CHAPTER XII.
All Kinds of Climates in South Africa—Pa Hires Men to Capture Wild Animals—The Boy and His Pa Capture Some Tigers and a Big Lion—They Have a Narrow Escape from a Rhinoceros.
I don’t know whether I like the climate of South Africa or not, but you can have any kind of climate you are looking for, from the Alaska kind to the tropical kind, the same day.
I think it is the climate that makes all the animals so mad. One minute a lion or a tiger may be lolling with his tongue out, fighting flies and scratching fleas, and the next minute there are icicles on his moustache, and he has to crawl into a hole in the ground to keep from freezing.
These natives beat me. They do not wear any clothes except a doily, made of bark orgrass, over their loins, and from the doily, above and below, their skin is bare, and they ought to be arrested for disorderly conduct and exposure, but their skin is thick and warty like a rhinoceros, and when it freezes it looks like pickled pigs’ feet.
One man we have hired to help capture animals is a native chief with sixty wives, and he has brought them all to camp with him, and we have to feed them, and it is rumored the women all have their caps set for Pa, if the husband dies, and Pa is afraid they will kill their old man and select Pa to fill the vacancy, that being the unwritten law that a man’s wives can select a husband.
Gee, if I had to be a stepson to all those sixty senegambians that look like monkeys in the face and when on dress parade like oxen, I should die, or they would, if I could find chloroform enough to go around.
Well, Pa is trying his best to save the life of that husband of the sixty wives, and every time one of the wives pats Pa on theback or chucks him under the chin he has a chill, and I know he will do something desperate if they get after him in flocks.
I suppose I ought not to have done it, but I told one of the wives who understands a little English that Pa liked to be hugged and squeezed, and held on the girls’ laps, so when we get through work at night and sit around the camp fire they take turns holding Pa on their laps, and he thinks one of the women broke one of his ribs hugging him, cause they are strong as giants, and have a terrible squeeze.
I told one of them she could make herself solid with Pa if she could get him a nice long snake, so she went off into the jungle alone and came back dragging a snake more than twenty feet long, and put it in Pa’s tent when he was asleep. When Pa woke up in the morning and found the snake coiled upon his blanket he threw a fit andwent to the doctor and got some medicine for chills and fever, and we put the snakeinto a cage to sell to a menagerie.
When Pa Found the Snake Coiled Up on His Blanket He Threw a Fit.
When Pa Found the Snake Coiled Up on His Blanket He Threw a Fit.
When Pa Found the Snake Coiled Up on His Blanket He Threw a Fit.
The old airship got in its work the first time we tried it, though we didn’t make gas enough to more than half fill it, and it wouldn’t fly, but we got some tigers and a big lion, all right.
We took the airship out on an open prairie and built a fire to make the gas for the balloon, and Pa made everybody stay away from it except me, and when we got it inflated we were to blow a horn, and the people we wanted to go along could come, but the crowd of workers and negroes must stay back, so as not to scare the animals, and be ready to bring cages up when we blew the horn three consecutive times.
We were not looking around much, but just paying attention to our gas, and steering it into the gas bag, and we had got the bag about half full, and it was lying on the grass like a big whale that has died at sea and floated ashore, and we were busy thinkingof how we would sail over the veldt and have our cowboy rope a few lions and choke them into submission, when I happened to look around towards the jungle, and there were two tigers crawling through the grass towards the gas bag, and a lion walking right towards it as though he was saying to the tigers, “Ah, g’wan, I saw it first,” and a rhinoceros was rooting along like a big hog, right towards us. I told Pa to look out, and when he saw the animals he seemed to lose all appetite for lions and tigers in their wild state, for he started for a tree and told me to climb up, too. Well, it took Pa quite a while to get up on a limb, but he finally got all his person up there, and I was right with him, and Pa looked at the animals creeping up to the gas bag, and he said, “Bub, the success of this expedition will be settled right here if that lion drinks any of the gasoline.”
Well, I have seen cats crawling along the floor towards a mouse hole, and stoppingand looking innocent when the mouse stuck his head out of the hole, and then moving on again when the mouse disappeared, and these tigers acted that way, stopping every time the wind caused the gas bag to flap on the ground. The lion acted like a big St. Bernard dog that smells something ahead that he don’t exactly know what to make of, but is going to find out, and the rhinoceros just rooted along as though he was getting what he wanted out of the ground, and would be along after a while to investigate that thing that was rising like a big ant hill on the prairie and smelling like a natural gas well. Finally the tigers got near enough to the gas bag with their claws, running their noses down into the holes where the gas was escaping, and fairly drinking in the gas. Their weight sent the bag down to the ground, and they were in the middle, inhaling gas, and pretty soon the lion came up and clawed a hole in the gas bag and acted as though he was not going to let thetigers have all the good stuff and pretty soon we could see from up the tree that they were being overcome by the fumes, and Pa said in about four minutes we would have a mess of animals chloroformed good and plenty, and we would go down and hobble them and hog-tie them like they do cattle on the ranches. What bothered us about going down the tree was the rhinoceros that was coming rooting along, but after a while he came up and smelled of the gasoline can, tipped it over, and as the gasoline trickled out on the ground he laid down and rolled in it like a big pig, and after he had got well soaked in gasoline he rolled near the fire, and in a minute he was all ablaze and about the scaredest rhinoceros that ever roamed the prairie.
When the fire began to scorch his hide he let out a bellow that could be heard a mile and started towards the camp on a gallop, looking like a barn afire, and Pa said now was the time to capture our sleepinganimals, so we shinned down the tree and found the lion dead to the world, and we tied his feet together and put a bag over his head, and then climbed over the gas bag and found the two tigers sleeping as sweetly as babes, and I held their legs together while Pa tied all four legs so tight they couldn’t move a muscle, and then Pa told me to blow the horn for the cages to be sent out.
Gee, but I was proud of that morning’s work, two tigers and a lion with no more danger than shooting cats on a back fence with a bean snapper, and Pa and I shook hands and patted each other on the back. I told Pa he was a wonder, and that Mr. Hagenbach would probably make him a general in the Prussian army, but Pa looked modest and said, “All it needs is brain and sand to overcome the terrors of the jungle,” and just then we saw the cages coming across the veldt, and Pa said, “Now, when the boys come up with the cages you putone foot on the lion and strike an attitude like a lion tamer, and I will play with the tigers.”
When the cages came up I was on to my job all right, and the boys gave me three cheers, and they asked where Pa was, and I pointed to the center of the gas bag and said Pa was in there having a little fun with a mess of tigers, and when they walked over the billowy gas bag they found Pa with one of the tigers that had partly come to playing with him and chewing his pants, but they rescued Pa and in a few minutes they had our three animals in the cages, and we started for camp, Pa walking behind the cages with his coat over his arm, telling young Hagenbach the confoundedest story about how he subdued the animals by just hypnotizing them, and I never said a word. A boy that will not stand up for his father is an idgit.
When we got to camp the natives had all scattered to the four winds. It seemed thatwhen the fiery rhinoceros came towards them they thought the Great Spirit had sent fire to destroy them, and they took to the jungle, the rhino after them, bellowing all kinds of cheering messages from the Great Spirit.
Along towards night they came to camp dragging a cooked rhinoceros, and they turned in to eat it, and all those sixty females brought nice pieces of rhino, cooked by gasoline, to Pa, and wanted Pa to eat it, but Pa said he was dieting, and it was Friday, anyway, and he never ate meat on Friday.
Then we all sat up all night, and everybody made speeches glorifying Pa as the greatest hero that ever came to Africa, and that he had Stanley beaten a mile, and Pa blushed, and the women held him in their laps and said he was the dearest thing ever.