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At sight of us they turned with bared fangs and low growls to confront us. I did
not wish to fire among them unless it became absolutely necessary, and so I
started to lead my party around them; but the instant that the Neanderthal man
guessed my intention, he evidently attributed it to cowardice upon our part, and
with a wild cry he leaped toward us, waving his cudgel above his head. The
others followed him, and in a minute we should have been overwhelmed. I gave
the order to fire, and at the first volley six of them went down, including the
Neanderthal man. The others hesitated a moment and then broke for the trees,
some running nimbly among the branches, while others lost themselves to us
between the boles. Both von Schoenvorts and I noticed that at least two of the
higher, manlike types took to the trees quite as nimbly as the apes, while others
that more nearly approached man in carriage and appearance sought safety upon
the ground with the gorillas.
An examination disclosed that five of our erstwhile opponents were dead and the
sixth, the Neanderthal man, was but slightly wounded, a bullet having glanced
from his thick skull, stunning him. We decided to take him with us to camp, and
by means of belts we managed to secure his hands behind his back and place a
leash around his neck before he regained consciousness. We then retraced our
steps for our meat being convinced by our own experience that those aboard the
U-33 had been able to frighten off this party with a single shell--but when we
came to where we had left the deer it had disappeared.
On the return journey Whitely and I preceded the rest of the party by about a
hundred yards in the hope of getting another shot at something edible, for we
were all greatly disgusted and disappointed by the loss of our venison. Whitely
and I advanced very cautiously, and not having the whole party with us, we fared
better than on the journey out, bagging two large antelope not a half-mile from
the harbor; so with our game and our prisoner we made a cheerful return to the
boat, where we found that all were safe. On the shore a little north of where we
lay there were the corpses of twenty of the wild creatures who had attacked
Bradley and his party in our absence, and the rest of whom we had met and
scattered a few minutes later.
We felt that we had taught these wild ape-men a lesson and that because of it we
would be safer in the future--at least safer from them; but we decided not to
abate our carefulness one whit, feeling that this new world was filled with terrors
still unknown to us; nor were we wrong.
The following morning we commenced work upon our camp, Bradley, Olson, von
Schoenvorts, Miss La Rue, and I having sat up half the night discussing the
matter and drawing plans. We set the men at work felling trees, selecting for the
purpose jarrah, a hard, weather-resisting timber which grew in profusion near by.
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