Chapter 2: Death in the Moonlight
Cecil surprised Ansen when he tagged along behind the armed men as they tromped deeper into the night-black jungle.
Ansen had been mildly shocked to hear it when Wamibi mentioned the fact to him. He credited himself to be an excellent judge of character, having guessed the man from Hollywood to be an errant coward – a fop, a dandy, a pantywaist. He did not expect to find any more backbone in the man than a scientist might discover upon vivisecting an invertebrate. He was glad to hear he’d accompanied them, however, as they needed every eye scouring the darkness in search of any sign that might have been left by the kidnapper.
Naturally, there could be no way of knowing which direction the savage had fled with the girl. After walking about fifty yards, Ansen called a halt. Slinging his shotgun over his shoulder he clambered into the branches of a jungle giant, using the yellowish light of his lantern to seek for clues.
In this manner he began circling. In about twenty minutes he found what he was looking for. About twenty-five-feet above the ground he discovered sign on a limb where a twig had been snapped by the passage of a body. Nearby, the bark had been scuffed by the pressure of a grinding, callused foot – a foot bearing more weight than normal.
The girl was being taken north-west.
Dropping back to earth he called for his men, signaling with his lantern which shined like a beacon in this unlit, nighttime forest that, on the trail of what looked to be a prehistoric savage with skull-like paint on his face, now seemed darker than a grave.
They found their way to be hard fought, the jungle floor being matted with all manner of vegetation. Machetes in hand, they hacked and hewed their way forward. The director had fallen silent, offering no complaint from the myriad stinging insects that swarmed them, a fact that Ansen found curious as the man had tended to gripe at the least imposition or slightest provocation ever since they set sail.
Spider webs, crisscrossing their path, nearly always managed to catch a man square across the face, the icky bloated bodies of the creatures turning to pulp under the palm when one attempted to swipe the mess away – as long as it wasn’t a giant banana spider, that is.
But Ansen wasn’t one to worry much over hardships or inconveniences, not even the disgusting ones. He possessed a type of charisma that would exert just that much more effort when the going got tough.
Occasionally he would climb back into the trees, seeking evidence they still yet followed their quarry. Once he very nearly couldn’t find that which he sought. It took him forty minutes of diligent searching but at last he discovered that their prey had come to ground to continue his way along a well-worn trail approximately a hundred yards to their west, a trail Ansen’s party had been unknowingly paralleling.
He came back to the men, immediately seeking Wamibi.
“We must tread quietly, Wamibi,” whispered Ansen. “There is a trail just over that way. It is plain. It is fairly certain the natives will watch that trail, perhaps signaling ahead to either trap or ambush us.”
As quietly as humanly possible the men slunk along, all light now extinguished. But the jungle night is raucous and alive with sound. The cries of hunter and hunted often broke the stillness, along with mating calls and the buzzing of insects. Shortly the trail crossed into a small clearing, an area where an enormous acacia had fallen, dragging with it the million microcosms of those that abided amongst its branches before its return to the earth. Cautiously, the men started across the clearing.
Without warning a sharp sting pierced Wamibi’s neck, where he walked just behind the great bwana. Smacking what he presumed to be yet another irritating insect he felt surprise to feel a firm body attached to him – a slender, rigid body with a soft, fluffy portion at one end.
A poisonous dart, his mind screamed.
“Bwana! We are attacked,” he cried.
Already he began to feel a sluggishness spread outwardly into his extremities. Raising his rifle the headman fired without aiming into the tree line across from them before sinking to the ground to speak no more, the fast acting venom dropping him in seconds. In the flash of Wamibi’s rifle a face was briefly visible.
“There!” an askarii cried.
Ansen turned at the shout, surprised to note a lessening of the surrounding darkness. The moon was rising and, although the orb had not yet climbed high enough to be visible, now cast a glow that managed to filter down between the boles of the trees in areas. He looked where the askarii pointed. In the trees a lesser smudge of darkness stood upon a large branch. He heard a phhhht - the native who had spoken screamed, clutched his throat and dropped to the matted forest floor.
“They’re in the trees!” Ansen cried then, and fired a blast at the form with his shotgun.
The dark blot fell from the limb, quickly disappearing in the darker obscurity amidst the riotous flora near the matted floor of the primordial forest.
Now the askarii fired at will, their muzzle flashes revealing faces and forms cached in the trees all about them in strobe-like fashion. The garishly painted natives were equipped with spears and blow guns, the latter of which they made lavish use. Screams could be heard on all sides as his men were shot to death by the poisoned darts, their screams originating more from the psychological fright and horror produced by the darts than any pain induced by the stinging pricks of the barbed deaths that came at them from out of the surrounding darkness, missiles they stood no chance to avoid.
Ansen realized instantly that they must take the battle to these fellows or they were done for. Slinging his shotgun over his shoulder he ran behind the bole of a tree and immediately began ascending it, keeping the jungle giant between his body and the attacking natives.
Gods, he thought, as he continued climbing. We’ve stumbled into it!
He guessed there must be a hundred of them, having made that estimate from the tell-tale glimpses he saw in the flashes of their gunfire. The real numbers could be double that, he realized.
A dark shape appeared in his path. Without pause, he stuck his Colt’s automatic in the face and squeezed the trigger. Advancing, he came upon another form that he batted aside with the barrel of the gun, grunting in grim satisfaction at the scream of the falling warrior, and the sound of snapping branches as the body plummeted to earth.
As sure-footed as the mountain lions he’d stalked in forests and deserts as a boy, he ran out upon a gigantic limb he had selected from which to launch his attack. The length of it extended into the neighboring growths, all of which swarmed with the howling wild-men. The numbers of Ansen’s men had dropped considerably; he could judge that by a lessening of the flashes he saw from below and the noticeable decrease in gunfire. He guessed there to be less than five or six of his men remaining.
By the dim glow of the moon and the glint of pale moonlight off faces painted the color of skulls, he dropped into the midst of three or four of them before they were aware of his proximity. No sooner had he alighted upon the branch than he pulled his shotgun from his back and unloaded a round directly into the face of the nearest savage. The man’s face, and most of his head, disappeared, and the body flew backwards from the blast and disappeared instantly from sight into the weeds and tangled brush below, taking the dead man’s nearest companion with it in its flight from the branch.
Ansen was an old hand at this and so, with undimmed sight, he pivoted, automatically wracking the action to load another shell into the breach of his model ’97 trench gun. He stuck the shotgun into the belly of another painted warrior. The same moment he squeezed the trigger he snapped his eyes shut against the blinding flash, opening them an instant later to note the effect. The body, blown ten feet out into space, described an arc toward the ground.
Satisfied, he advanced upon the next one. This warrior had been staring in Ansen’s vicinity when the American fired his previous round. The bright fireball, coming as it did out of the darkness, caused the savage to see dan
cing stars in front of his eyes. Temporarily blinded, the savage lunged at him with his spear. Ansen batted the man’s clumsy thrust aside with the shotgun’s barrel, worked the action and squeezed – nothing. The weapon needed to be loaded but he had no time to do so.
To some these things would have required conscious thought - to both realize one clutched an empty weapon and then to automatically grab the choicest backup weapon without hesitation. In the trenches of France and Belgium Ansen had witnessed men frantically squeezing the triggers on empty firearms many times in the heat of battle, they seeming incapable of comprehending they were out and needed to reload.
Only later in life did the blonde giant acquire his first firearms, practicing with them until his proficiency became notable amongst his peers. Before then, however, he’d mastered the knife, the bow, the spear – and the tomahawk. Many times had he been in predicaments when only split-hair moments lie between his continuing to walk the Earth and his joining the spirit world. His reflexes by now were so automatic that his own reactions were as unconscious as breathing.
And so it was that, his shotgun rendered momentarily useless, the American immediately filled his fist, not with the .45 slung low upon one lean hip which he’d brought to bear a few moments before and which for many would have been the natural choice, but instead with the tomahawk that had for years been his constant companion.
This weapon was old long before he’d been born, bearing as it did the scars of many battles. It had belonged to the medicine man of his tribe that raised him, having been handed down to him as a child from his father, who had in turn received it at his own coming of age. No man could gauge its years upon the Earth, yet its worth in war could be sensed when one’s fingers wrapped themselves about its studded, sweat-stained haft.
In less than a second the ancient tomahawk drank of fresh spilt blood and brains.
Before, as he fought, Ansen had shouted encouragement and instructions to his askarii. He’d cursed as lustily as any other, his savage insults and billingsgate blasting the ears of the enemy as he cursed them, their forebears and their progeny.
But now it was not language, but rather the wordless howl of the Arapaho who has made a kill, that filled the air – a cry so savage, so elemental in its fierceness, and so visceral in its gloating over the fallen slain, that it caused near-instant, ripe fear to blossom in the hearts of all those who heard it.
It was at this moment the Old Man in the Moon looked down in his full glory upon the scene of battle. Silvery-white light bathed the bloody clearing in the forest where the natives thought to slaughter Ansen and his men. Only two of the askarii remained on their feet. One of them feverishly attempted to load his weapon with a shaking hand. The other, even as he lifted his rifle, Ansen saw swat at a place upon his breast, glance down, and then pitch forward headlong and face-first into the trampled brush and grasses.
The remaining warrior, having just finished loading his weapon, looked up just in time to witness Ansen leap from his perch twenty-feet above the ground toward a point several feet away and below him. The white man’s arms were drawn back, both his fists gripping the haft of some weapon swung to a position far behind his head. In that moment his godlike flight made him appear as one of the heroic figures of ancient myth.
Mesmerized by the dazzling sight the warrior stood stock still for a moment, watching, until he felt a sting in his neck. He swatted at the spot almost absentmindedly. For the life of him, though, he could not tear his eyes from the figure of the white bwana.
As his knees buckled beneath him from the effects of the poisoned barb he caught the glint of moonlight off the wicked edge of the axe in the white bwana’s hands. Ansen’s body flew through the air and, timed to absolute perfection, the tomahawk swung viciously, describing an arc that ended its grim journey in the cranium of a warrior upon whom Ansen focused his undivided attention.
And then the askarii’s rifle fell from nerveless fingers, and he knew no more.