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Your respectable English Wilkinson is an excellent man but nothing would surprise me less than his reducing your Cayman to matchwood in the next gale. That strange scene in the old house at Fellside made a profound impression upon Lord Hartfield.
From this we intended to shoot an arrow into the cayman: at the end of this arrow was to be attached a string which would be tied to the rope, and as soon as the cayman was struck we were to have the canoe ready and pursue him in the river. While we were busy in preparing the stage a tiger began to roar.
Upon looking towards the place there appeared something on the water like a black log of wood. It was so unlike anything alive that I doubted if it were a cayman; but the Indian smiled and said he was sure it was one, for he remembered seeing a cayman some years ago when he was in the Essequibo. At last it gradually approached the bait, and the board began to move.
All sign of the Indians had passed away, but animal life was more frequent, and the tameness of the creatures showed that they knew nothing of the hunter. Fuzzy little black-velvet monkeys, with snow-white teeth and gleaming, mocking eyes, chattered at us as we passed. With a dull, heavy splash an occasional cayman plunged in from the bank.
Rearing his enormous head out of the water, the monster threw himself upon the steed and seized him by the saddle. The horse made a violent effort, the girths broke, and thus enabled him to reach the shore. Soon, however, finding that his prey had escaped, the cayman dropped the saddle, and made towards the Indian.
The snout was taken off by one ball, and another entered the hinder part of the skull, when the Indians, attacking it with their clubs, appeared completely to have knocked out every spark of life. It was at last hauled up and placed on the bow of the corial. While the corial was being drawn across the rapids, two of the Indians took up the cayman in order to lay it in a more convenient position.
The summer hours glided past them. The Cayman was far out at sea; all the other yachts had vanished, and they were alone amidst the blue, with only a solitary three-master yonder, on the edge of the horizon.
About an hour before sunset we reached the place which the two men who had joined us at the falls pointed out as a proper one to find a cayman. There was a large creek close by and a sandbank gently sloping to the water. Just within the forest, on this bank, we cleared a place of brushwood, suspended the hammocks from the trees, and then picked up enough of decayed wood for fuel.
"The more aged the cayman, the more bitter is his bark." Yet the spots where we found the most fetid water, were not always those where dead animals were accumulated on the beach.
"A cayman!" repeated everyone, as the word ran from mouth to mouth in the midst of fright and general surprise. "What did you say?" they asked him. "I say that we're caught a cayman," Leon assured them, and as he dropped the heavy end of the pole into the water, he continued: "Don't you hear that sound? That's not sand, but a tough hide, the back of a cayman. Don't you see how the posts shake?
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