Word: croc
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...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...
...crocodiles embodied the spirits of his ancestors, but after his death an enlightened colonial government put the beasts on a diet of fish. Later, the government cleaned them out of the lake altogether-or thought it did. But last week, an alert game warden discovered one little four-foot croc still in residence. Ah, said the natives, old Mwanga himself. A hunt began, and the little croc vanished...