Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [65]
Half an hour it stood, ineffable. Then everything happened very fast.
It turned once more to the buzzing meat, and nodded slowly once or twice, raising itself high, then charged. Dan let go the trigger, the tree sprang up, the rope pulled tight round the dragon’s belly and it went mad. It was supposed to go all the way in the trap but it had got caught half in and half out of the doorway, and it kicked and bucked and twisted there like a salted slug, snapping dementedly and hammering the earth. A thick, purplish-brown clag of half-digested slime spewed from its jaws. They were out the side of the hide, Dan and Tim and the two Malays, but they couldn’t get near. The stakes were cracked and bending, the dragon sliding in its vomit, rolling in it, the four of them stalking it round, keeping back. The tail beat like the flukes of a whale and made thunder, the long, sharp claws clenched wildly at anything within reach. It was a killer, and it was furious and terrified.
It broke free, the rope round its middle trailing a long sliver of wood the size of a broom.
Dan had been right to choose Tim for the hunt. He was just where he needed to be and he was calm, or at least he seemed calm. Is that bravery? I don’t know if he was brave or just in a trance. He got scared, I knew. Maybe he was now, but if so, he’d put the fear away in some other part of himself that didn’t show. Not to anyone else anyway, but to me because I’d known him so long. Those veiled yet humorous eyes, self-conscious. That set mouth. He had the fear certainly, but he wasn’t going to break. Me, I might have run. I might have jumped the wrong way at the wrong moment. So might he, but it wouldn’t be because his nerve failed. I was proud. Our Tim, Ratcliffe Highway Tim, a golden brave in a hunt. He was all sure movement, manlike. They all were, the Malays lithe and nearly naked, Dan, who was not elegant, but a hard, hunched little knot of a man, suddenly graceful and skilled as a dancer, stepping forward with the rope made into a noose and throwing it resolutely at the creature’s head.
It missed and he dragged it back and had it recoiled and rethrown in a second. It missed again, and again. The dragon frothed, convulsing, voiding itself from both ends and soaking the ground with sudden spurting shoots of piss. He got it with the fifth throw. The rope dropped magically over its head during an upward thrust, pure luck or genius I’ll never know. Dan was sweating and red in the face. He stepped back, throwing the end of the rope to Tim and immediately swinging another coil down from his shoulder and getting ready to throw again. Tim hauled off and tied his end to a tree, his lips moving as if he was singing or praying and his eyes glazed.
The whole thing took only a few minutes, I suppose. We came from the hide when Dan called us, when the monster, still furiously kicking and heaving, was secured to the trees by three strong ropes, one at each end and one in the middle. Nine or ten foot long, that thing was, and stinking to high heaven. I sometimes think my life has been overfull of stench. The creature was caked in its own shit and piss and vomit, and the carcass of the boar was beginning to stink too. The air of this place was now thick and hot with a smell that made me think of Bermondsey pure sellers, their hallways full of buckets of compacting dog shit for the tanner’s gate. It was the kind of smell that makes walls cringe and plants curl and die.
They cut the stake away. All of us helped now. My heart was hammering like mad, my cheeks were burning and I felt funny, as if I was coming down with a fever. Our faces were wild and tight and surprised, and we laughed at one another amazedly. Dan quieted us. The Malays were laughing too, and a sense of suppressed carnival seized us. Dag, the strong one, hacked down a young tree to which we tied the creature—I could not call it a dragon seeing it like this, not a dragon, it never was—swaddling