Python Adventure

  Contents

  Map

  Part 1: Big Snake

  Prelude

  1. The Party

  2. Amazon’s Short Straw

  3. Comfort Break

  4. The Love of the Hunt

  5. The Maharaja’s Pleasure Dome

  6. Jungle Drive

  7. Burnt Offerings

  8. The Snake Hunt Begins

  9. An Indian Banquet

  10. Ambushed!

  11. The Snake in the Grass

  12. Squeezed!

  Part 2: Hunted

  13. Amazon’s Journey

  14. Frazer’s Journey

  15. The Hunts Meet the Hunters

  16. Chung Chained

  17. Two Titans Battle

  18. Night Visitor

  19. The Temple Trek

  20. Black and White

  21. Kaggs Thwarted

  22. Light and Heat

  23. Shelter

  24. Midnight Snack

  25. Planning Ahead

  26. Breakfast amid the Ruins

  27. Feline Fury

  28. The Pup

  29. Another Kill

  30. On the Banks

  31. River Tragedy

  32. The Unexpected Rescuer

  33. Swallowed!

  34. The River Run

  35. Kaggs Perplexed

  36.Stalked

  37. Unexpected Help

  38. The Refuge

  39. The Lab

  40. The Hairy Truth!

  41. Surrounded!

  42. The Hunters Wait

  43. The Charge of the Heavy Brigade

  44. Reunions

  45. An End

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  PYTHON ADVENTURE

  Anthony McGowan is a multi-award-winning author of books for adults, teenagers and younger children. He has a life-long obsession with the natural world, and has travelled widely to study and observe it.

  Books by Anthony McGowan

  LEOPARD ADVENTURE

  SHARK ADVENTURE

  BEAR ADVENTURE

  PYTHON ADVENTURE

  To all those fighting to protect our beautiful planet and the

  astounding and wondrous living things on it from the

  greed and stupidity of the rest of us

  Part 1: Big Snake

  The old man was determined not to lose any more goats. He was sitting in the ancient baobab tree, its trunk so wide that it took six of the village children, holding hands with arms outstretched, to encircle it. He rested comfortably with his back against that huge trunk, and the village firearm – a battered shotgun that was even older than him – nestled in his lap.

  The shotgun was an impressive-looking piece of machinery and, at close range – say within a couple of metres – it was still lethal. Beyond that, its wildly inaccurate spray of pellets would cover an area the size of a tennis court, making it very hard to inflict any real damage on man or beast. The bang, however, would be loud enough to wake the demons that dwelt atop the distant mountain that loomed up over the jungle. It was the bang, and not the pellets, that the old man was counting on to deter the goat thief.

  And so in the tree he sat and waited. The goat – a nanny with lovely eyes, but a cantankerous temperament – was on the ground below him, tethered to a stake. She had nibbled at the dry grass for a while, bleated plaintively for the rest of the herd and then, content, it seemed, with the prospect of a night under the tree with the crazy old human in the branches above, she lay down and slept.

  Every villager had a theory about who or what was taking the goats. To begin with, a leopard had been suspected. Some hotheads had even suggested a tiger may have come from the reserve at Buxa. But even the stealthiest tiger or leopard leaves pug marks, and none had been found.

  Some of the men had suggested that it might be a pack of dhole – Indian wild dogs. Dhole were certainly bold and fearless predators, but they were rare now in this part of India and, besides, the one thing they were not was stealthy. They made no secret of their hunts, but simply chased down their prey with remorseless energy, communicating to each other all the while in unearthly whistles and screams.

  No, had it been dhole, then the whole village would know of it, and every other living thing in the forest for miles around.

  It pleased the old man to think that the goats were not being taken by dhole. They were not large creatures – hardly bigger than a jackal – and so death for their prey was slow, and to see, as he had done, a deer being eaten alive was not something he wished to recollect.

  The old man had his own theory. The next village was several miles away and the people there were known to be untrustworthy. There was only one thing they could be relied upon for: that they would cheat at the annual cricket match between the two villages. The old man still distinctly remembered when, forty years before, he had been given out by a crooked umpire who was the father-in-law of the bowler.

  So, yes, it was doubtless some young hooligan from the next village who was pilfering the goats. Well, the old man had no intention of shooting the scoundrel, but he would certainly give him a fright. And if it did turn out to be some leopard, perhaps one forced by old age or injury into preying on domestic animals, well then, he’d give that fellow a fright too.

  And, thinking of this – of the leopard, and the scoundrels from the next village, and most of all about that long ago LBW decision, which he was sure had robbed him of a century and a permanent place in the folklore of his village – he fell asleep in the tree.

  As he slumped there, propped comfortably against the great trunk, he was not aware of the huge shape that emerged from the low bushes. It was as thick around the middle as a big man, but longer, so much longer. It moved silently over the ground. This was not the careful watchfulness of a prey animal, nervous that it might be seen or heard by a hunter. No, this was the creeping stealth of a predator.

  She approached the tree slowly and smoothly, as she had done a hundred times before. Her slitted reptilian eyes were intent upon the goat. But then the flickering tongue caught a taste of something interesting above in the branches, and she began to climb. Her long body wound easily round the massive trunk, and she crept silently through the foliage until she reached the spot, ten metres up, where the old man slept.

  And the great snake paused.

  She had eaten humans before. Young ones mainly. But the last was long ago. Her jaws could open wide, but those human shoulders were always a struggle. Down below, the goat promised to be a much easier morsel, slender enough to slip down without risking damaging her throat. And so she lowered herself – not bothering this time to slither down the trunk, but simply allowing her enormous body to dangle.

  It was at just that moment that young Anand Narayan saw her as he came into the clearing, looking for his grandfather. He had been sent by his mother to bring the old man back for his dinner. It took Anand several seconds to understand the strange scene unfolding before his eyes. In that time he did what any young man might do – he reached for his mobile phone. The village had no running water other than the single tap outside the village shop, but the phone signal was good and strong. Anand pointed his phone at the snake and pressed the record button. And only then, the movie safely running, did he scream. This had two immediate effects.

  Firstly, his scream startled the goat, which stood and bleated, and tried to pull away from the stake to which it was tethered. It could not see the snake, which hovered just above its head, but it could smell it, and this filled the little animal with terror. The scream did not disturb the snake, as snakes, although not deaf, have rather poor hearing, mainly limited to low-frequency vibrations – and Anand’s hysterica
l shriek was very high-pitched indeed.

  The second effect was that the old man jerked awake and fell out of the tree.

  As he fell, he wailed and stretched out his hands, flailing in the air. There was, of course, nothing for him to grab on to. Except for the thick scaly body of the snake. The old man managed to get a hold of it without having the faintest idea what it was he grasped.

  The snake held his weight for a moment or two, but then lost its own grip on the branch above, and together the man and the snake landed on the ground next to the panicking goat.

  This was not at all the easy meal that the snake had anticipated, and so, with a speed that belied her great size, she disappeared back into the forest, leaving both man and goat unconsumed.

  Anand was already running to the aid of his grandfather who was emerging from a most peculiar dream. But the young fellow’s thoughts were elsewhere. This, he knew, was going to look very good on YouTube.

  Amazon Hunt was bored, agitated, annoyed and frustrated. Even if she’d had nothing else more important to occupy her mind, she was not made for small talk with millionaires or for hobnobbing with maharajas.

  But there was something very much more important on her mind than raising money, even for a cause as good as TRACKS – the Trans-Regional Animal Conservation and Knowledge Society – an organization that she had joined recently in rather dramatic circumstances.

  It was just a week since she had returned from the wilds of British Columbia, in Western Canada, where she had discovered the wreck of the light aircraft in which her parents, Roger and Ling-Mei Hunt, had been travelling. And carefully hidden on the site of the wreck she had also found her father’s diary, which proved both that he was alive and that he was in possession of a secret that threatened the very existence of TRACKS.

  The diary was badly burnt, and much of it was illegible, so Amazon’s Uncle Hal had taken the diary off her to have it properly analysed by Dr Drexler, the TRACKS chief veterinary surgeon. Drexler had scanned each page of the diary, done what he could to enhance the images and returned a copy to Amazon. She kept the file on her iPad and felt that every moment she wasn’t studying the burnt pages was wasted.

  For now she was stuck on the roof terrace of a luxury apartment owned by an Indian financier called Pandu Singh with the TRACKS gang and dozens of important business people. The apartment was perched at the very top of a skyscraper – one of the tallest in Mumbai. Below, the city was spread out before her, speckled with countless lights like fallen stars, so that it seemed to mirror the night sky above.

  Despite her frustration at being here, Amazon had to admit that the view was spectacular. Not even the sea away to the west was truly dark, for even there the lamps of solitary fishing boats bobbed, and yet more dazzling cascades of light spilled from the yachts of the millionaires out in the bay. The same millionaires that Amazon was now expected to charm and dazzle to raise money for TRACKS.

  It was supposed to be something useful to do while the experts were extracting whatever information could be gleaned from the burnt diary, but it still felt like torment to a young girl who wanted nothing more than to see her parents again.

  Amazon sighed, sipped her ‘cocktail’ – a rather delicious mixture of exotic fruit juices – and smiled as another Mumbai entrepreneur told her about his new factory, which produced umbrellas, washing machines and electric pianos for the South-east Asian market.

  Scattered around the gathering she spied various other members of TRACKS. There was dome-headed Dr Drexler, as stiff and formal as a tailor’s dummy. Amazon felt another ripple of irritation. Just why wasn’t he working on the diary? It was unbearable!

  Her eye passed quickly on to Drexler’s assistant. Miranda Coverdale was looking very pretty, Amazon had to concede, in a black cocktail dress. She was surrounded by a crowd of Mumbai industrialists, like flies around a honeypot. But Amazon knew that Miranda would have been more comfortable with a test tube and a Bunsen burner. She was no less dedicated to science than dry old Drexler.

  Uncle Hal was working the room in a methodical way, shaking hands and smiling. He’d been doing this sort of thing for years, and he was good at it, but it was still a little like seeing a tiger pulling a plough.

  Strangely, the one member of TRACKS who genuinely looked like he was enjoying himself was Bluey, the young Australian zoologist who had become a good friend to Amazon over the past couple of months. True, he was more used to shorts, T-shirt and flip-flops than the formal shirt and tie outfit he was sporting, but he had found a group of cricket-mad Indians to bond with, and they were laughing and joshing in the way that sports fans do. It looked to Amazon that a glass or two of beer had helped with the bonding process.

  She looked around for her cousin, Frazer. He was probably up to no good, she thought, an involuntary smile twitching at the corners of her mouth.

  ‘I don’t know about you, but if I have to eat any more samosas or smile at any more millionaires I’m going to go mad. Shall we split?’ Amazon jumped at the sound of Frazer’s voice in her ear.

  She turned to see her cousin standing right behind her. Like her, Frazer had been dressed up in smart clothes for the cocktail party. He had gelled back his hair, but now it looked like it was about to break loose, and the rest of him was sure to follow.

  Amazon nodded gratefully. ‘Let’s go check out what the kids are up to.’

  Back in the apartment was a games room full of technology: there was no games console, no electronic device so far devised by human ingenuity that wasn’t present and correct in the room, along with white-leather easy chairs and retro beanbags perfect for lounging in.

  It was the hang-out of Lakshmi and Arjuna, the teenage son and daughter of Pandu. They were sitting together on one of the beanbags, watching a video on Arjuna’s mobile.

  ‘Guys, you gotta see this,’ said Lakshmi.

  ‘What is it?’ replied Frazer. ‘If it’s another cat that looks like Hitler or a duck on a skateboard, I’m going back out to join the oldsters on the roof to talk some more about stock options and share dividends. Then I’m going to jump into the ocean.’

  ‘No, no,’ laughed Arjuna, ‘it’s right up your street. Someone in Bengal in the east of India has taken a movie of the biggest snake ever beheld. It is a YouTube sensation. See, see!’

  He held the phone out for Amazon and Frazer. And there was the movie taken by the boy in the village. The light was bad, and the movie grainy, but even so they could make out the unmistakable form of an enormous snake reaching down from the tree. And then came the almost comical sight of the old man falling, grabbing the snake and sliding harmlessly to the ground.

  Amazon stared with open-mouthed astonishment.

  ‘That must be a fake,’ she said. ‘Surely there aren’t any snakes that big?’

  ‘No, it is definitely real. You can see by the way it moves,’ said Lakshmi.

  ‘It sure looks real to me,’ said Frazer. ‘Where did you guys say the movie was filmed?’

  ‘Bengal. In the jungle,’ replied Arjuna. ‘See – it’s geotagged.’

  Amazon was still stunned by the sheer size of the reptile. ‘What kind of snake grows that long? A python of some kind …?’

  Frazer nodded. ‘You got it. They have Burmese pythons out there, but they usually only reach three or four metres. This thing is enormous. I reckon it’s at least ten metres long. There’re only two snakes in the world that grow to anything like that size: the anaconda, but it can’t be one of those as they live in South America, and the –’

  ‘Reticulated python,’ cut in Amazon. ‘I’ve just remembered – my dad once took me to see one in the reptile house in London Zoo. But that was only three metres long. This one must be the biggest snake in the world.’

  Arjuna said, ‘Well, it won’t be the biggest snake in the world for much longer. The villagers will probably try to kill it to protect their livestock.’

  Frazer nodded. ‘And not just the animals. A reticulated python that size
could easily tackle a human. And they’re famous for being aggressive – most pythons are pretty shy and like to stay out of our way, but these guys like to rumble. And there’s something else. This movie has gone round the world, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Lakshmi. ‘It’s all over the internet.’

  ‘Well then, every professional wildlife collector in the world is going to be heading to that village, along with all kinds of cowboys and fortune-hunters. A snake that size is worth serious money. Dead or alive. And, even if they don’t mean to kill it, capturing a seriously big snake is one of the great challenges in wildlife rescue, and there’s a good chance the cowboys will do it some serious damage.’

  ‘This is terrible!’ said Amazon. ‘We’ve got to find it first and get it to safety!’

  ‘Dead right,’ said Frazer. ‘It’s exactly what TRACKS is all about. We’re gonna save that snake –’

  ‘I thought I might find you lurking here,’ came a voice from behind them. They swivelled to face Hal Hunt, Frazer’s father. ‘I know it’s not the most exciting party in the history of the world, but, unless the money keeps rolling in, TRACKS is finished. Wait, what was that about a snake …?’

  Frazer handed him the phone.

  ‘Dad, we’ve got some real work to do.’

  It was the next day and Amazon Hunt’s life had taken a definite turn for the worse. Rather than being in the jungle on an exciting race to reach the world’s biggest snake before it was captured by a bunch of evil bounty hunters or slaughtered by frightened villagers, she was in an air-conditioned limousine on her way to the noisy, dusty city of Jaipur, where there would be more receptions, more meetings, more false smiles and, it was hoped, more cheques made out to TRACKS.

  And it wasn’t just that she craved the adventure – the search for the snake would have helped to give her some relief from the huge cloud of worry and anxiety about her parents …

  She was travelling through the arid, baked and rather unlovely landscape of Rajasthan in northern India with Dr Drexler. Drexler himself looked arid and baked and rather unlovely in the unbearable heat, with his grey skin and wisps of grey hair around the bald dome of his head, and half-moon glasses perched on his nose as he read through some scientific report.