Chapter 50 - The Plant Hunters by Mayne Reid
A Mysterious Monster.
Karl, poor fellow! was killed, of course; crushed to death upon the rocks; mangled—
Stay—not so fast, reader! Karl was not killed; not even hurt! He was no more damaged by his tall, than if he had only tumbled from a chair, or rolled from a fashionable couch upon the carpet of a drawing-room!
How could this be? you will exclaim. A fall of sheer twenty feet, and upon loose rocks, too! How could he escape being killed, or, at the very least, badly bruised and cut?
But there was neither bruise nor scratch upon his body; and, the moment after he had relinquished his hold, he might have been seen standing by the bottom of the cliff, sound in limb, though sadly out of wind, and with his strength altogether exhausted.
Let us have no mystery about the matter. I shall at once tell you how he escaped.
Caspar and Ossaroo, having expected him to return at an early hour, took it into their heads, from his long absence, that something might be wrong; and, therefore, sallied forth in search of him. They might not have found him so readily but for Fritz. The dog had guided them on his trail, so that no time had been lost in scouring the valley. On the contrary, they had come almost direct from the hut to the ravine where he was found.
They had arrived just at the crisis when Karl was making his last attempt to descend from the ledge. They had shouted to him, when first coming within hail; but Karl, intently occupied with the difficulty of the descent, and his anxiety about the bear, had not heard them. It was just at that moment that he lost his foothold, and Caspar and Ossaroo saw him sprawling helplessly against the cliff.
Caspar’s quick wit suggested what was best to be done. Both he and Ossaroo ran underneath, and held up their arms to catch Karl as he fell; but Ossaroo chanced to have a large skin-robe around his shoulders, and, at Caspar’s prompt suggestion, this was hurriedly spread out, and held between the two, high above their heads. It was while adjusting this, that Karl had heard them crying out to him to “hold on.” Just as the robe was hoisted into its place, Karl had fallen plump down into the middle of it; and although his weight brought all three of them together to the ground, yet they scrambled to their feet again without receiving the slightest injury.
“Ha! ha! ha!” laughed Caspar, “just in the nick of time! Ha! ha! ha!”
Of course there followed a good deal of rejoicing and congratulation upon this narrow escape. Narrow it certainly was, for had not Caspar and Ossaroo arrived in the “nick of time,” as Caspar expressed it, and acted as promptly as they had, poor Karl would never have lived to thank them.
“Well,” said Caspar, “I think I may call this one of my lucky days; and yet I don’t know about that, since it has come so near being fatal to both my companions.”
“Both?” inquired Karl, with some surprise.
“Indeed, yes, brother,” answered Caspar. “Yours is the second life I’ve had a hand in saving to-day.”
“What! has Ossaroo been in danger, too? Ha! he is quite wet—every rag upon his body!” said Karl, approaching the shikarree, and laying hand upon his garments. “Why, so are you, Caspar,—dripping wet, I declare! How is this? You’ve been in the lake? Have you been in danger of drowning?”
“Why, yes,” replied Caspar. “Ossy has.” (Caspar frequently used this diminutive for Ossaroo.) “I might say worse than drowning. Our comrade has been near a worse fate—that of being swallowed up!”
“Swallowed up!” exclaimed Karl, in astonishment. “Swallowed up! What mean you, brother?”
“I mean just what I have said—that Ossaroo has been in great danger of being swallowed up,—body, bones, and all,—so that we would never have found a trace of him!”
“Oh! Caspar, you must be jesting with me;—there are no whales in the lake to make a Jonah of our poor shikarree; nor sharks neither, nor any sort of fish big enough to bolt a full-grown man. What, then, can you mean?”
“In truth, brother, I am quite serious. We have been very near losing our comrade,—almost as near as he and I have been of losing you; so that, you see, there has been a double chance against your life; for if Ossaroo had not been saved, neither he nor I would have been here in time to lend you a hand, and both of you in that ease would have perished. What danger have I been in of losing both? and then what would have been my forlorn fate? Ah! I cannot call it a lucky day, after all. A day of perils—even when one has the good fortune to escape them—is never a pleasant one to be remembered. No—I shudder when I think of the chances of this day!”
“But come, Caspar!” interposed the botanist, “explain yourself! Tell me what has happened to get both of you so saturated with water. Who or what came so near swallowing Ossaroo? Was it fish, flesh, or fowl?”
“A fish, I should think,” added Karl, in a jocular way, “judging from the element in which the adventure occurred. Certainly from the appearance of both of you it must have been in the water, and under the water too? Most undoubtedly a fish! Come, then, brother! let us hear this fish story.”
“Certainly a fish had something to do with it,” replied Caspar; “but although Ossaroo has proved that there are large fish in the lake, by capturing one nearly as big as himself—I don’t believe there are any quite large enough to swallow him—body, limbs, and all—without leaving some trace of him behind: whereas the monster that did threaten to accomplish this feat, would not have left the slightest record by which we could have known what had become of our unfortunate companion.”
“A monster!” exclaimed Karl, with increased astonishment and some little terror.
“Well, not exactly that,” replied Caspar, smiling at the puzzled expression on his brother’s countenance; “not exactly a monster, for it is altogether a natural phenomenon; but it is something quite as dangerous as any monster; and we will do well to avoid it in our future wanderings about the lake.”
“Why, Caspar, you have excited my curiosity to the highest pitch. Pray, lose no more time, but tell me at once what kind of terrible adventure is this that has befallen you.”
“That I shall leave Ossy to do, for it was his adventure, not mine. I was not even a witness to it, though, by good fortune, I was present at the ‘wind up,’ and aided in conducting it to a different result than it would otherwise have had. Poor Ossy! had I not arrived just in the right time, I wonder where you’d have been now? Several feet under ground, I dare say. Ha! ha! ha! It certainly is a very serious matter to laugh at, brother; but when I first set my eyes upon Ossaroo—on arriving to relieve him from his dilemma—he appeared in such a forlorn condition, and looked the thing so perfectly, that for the life of me I could not help breaking out into a fit of laughter—no more can I now, when I recall the picture he presented.”
“Bother, Caspar!” cried Karl, a little vexed at his brother’s circumlocution, “you quite try one’s patience. Pray, Ossaroo, do you proceed, and relieve me by giving me an account of your late troubles. Never mind Caspar; let him laugh away. Go on, Ossaroo!” Ossaroo, thus appealed to, commenced his narration of the adventure that had occurred to him, and which, as Caspar had justly stated, had very nearly proved fatal; but as the shikarree talked in a very broken and mixed language, that would hardly be intelligible to the reader, I must translate his story for him; and its main incidents will be found in the chapters that follow.