'This is where it was last seen,' Gerald panted, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief. 'The men in the pub said there'd still be tracks.'

They both surveyed the surrounding land, looking for any movement, any lights or telltale sounds.

'I'm still not sure that three men in a pub is the best source of information on which to base a hunt,' Nathaniel grunted.

'You said you wanted local knowledge.'

'I was thinking more along the lines of someone who could lead us to the bloody thing.'

'Well, the last man who managed to find it had his leg broken in three places for his effort, so he won't be leading anyone anywhere for quite a while. Three men in a pub was the best I could do-What is it?'

Nate had stopped suddenly. Gerald looked round his shoulder at the spot on the ground that had seized his cousin's attention. There, in the soft ground near the base of the waterfall, was a single linear track, winding like a rigid snake into the heather that covered part of the hillside.

'It looks like the drinks are on me,' Nate breathed shakily. 'See the size of that? It's a foot wide if it's an inch.'

'I told you it was big,' Gerald said, nodding. 'I've wanted to catch sight of this creature ever since Clancy used to scare us to bed with those stories of his. All these years, and nobody's managed to trap it.'

He gazed expectantly at Nathaniel, his blue eyes, flushed cheeks and damp black hair making his unhealthily pale face seem as if it were glowing.

'But you handled bigger things than this in Africa, right? You haven't steered me wrong, have you? We can still go home and get more men.'

'And have a bunch of bog-trotters traipsing around, making enough noise to wake the dead?' Nate snorted. 'That's exactly why nobody's caught the thing. No, we can handle it.'

But looking at that track, he was beginning to have second thoughts. After finishing school he had decided to defer his place at university in favour of travelling. While some of his friends had gone off on jaunts to London, Paris or even New York, Nate had wandered further afield. His family had made part of its vast fortune capturing and selling engimals, and he wanted to see how it was done. And the biggest, most dangerous engimals were to be found in Africa.