I didn’t get a moment’s sleep after the boar disappeared. For what must have been two or three hours I sat nearly motionless, holding Nissa and staring over the black expanse of water. Gradually, the water crept closer. And closer. By the time dawn spread its first pink glow across the sky, the mound was all that remained of the island. It was two metres in diameter and half a metre high. Everything else, apart from the tops of the three gumtrees and three quarters of the coconut palm, had disappeared beneath the floodwater. Even the baobab tree, which I now regretted leaving, had been swept away.
‘Nitta hungry.’
I looked down at her and tried to smile. I hadn’t realised she was awake. ‘I’m sorry, Niss. There’s nothing to eat.’
She struggled off my lap and stood up. I stood up too. My legs felt wobbly and my feet sank a few centimetres into the unstable mixture of sand and rotting leaves that composed our tiny island. Nissa took hold of my hand.
‘Want go home now,’ she said, determined.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘So do I.’
My eyes searched the sky. If a helicopter was going to come looking for us, now would be a good time. The horizon remained empty for a full 360 degrees. There was land to either side, but it was a long way off. The line of trees between the island and the shore had vanished overnight, submerged beneath the rising water. I remembered how the wild boar had disappeared and my skin prickled. Deep down I suspected what might have happened, but I didn’t want to think about it. Fate, however, was working against me.
‘Yizard,’ said Nissa.
‘Beg your pardon?’ I asked, not taking much interest.
She released my hand and crouched down for a closer inspection of something on the ground. ‘Cute baby yizard,’ she said.
I heard a strange chirping sound and suddenly I was taking interest.
‘Get back!’ I cried, grabbing Nissa by the shoulder and roughly pulling her away. ‘Don’t touch it!’
Nissa was right: it was a baby and it did look cute. But it wasn’t a baby lizard, it was a baby crocodile! I recognised the sound it was making from a documentary I’d seen on TV. It was calling its mother!
The baby crocodile was only about fifteen centimetres long, but I wasn’t taking any chances with those needle-sharp teeth. Lifting it by the tail, I tossed the little reptile out into the swirling water.
‘Go find your mum,’ I called as it wriggled away across the surface. ‘And don’t bring her back here, okay?’
I felt something move beneath my bare foot and stepped quickly to one side. From the deep sand- and leaf-lined foot mark, a little reptilian head looked up and chirped.
‘Nother yizard,’ Nissa cried happily.
I was anything but happy. I noticed a small movement behind her. A clump of sandy leaves shook, then fell to one side as a third reptile appeared. Then a fourth. Now I understood what was going on.
Our tiny island, the squashy mound where Nissa and I had been forced to take refuge, was a crocodile’s nest! Buried in the sand and rotting vegetation beneath us was a whole stack of crocodile eggs.
Perhaps it was the floodwater. Perhaps it was us stomping over them, or maybe they had been due to hatch anyway. Whatever caused it, the eggs started to hatch at that moment, and it was very bad luck for Nissa and me. Because as each new-born crocodile dug to the surface, it joined its voice to that of its siblings, making a high-pitched yelping chorus that no mother crocodile could ignore.
Nissa tapped me on the arm. ‘Tam.’
‘What?’ I said, busy scooping up baby crocodiles and pitching them into the river.
‘Yizard come.’
‘I know.’
‘Big yizard,’ she said.
I straightened up and turned around.
This can’t be happening! my slow-motion mind started saying, but I told it to shut up. This was happening. We weren’t in a movie. That four-metre crocodile swimming towards us wasn’t a computer-generated special effect. It was real.
‘Stay behind me,’ I said to Nissa, and picked up the buffalo bone.