Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [61]
And now a dumb show began. Our blood was up. We were in the wild, and the wild has teeth and claws and eyes and a stink like the rotting of a day-old carcass. I saw only a dark, living bulk of great size, four bandy legs running. So fast! Dan and the Malays talked with their hands and shoulders and eyes. I wanted to be Dan. I wanted his gift for roaming the world talking to everyone he met. I wanted his ease in outlandish places and the way he never seemed afraid. I wanted the fear that moved in my belly to transmute into serenity. The smaller of the two Malays spotted blood. Something is leaving a trail. He moved his forearm in such a way—how he did it I don’t know, he made it look like a deer. Palm towards us, keeping us back, he went forward. For a while he stood absolutely motionless looking through the thinning bush, then beckoned us cautiously on.
We came like ghosts. I saw the deer first, through the high grass. She was far away on the side of a long, balding slope, near dead, her blood trail following her faithfully not quite to the shadow of the rock to which she’d dragged herself. She’d collapsed in the dust. A stain of blood widened about her and she was trying, hopelessly but doggedly, to raise her head up sideways. Then I saw the dragon, just above and beyond us, completely still on a low wrinkle of land overlooking the plain, no more than a deck’s length from me. A huge, brownish-grey thing with black head and legs, bigger than a tiger, longer and lower but raising its powerful chest and head as high at the front and trailing behind a mighty weapon of a tail.
It was magnificent. Its feet were like giant hands, splayed and slightly inturned, knobbly and wavy and tipped by long, black claws that curved like sickles—a kind of a lizard obviously, but like nothing I’d ever seen. We’d had geckos and chameleons and iguanas at Jamrach’s, even a Gila monster once, but they were nothing compared to this. The size of it! That chest, the muscles in those arms, the skin like ancient armour, scaly and notched and scarred like the ears of an old tomcat, yet loose and wrinkled, hanging in baggy swathes under its belly and throat. Its closed mouth was like a crocodile’s, a crooked line that meandered along its lower jaw. A slick tongue darted out and in, forked and yellow.
It began to sway its head a little, slowly, snakeish, side to side. How long did we watch? Minutes.
After a while it looked towards us, but not, I think, at us. It had a broad and slab-like face with large nostrils and cold, overhung eyes set very wide on either side of its head. A sour, displeased face. Its jaws opened and I saw crocodile teeth. Then it turned its face away and moved forward, showing none of the speed we had seen before, but walking ponderously as if feeling its weight. Slowly, it slid down the short incline and lumbered on across the broad plane towards the deer, head now low to the ground, snake-like with its darting tongue and questing, forward movement. Its departure caused us to relax, but the Malay tensed every muscle and warned us with one chopped movement to keep still. We watched the dragon amble about in a vague sort of way for several moments. Clearly it was not interested in finishing off the poor deer, not yet. We watched till the creature was no more than a pointed tail disappearing into the scrubland beyond the clearing.
The Malay turned and motioned that we make a slow