Hunter of Saurians

CROCODILE FEVER (293 pp.)--Lawrence Earl--Knopf ($3.95).

Canada-born Lawrence Earl is a good storyteller (Yangtze Incident, TIME, July 23. 1951) with a weakness for pretty prose. To Earl, a woman's waist is a "sweet, inward curve," and a hunk of driftwood can be "ductile to the heaving flood." So when Earl ran into an African crocodile-hunter named Bryan Herbert Dempster, he noted that 28-year-old Hunter Dempster had a "hard challenge in his bright, sapphire eyes [that] had come of something more peremptory than time." But Author Earl picked up a good story.

Dempster was trying to raise capital to start a crocodile farm. He took Earl to the London zoo and showed off the crocs.

"See? His ear is just a slit, directly behind the eye. When you're shooting from the side, that's the target . . . His brain is right under . . . Crocodile tears? . . . After I've shot them I've found tear stains down their cheeks. It's my theory they shed them when straining to open their mouths wider for a big chunk of meat."

Earl hurried Dempster to his London flat, spent many a day pumping the naked truth out of him and clothing it in robes of Earlite.

Soft Noses Are Best. Dempster was a farmer's son, born and bred in the province of Natal. He was eight years old when his father shot a hippo in the Zambezi River and tethered it to the bank as crocodile bait. That night, creeping to within a yard's distance, Bryan Dempster shot his first croc.

From then on, he was obsessed by the idea of crocodile hunting. He ran away from school, scorned his father's efforts to make him a farmer. When World War II began, he joined the South African Air Force, but soon "lost his temper" and was put under arrest. He escaped by pole-vaulting the prison stockade, hopped a train to Durban and enlisted in the artillery under a fake name. Demobilized in 1945, a veteran of Anzio and Cassino, he set about the more serious business of fighting crocodiles.

Dempster took to the Zambezi a service rifle. 4,000 rounds of war-surplus ammunition and a wooden dinghy with an outboard motor. He soon met an indignant bull-hippo, who immediately seized both the dinghy and the Zulu helmsman and tore them to pieces. Dempster also found that his hard-nosed service bullets were useless: they ricocheted off a croc's bumpy hide. But the worst snag was the crocodile-birds, a species of African plover. The crocodile's "dental service" is provided by his plovers ("a mating pair ... to each crocodile"), who fly fearlessly into his open jaws and pick leeches and scraps of food from between his teeth. At the least hint of danger, they leave his jaws with a shriek and the croc submerges.

Dempster bought a new aluminum dinghy. He bought soft-nosed bullets, which would blow a crocodile's head open. Finally, he outwitted the birds by hunting at night, a powerful hunter's lamp strapped to his head.

His simple hunting technique called for nothing but maximum nerve and courage. He would charge straight into "a mass of giant reptiles" with the boat at full speed, "firing at point-blank range at each selected target." A native helper gaffed each carcass before the boat buzzed on to the next victim. Dempster varied this technique by camping on sandy islets in midriver, baiting the edges with hippo meat, and shooting the crocs approximately at his feet. In his first three weeks of this kind of hunting, he killed and skinned 162 crocodiles. For the hides, used in wallets, belts and shoes, he netted a first-season profit of -L-3,000 (about $12,000 at the time).

Ministers Are Serious. Like many another professional hunter, Dempster was a simple, primitive type. Though he soon knew about all there was to know about crocodiles, it never occurred to him to save his own hide by hunting in waterproof clothes. Soaked to the skin night after night, he ached with chronic rheumatism, grew thin and pale with typhoid. Moreover, as it must to every primitive, civilization began to creep up on him. Hydroelectricians invaded his favorite gorge and built a dam. The Rhodesian Minister of Games and Forests officially forbade him the use of another great stretch of the teeming river. "Shooting any creature in vast numbers," he explained patiently, "upsets the balance of nature." "Good God!" cried Dempster. 'You're serious!"

He moved over the border into Portugese East Africa. Customs officers waited until he had collected a truckful of hides, and then pounced. Warned in time, Dempster escaped, hides and all, back over the border into Rhodesia. But by then he knew the jig was up; in the modern world, even crocodiles must be 'armed if a man wants them in large quantities.

When Author Earl met him, the gaunt hunter was wandering London, saying, in bewildered tones: "I don't know how to thrust myself into the money market. Somebody said that Lord Bracken . . . might be interested ... I phoned, but his secretary said nothing doing. I thought of Lord Beaverbrook . . ."

Earl has never seen Bryan Dempster again, nor has anybody else, to his knowledge. But he has heard rumors of a white hunter shooting crocodiles "somewhere on Lake Nyasa," and thinks he must be Dempster. He is also confident that Dempster will return again one day with another story to tell. By which timer with any luck, Earl will have found a plainer prose to tell it in.

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