He had just come up from the river, and his hide was clean and almost a dark birch color. His head was raised and he was regarding us suspiciously from his small green eyes.
I put down my rifle in disgust, and took up my revolver. I had no idea of wasting a hundred and ten grains of powder on a baby. I took careful aim and fired. The revolver was a self-cocker, and yet before I could fire again, he had whirled about and was out of reach. He was gone and I drew a long breath. The Malays said I struck him. If I did, I had no means of proving it.
The only way to bag crocodiles is to kill them outright or nearly so. If they have strength enough to crawl into the river and die, they will come to the surface again two days later; but the chances are that they will get under a root, or that in some way you will lose them. Out of forty or fifty big and small ones that we hit only five floated down past the Residency.
I also soon found out that my hundred and ten grain cartridges were none too large for even the smaller crocodiles. As for those eighteen and twenty feet long, it was necessary that the Chief Justice and I should fire at the same time and at the same spot in order to arrest the big saurians in their wild scramble for the water.
We had tried some half-dozen good shots at small fellows, varying from two to five feet in length, when I began to lose interest in the sport; so I turned to watch a colony of little gray, jungle monkeys, that were swinging and chattering and scolding among the mangrove trees.
One of them picked a long dart-shaped fruit off the tree and essayed to drop it on the head of his mate below. I was about to call my companion's attention to it, when I heard a crash among the roots near where the missile had fallen, and a crocodile, so large that I distrusted my senses, turned his great log-like head to one side and gazed up at the frightened monkeys. I raised my hand, and the launch paused not over twenty yards from where he lay patiently waiting for one of the monkeys to drop within reach of his great jaws.
The sun had dried the mud on his back until the entire surface reminded me of the beach of a muddy mill-pond that I used to frequent as a boy.