Gustave Speaks

Notorious man-eater crocodile has his say.

“Why do you wonder at the messages I leave for you? You pretend not to know that the predator longs for the prey as the prey longs for the predator? Part of you right now longs for my great gaping maw….

“We crocodiles were the original creatures on this planet to dream. I dream of hunting my first human prey back when I was young. My eyes see clearly in your darkness as I cruise around the great lakeshore. I erupt out of the water–the fisherman I catch releases screams cascading up into the starlit night sky until my death roll finishes him then we sink together into the abyss.

“Of course, you made me the ‘notorious man-killer’. Before the great dumping of hacked-up dead and living bodies into my river less than thirty years ago, I only occasionally preyed on you naked apes. To see all that gusto you exude when hacking to pieces your fellow man, how could I not show my own zeal? Even leopards were put off by your massive, blood-drenched human-on-human butchery and slinked away into the deepest jungle but not me. How can I not be inspired and long to join in?

“New blood, new prey is sacred. Crocodiles do not feel love, hate, jealousy, remorse, or pity. But we do have pride and can get angry. Your ‘crocodile biologists’ with their nosy binoculars make me lose my croc-cool; claiming I am only a man-eater and hippo-killer because I am too big and old and slow to catch ‘normal’ crocodile prey.

“I say, let them put on their running shoes, come down here and stand before me on the banks of the Ruzizi River and calculate how fast I gallop while I eat them alive. Those egg-headed, mammalian motherfuckers wouldn’t have any idea how much raw mojo is in this croc if they could study me ten thousand years.

“The only humans that are hard to catch are the local children. When I explode out of the water they seem to jump out of their skins. The dim-witted and the daydreamers I snap up quick but some are so full of life that I have to let them go. It’s not that I go soft on kids–you should know better than that—it’s just that is the way the game has to be played. I pose for them with my great jaws agape as their stick-figure legs propel them forward while they look over their shoulders in unbelieving terror. Often one runs into a tree and knocks himself out. It would be bad form for me to amble over and chomp on a kid after letting him go so I don’t. After all, humans are here to tell the tales and someone must be left to tell the tale of my magnificence when I am gone. If I could laugh I would.”