Croc Hunting
Dusk on Lake Kariba came fast.
“And how do we actually catch the crocodile?” I asked.
Dan looked at me through bloodshot eyes, draining his beer. “With our hands,” he said casually, as if it was too obvious to even need elucidating.
We’d been on the water since dawn, fishing and drinking. Mainly drinking. The Zimbabwean Lifestyle: Fish Hard; Drink Harder. But the sun was setting and seven very drunk men started the journey back to the lodge in high spirits, brown from the African sun and a keep-net full of bream just waiting to be barbequed.
As the light faded Dan produced a spotlight. “This,” he explained to my younger brother Oli and me, “means we can see the mangrove trees lurking below the surface…and spot crocs.”
We scanned the crocodile-infested lake with the beam, occasionally catching little red flashes of partially submurged eyes in the light’s glare along the dark shoreline.
“There’s one of the fuckers,” Dan said.
A hundred metres away they weren’t that scary, a glimpse of eye and a splash of tail as the reptilian killer slithered its way back into the water.
But we were going closer. We were going Croc Hunting.
After a brief search we spotted a croc that “looked like a baby”. A killer baby, I pointed out from the back of the boat. Potentially the most dangerous baby on the planet. A remorseless baby with two rows of skin-shredding teeth and a voracious appetite for flesh.
Dozer — self-appointed skipper for this dim-witted dusky diversion — pointed the nose of the boat at the unassuming crocodile. He then cut the power. This was so the croc couldn’t “hear us coming”, despite the mild racket five sozzled Zimbabweans and two very sozzled Englishman were making as we coasted through the murky water.
What we were going to do with the captured croc was still a mystery: they aren’t tasty, I imagine make terrible pets, and we didn’t have a keep-net or desire big enough to actually get it onto the boat.
I tried to ask Dan why we were doing this, but he just shrugged in the darkness.
So, to summarise, we were sneaking up on a crocodile. I figured this would be a bad time to point out that crocodiles have a widely-known reputation for being the most cunning and devious predators on the planet, and probably wouldn’t be outwitted by a disorganised gang of drunkards, so I kept my mouth shut, wondering how many hundreds of miles away the nearest hospital was out here deep in the Zimbabwean bush.
However I needn’t ask who was going to be the hunter, because there could only be one man for the job: Scotty Brand.
This was the same man who had been wearing a bandage all day “because he had a headache”. The same man who last year managed to accidentally lock himself in a police car in Central London while trying to take a selfie inside. The same man who has lost not one, not two, but three Oyster Cards to cash machines (to add insult to injury, it was the same machine each time). The very same man who was now taking his top off in preparation for trying to capture a crocodile with his bare hands.
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“Hold this,” he said, handing me his beer and taking position on the bow of the vessel.
We were now within 20 metres of the fated croc and Dan killed the spotlight because, oh yes, we had to do it in the dark, as if trying to capture a crocodile while being able to see wasn’t hard enough. The stars were out and provided just enough light to make out what was water and what was land. Seeing a scaly reptile in the water was totally out of the question.
The plan of attack was pretty basic — jump on it, pick it up, throw it on the land. Scotty — now crouching on the bow — looked like he had done this a thousand times, when in reality he was just an inebriated African about to jump on a crocodile.
“Don’t worry,” Dan whispered to Oli and me, “we’ve watched a couple of Steve Irwin documentaries. I replied that this didn’t count as “training”.
We were all silent, the boat idling lazily towards the banks of the lake. It was eerily silent, the stagnant night air closing in all around us, the craft hardly making a peep as it glided through the water.
And then, Scotty jumped. Into the water he leapt, diving on the reptile like, well, a crocodile onto its prey. The hunter becomes the hunted.
As the commotion started Dan switched on the spotlight so we could see the action. The sudden burst of light stung my eyes, but once they had adjusted I could see Scotty and the croc thrashing around in the water. It was about a metre long and not at all happy at having a Zimbabwean man jump on its back.
But, by some miracle, the element of surprise had given Scotty the upper hand, and he now had the croc in his grip. He got to his feet and tried to fling the flailing animal onto the land.
Here, the upper hand that Scotty had was immediately lost, because instead of the croc flying through the air onto the grass, it stayed locked to Scotty. This was because the creature had lodged its teeth into his forearm, Scotty forgetting the golden — and only — rule of Croc Hunting: Don’t let it bite you.
He swung the now dentally-attached croc round and round three or four times before it finally let go. Unfortunately as the croc released itself, Scotty was now pointing towards the boat. The helpless, molested crocodile now flew through the air — in painful slow motion to my beer-fuddled brain — towards the boat. If you’re envisaging a slapstick movie where the whole cast are completely incompetent and everything ends in disaster, then that is a pretty accurate picture. “I just didn’t see this coming,” I could hear a future me explaining to my parents back in the UK. “We really thought all things were going to end well from this venture.”
By an act of divine intervention that we definitely didn’t deserve, the croc flew right over the boat and splashed back into the water a metre or so behind us, free to swim off and tell all his friends about the time he savaged a fully-grown man.
Scotty jumped back onto the boat, blood dripping from the set of teeth marks now etched into his skin. We all rushed to his aid, but his main concern about was the whereabouts of his beer. I sheepishly admitted I had drunk most of it while watching the show.
“I think it’s pretty well honours even on the Croc Hunting leaderboard,” Oli said.
“And how do you judge that?” Dan said, now wrapping his t-shirt round Scotty’s bleeding crocodile bite in a makeshift torniquet.
“Well, the croc may not have been captured…” Oli continued, “…but Scotty hasn’t been eaten.” Scotty did a small bow, accepting the draw with good grace, the blood already seeping through the t-shirt torniquet.
Dozer fired up the engine and we started a slow, carefully trawl for home. I stood watch at the aft, feeling an edge of concern that the discombobulated crocodile was down there in the water, rounding up his friends for revenge. One wrong move and we’d hit a mangrove branch and be toppled into the lake. I took a final sip of Scotty’s beer and banished the thought.
Then the spotlight broke and we really were buggered.
