broke free, the rope round its middle trailing a long sliver of wood the size of a broom.

Dan had been right to choose Tim for the hunt. He was just where he needed to be and he was calm, or at least he
seemed
calm. Is that bravery? I don’t know if he was brave or just in a trance. He got scared, I knew. Maybe he was now, but if so, he’d put the fear away in some other part of himself that didn’t show. Not to anyone else anyway, but to me because I’d known him so long. Those veiled yet humorous eyes, self-conscious. That set mouth. He had the fear certainly, but he wasn’t going to break. Me, I might have run. I might have jumped the wrong way at the wrong moment. So might he, but it wouldn’t be because his nerve failed. I was proud. Our Tim, Ratcliffe Highway Tim, a golden brave in a hunt. He was al sure movement, manlike. They al were, the Malays lithe and nearly naked, Dan, who was not elegant, but a hard hunched little knot of a man, suddenly graceful and skil ed as a dancer, stepping forward with the rope made into a noose and throwing it resolutely at the creature’s head.