This 1926 jungle story is from the diary of Gladys Gose Pearce, a Seattle woman who lived with spouse Ken in India during the British Raj era.

October, 1926

Kerala, SW India

Dear Diary,

Not long after we arrived, while on our honeymoon, Ken and I were told that in a nearby temple pool was a mugger crocodile the villagers hoped we would shoot.

Early one morning we were led to the pool, where we hid in the high bank above.

There was no sign of the crocodile at that quiet scene; indeed it was hard to believe one existed. A man came to bathe and pray. He waded out into water waist deep, and when he finished his ceremonies he cupped some water in his hand to drink. Then women came to wash their clothing. They pounded their wet garments on a flat stone, dipped them repeatedly in the pool then spread their clean garments on bushes to dry. Others came to bathe their children.

As the sun grew higher in the sky, our shade diminished and our own clothes grew sticky with perspiration. The ants found us – black ants, red ones, little and big, crawling toward us and biting us if we failed to detect their advance.

At last our vigil was rewarded. A long snout and two bulging eyes rose slowly to the surface. Ken motioned me to shoot. I shook my head. He took careful aim and squeezed the trigger. The waters of the pool were threshed to a froth, and then as they subsided we saw they were stained red with the blood of the mugger.

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Laurie

[Excerpt from Tigers, White Gloves and Cradles, coming soon. Copyright 2020, Laurie Winslow Sargent]

This post is from a collection of diary entrees and letters written in the 1920s by Gladys Gose Pearce, an American expat. Her husband J. Kenneth Pearce (Ken), a logging engineer from Seattle WA, worked in British Raj India for ten years. After a jungle honeymoon touring elephant lumber camps, the couple lived in Ooty, Madras, and the Andaman Islands.