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"I'll promise you anything you like," I said gloomily, "but don't send me away. Let me stay and do something so as not to be an encumbrance to you, but don't send me away." "No one wants to send you away, Hal," said my uncle kindly. "Look about you and see the country; shoot and fish a little, too. I need not say, beware of the caymen the river swarms with them.
When he was a boy he had seen his father catch the caymen, and on the morrow he would make something that would answer. In the meantime we set the shark-hook, but it availed us naught: a cayman came and took it, but would not swallow it. Seeing it was useless to attend the shark-hook any longer, we left it for the night and returned to our hammocks.
Were I by chance to meet the son of the father who moulders here, he could tell me that his father was famous for slaying tigers and serpents and caymen, and noted in the chase of the tapir and wild boar, but that he remembers little or nothing of his grandfather. They are very jealous of their liberty, and much attached to their own mode of living.
The Indians went into the forest to hunt, and we took the canoe to shoot fish and get another supply of turtle's eggs, which we found in great abundance on this large sandbank. We went to the little shallow creek, and shot some young caymen about two feet long.
"Look out for me, you fellows!" Like a shot he was in the river, diving under the stem of the Black Bear. Harry and Frank, knowing the rivers of that district to be swarming with caymen, grouped at the rear and watched with anxious eyes for the reappearance of their chum. In a few seconds Jack's face appeared above the surface of the water.
A few small caymen, from two to twelve feet long, may be observed now and then in passing up and down the river; they just keep their heads above the water, and a stranger would not know them from a rotten stump.
Edmonstone had very kindly let me have one of his old negroes, and he constantly attended me: his name was Daddy Quashi. He had a brave stomach for heterogeneous food; it could digest and relish, too, caymen, monkeys, hawks and grubs. The Daddy made three or four meals on this cayman while it was not absolutely putrid, and salted the rest.
Then all was still again and silent as midnight. The caymen were now upon the stir, and at intervals their noise could be distinguished amid that of the jaguar, the owls, the goat-suckers and frogs. It was a singular and awful sound. It was like a suppressed sigh bursting forth all of a sudden, and so loud that you might hear it above a mile off.
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