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.