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By Root 917 0

they ate, dragging and shaking and ripping, snapping greedily, lifting their great gulping throats to swallow. At some point the big one at the side began swinging its head heavily from side to side, then waded in like a burly bully of a drunk and soon was pigging it with all the rest. Such weary majesty this one had, and so much bigger was it than all the rest, that it very quickly became centre of the scene, with all the others writhing around it respectfully 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 chills. 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 belly like sickness, and invading all 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 till there was nothing left. They downed the lot, bones and all, and one by one moved heavily away into the scrub, all 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 gracefully 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 all 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 all? 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 all armed. Any doubt at all 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 killed a boar. We trailed its bloody carcass a mile or more till 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 smaller 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