Cryptid Hunters by Roland Smith

Author:Roland Smith [Smith, Roland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Animals, Dinosaurs & Prehistoric Creatures
ISBN: 9780786851621
Google: ebYIGQAACAAJ
Amazon: 0786851627
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Published: 2006-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

The Liboko Village

Marty and Grace watched with envy as Bo swung through the branches overhead, sporadically swooping down to grab PD and take her for a joyride through the lush green canopy. Below, where the twins were, was not nearly as pleasant—with thorns stabbing their skin, vines tripping their feet, and the boggy ground trying to swallow them. For the first few hours, Marty was able to keep up a running monologue about the hippos, elephants, monkeys, and the other animals they came across from his vast store of memorized wildlife documentaries. After a while though, he fell silent. It was all he could do to swing the machete and keep the sweat bees from crawling under his netting and up his nose. Every half hour or so they stopped to catch their breath, drink water, and check their location on the Gizmo.

By early evening they were less than halfway to the Skyhouse.

Marty sat down in an exhausted heap and pulled his second bottle of insect repellent from the pack. "You know," he said, slathering the smelly juice on his face beneath the netting, "if I were to jump in that swamp I bet the amount of poison on my skin would kill every fish in there . . . crocs, too." He was certain that under her netting, Grace was the same sweaty mess as he was. She lifted the veil to take a drink a water. She was barely sweating. "What’s the matter with you?"

"I’m carrying the little pack, and I haven’t been swinging a machete all day."

Marty thought that by this time he would be carrying her as well as the big pack. "That doesn’t quite explain it, does it?" He wiped his face with a dry shirt and wrung it out. "If I were stark naked, carrying nothing, I’d still be sweating like Victoria Falls. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but it’s a little hot in the jungle."

"I’ve noticed," Grace admitted with a worried expression. "Ever since we got here something strange has been happening to me."

"Like what?"

"I can’t explain it. I just feel . . ." She tried to think of the right word. "Comfortable, I guess."

"In that case, you can use the machete when we . . ." A branch cracked to their right. Marty put his finger to his lips and the binoculars to his eyes. "Unbelievable," he whispered. "It’s an okapi with a calf." He handed the binoculars to Grace.

About fifty yards away was the most unusual animal Grace had ever seen. It had a long muscular neck, big ears, a beautiful sable brown body, and striped legs. "It looks like a short giraffe."

"That’s because it’s related to the giraffe," Marty said. "The Pygmies hunt them for their meat and skin. It didn’t become known to science until the nineteen hundreds. The first live okapi reached Europe in 1918. Before that nobody believed they existed. Sound familiar?"

"Sounds like another one of your wildlife documentaries," Grace answered.

"It is, but that’s not what I was getting at.

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