Crocodile Tears

I have seen a few unspeakable things in my life. Years and years ago when I was going to school and before they had automatic doors on trains my friends and I used to lean out of the moving carriages to impress the girls. One day a boy called Kieran Smith was leaning out and looking the wrong way back down the train when we entered a tunnel. All of a sudden his body was headless and then it was gone. We never heard if they found the head or the body or if they got chewed up on the tracks.

So that was one and there have been plenty of others, like sheep all shredded up from being caught in barbed wire fences overnight or a calf bleeding out after a badly botched castration but no, nothing’s come close to the sight of Erin’s leg, still wearing her work boot, surfacing in the mouth of a crocodile.

It’s strange. As I’m looking down, shivering and still numb with shock, I know for an incontrovertible fact that the creature below in the water acts on little more than raw animal instinct and that its brain lacks anything like the complexity necessary for thoughts of malice or spite or any sort of sadistic thrill at torments inflicted on another living thing. Yet this leaves me at a loss to explain why it followed me to my brittle perch and fought the current to flaunt before me the pieces of my dead wife. It had its meal. There was nothing more for it here. So it’s hard not to attribute its behaviour to some malevolent impulse encoded into its predator’s DNA. I’ve read that crocodiles are the only animals that instinctively view humans as food. There are plenty of stories about lions and other big cats hunting humans but those cases are the exception and the result of learned behaviour. A shark will leave a person to bleed to death once they’ve taken an exploratory bite and discovered they’re not a seal. But any croc that’s big enough will stalk and eat a human. Forget the snake. In the natural world this thing is nothing if not our nemesis; the perfect hunter of mammals, perfected before the first mammal was ever born, hiding death within life-giving water. People talk about crocodile tears and I don’t know if that’s a myth or not but it makes you think. If they can cry, surely it means they can understand pain. And if they can understand pain then it stands to reason some could enjoy it. It’s strange what goes through your head in these sorts of moments.

Anyway, she was gone under the flood before I even knew we were being hunted. I couldn’t see or hear a thing over the rain on the river and I knew she was a strong swimmer anyway. When I reached the tree and was able to pull myself up by a low-hanging branch I looked back and she wasn’t there. Since the water had started to rise yesterday morning I’d thought of little else but swollen tributaries and drowning stock and so when I couldn’t see her I thought the water had taken her. I was about to dive back in to search when the croc surfaced just a meter away. I froze in fear for my life and then I saw what it had in its jaws. For a moment I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing but then I did and despair opened a hole in my chest through which everything I was drained out. My will went with it and I would have given up my grip on the branch and slid uncaring into the water if I hadn’t remembered Becca, asleep back at the house and less a mother already. Instead, I cling to the thin branches of the drowning tree and after watching me for a minute or so the animal sinks back under, taking with it the last of my wife.

So now I’m waiting and hoping for some kind of rescue while the water gets steadily higher. I study the surface but any ripples signalling the hidden presence of a crocodile are lost in the roiling current. It’s flowing strongly but not so hard or so fast that I couldn’t swim it if I had to. I look out to the far bank and figure it’s about a hundred meters to where the land rises up in a low hill but the more minutes creep by the higher the water rises and the further the bank recedes. Behind me the river stretches off into the distance unbroken except for the crowns of a few trees that the cattle use for shade and which are now struggling to stay above the floodwaters. I hesitate for one last second, looking to the sky for a rescue chopper or any other form of deliverance, but nothing comes and so I close my eyes and slip into the water as gently as I can. My body’s tense and shivering and with a deep breath I strike out for the bank.

I haven’t gone far when I see it out of the corner of my eye. There’s the long low profile with the knotted ridges over the eyes and nostrils and my heart hammers hard in my chest and I panic I’m trying to swim as fast as I can but I don’t seem to be moving despite all my thrashing while my pursuer cuts effortlessly through the water and glides steadily closer and closer until it’s upon me and I can see it’s just a branch being carried along on the current. From that point on every piece of debris I see drifting close on the tide looks reptilian and I’m a shattered creature when I finally crawl up onto the bank and collapse.

Thank you Mr. Cooper. I know that can’t have been easy for you but we just needed to clarify a couple of things. We appreciate your help.

That’s fine. I’m just glad it’s all done with. Can I see my daughter now?

Sure, sure. There’s just one thing though. Now, this crocodile that you saw with a leg in its mouth. I need you to think very carefully now. Is there any chance at all, and I mean any possible chance, that the leg you saw wasn’t Erin’s?

Well, I suppose…

Because we found your wife’s body a few kilometres down river. Finding her was pure chance. We got a call from a Mr. Frank Bruce saying that he’d been trying to rescue a calf from the floodwaters and had found a woman’s body but there was no leg missing. In fact, she was almost completely intact except that some fish had gotten at her eyes and tongue. They haven’t done the autopsy yet but the forensic team did note what looks very much like a brown snake bite on her right ankle. We’re fairly confident that was the cause of death but the real mystery is how she came to be in the river weighted down with cinder blocks and secured with rope. Mr. Cooper?