For more than a century, biologists believed that carrion-borne bacteria in the lizard’s mouth is what caused paralysis in victims, man and animal alike. It is now known, however, that the monitor lizards of Komodo are indeed venomous. At least one very fine Australian scientist is now assembling evidence that most, if not all, monitors are equipped with poison glands.
They are an ancient species articulately equipped for survival.
I had seen monitors on islands near Sumatra that were the size of rottweilers, not lapdogs, that, with their viper tongues, wind-scented primates as quickly as carrion. One time, on the island of Gili Motang, on the Suva Sea, an Australian friend and I had found the claw and tail prints of a big monitor on a beach beneath coconut palms not far from the lagoon where we had anchored our boat.
The two of us spent the afternoon tracking the animal through dense Indonesian rain forest. A couple hours before sunset, my friend and I were both exhausted and frustrated—outsmarted by a reptile?—and so we returned to the lagoon and our little ridged hull inflatable.
We hadn’t lost the monitor lizard, it turned out. She was in the shadows waiting on us. It was one of the big females, probably a couple hundred pounds. She was ten feet tall, standing on her hind legs in a thicket of traveler’s palms as if begging for a treat.
It was a rare encounter. Her tongue had probed the air experimentally like a snake, tasting the flavor of us in advance of attacking. She’d been shadowing us the whole time, we guessed later, anticipating our moves. Why she didn’t press her attack as we backed away toward our boat and then escaped by sea, we didn’t know.
Days later, an Indonesian naturalist, who was as knowledgeable as she was beautiful, suggested it was because some Komodo monitors are nocturnal hunters, either by predilection or genetic coding, so the animal was waiting for nightfall to attack.
If the naturalist was right, sunlight had saved us, not our quick feet.
King’s voice interrupted my thoughts, chiding me from the shoreline. “Hurry back, now—you hear, Jock-a-mo! Bring your new boyfriend something real pretty, okay? Perry’s waiting!”
Because I suspected he would do it, I had my hands up, shielding my eyes, when he tried to blind me with one of my own flashlights. A second later, a chunk of rock the size of a baseball landed in the water nearby. By the time I’d made it to my marker buoy, the man had lobbed three more rocks at me. I’m not often tempted to reply with a middle finger, but I was tempted now.
Instead, I turned away from the rocks and the blinding light and used night vision to have a last look toward the swamp The third monitor lizard had returned to the bank—a presence I found reassuring instead of disturbing. If three small lizards were in attendance, it suggested that a very large gator or croc was nowhere in the area.
I tested my regulator, then checked my new watch, a Graham Chronofighter. My pals at the marina had given it to me as a present—Tomlinson’s idea, as I knew. It had a big round face that was luminous with orange numerals. The watch read 7:22 p.m.
I twisted the bezel, marking the time of my descent, and then I deflated my BC. I submerged, feetfirst, using the buoy line to feel my way downward.
The water was clear again. Details of my fins and my hands were bright through the monocular. Soon, when I could distinguish the bottom, I turned and began to kick slowly downward, hearing the crackle of fast-twitch muscle fiber as fish spooked ahead of me. Sand appeared a luminous blue and fossilized oysters were black—a dinosaur-era tableau that created a nagging worry in the back of my brain. I wasn’t sure why. It had something to do with those three monitor lizards, flicking their tongues, wind-profiling me, before I had submerged.
It took a minute to formulate the details, but it finally came to me. The results were unsettling: Nile monitor lizards are diurnal, unlike their monster-sized cousins in Indonesia. They hunt at sunrise and they hunt at sunset, but they spend their days and nights underground.
What were the three lizards doing outside their dens watching me long after sunset? Why were Nile monitors hunting at night?
NINETEEN
NEAR THE ENTRANCE INTO THE KARST TUNNEL, AS I reached for the mammoth tusk to steady myself, I stopped and listened, aware that something large had entered the water somewhere above me.
It wasn’t close and it wasn’t loud, but the object had weight. The awareness came to me as a feeling, not a linear observation. Water, displaced by mass, exerts an expanding wave of pressure. I sensed the subtle force before the vibration registered in my ears.
My first thought was that Perry had forced King into the lake to help me with the jet dredge.
But, no . . . it wasn’t King. I had heard only the percussion of entry, no amateurish thrashing and splashing. It wasn’t King and it certainly wasn’t Perry.
It was something else—something not human, I felt sure. An inanimate object possibly. It could have been a boulder or a chunk of tree trunk. I pictured King throwing something big into the water, another attempt to irritate me. In him, humor took the form of harassment when violence wasn’t an option.
Maybe so, but he hadn’t thrown a chunk of wood. Wood floats. Whatever had breached the surface now continued to move. I could hear it, descending rapidly down the lake’s incline. It made a scraping, clanking noise that was impossible to identify.
I wedged the extra gear close to the marker buoy’s line, grabbed my underwater spotlight and looked up, paying attention. If it wasn’t a joke, I needed to know what was coming toward me.
Through my naked eye, the lake’s surface was a lucid obsidian disk. It was vaguely luminous and star speckled. Through the green eye of the monocular, though, stars glittered brightly against an emerald sky. I could see the silhouette of the marker buoy above and the silver thread of rope that anchored it.
I had done a full turn before I finally saw what was making the noise. It was large and dark and symmetrical. It appeared to be descending at an angle, following the slope of the lake bottom, coming fast in my direction.
I closed my right eye and touched my fingers to the outer ring of the monocular, trying to focus on the object as it drew closer. It wasn’t easy to track, because the thing was gaining speed as it descended. Automatically, I began sculling backward in retreat—an instinctive response that was silly. I was running away, even though I didn’t know what was coming at me.
For a moment, I believed my first guess was right: I thought it was a chunk of rock pushed into the water by King because it was like watching something tumble downhill. The thing wobbled and bounced and kicked up sand, snaking its way toward me like a drunken skier on a vertical slope.
In my right hand, I had the big underwater light. I didn’t think I would need it because of the night vision system, but I used the spotlight now, swimming on my back so I could maintain visual contact. As the thing rumbled closer, I kicked harder—but then it abruptly slowed, then stopped. I watched it wobble and spin, and then it fell onto its side, kicking up another explosion of sand.
I stopped swimming and righted myself. I painted the object with light until I was sure of what I was seeing. I was breathing hard, I realized. Arlis Futch’s warning had spooked me, which now caused me to feel stupid. I had overreacted to a threat that didn’t exist.
I swam over and took a closer look. Near the mammoth tusk, where I had left my extra gear, lay the steel wheel from the shredded truck tire. It was thirty pounds of metal, minus the rubber.
King had done it, of course. He had pried the thing free of the tire, then rolled it into the lake to scare me. I had been wrong about the rock, but my instincts had been right about King.