"Now give it him with your boat-hook; drive it well home into
him. That's your sort, Ben; another like that, and he _must_ let go.
Well struck! now another--"

Bang!

The crocodile had suddenly released his hold upon the antelope; and the
creature no sooner felt itself free than it wheeled round, and, on three
legs--the fourth was broken above the knee-joint, or probably _bitten_
in two--made a gallant dash for the shore. But our first lieutenant was
quite prepared for such a movement, had anticipated it, in fact, and the
buck had barely emerged from the water when he was cleverly dropped by a
bullet from Mr Austin's musket. The boat was thereupon promptly
beached, the buck's throat cut, and the carcass stowed away in the
stern-sheets, which it pretty completely filled. We were just about to
shove off again when the first lieutenant caught sight of a banana-tree,
with the fruit just in right condition for cutting; so we added to our
spoils three huge bunches of bananas, each as much as a man could
conveniently carry.

The deepening shadows now warned us that the sun was sinking low; so we
shoved off and made the best of our way back to the river. When we
reached it we found that there was a small drain of the flood-tide still
making, and, the land-breeze not yet having sprung up, Mr Austin
determined to push yet a little higher up the river. The boat's head
was accordingly pointed to the eastward, and, four miles further on, we
hit upon another opening, into which we at once made our way.

We had no sooner entered this creek, however, than we found that, like
the first we had visited, it forked into two, one branch of which
trended to the south-west and the other in a south-easterly direction.
We chose the latter, and soon found ourselves pulling along a channel
very similar to the last one we had explored, except that, in the
present instance, the first of a chain of hills, stretching away to the
eastward, lay at no great distance ahead of us. A pull of a couple of
miles brought us to a bend in the stream; and in a few minutes
afterwards we found ourselves sweeping along close to the base of the
hills, in a channel about a quarter of a mile wide and with from three
to four and a half fathoms of water under us. Twenty minutes later the
channel again divided, one branch continuing on in an easterly
direction, whilst the other--which varied from a half to three-quarters
of a mile in width--branched off abrupt