Ansen had yet to discover that he alone of his troupe remained on his feet.
The balance lay scattered about the small clearing, the tall flowing grasses of which were now trampled and blood soaked from the rent bodies of the attackers that had fallen from the lower terraces of the surrounding trees. Hanging amidst the branches and lying about in the tangled mat of brush were the bodies of both the bushwhackers and his men.
Many of these who could still be counted among the land of the living moaned in agony from gunshot wounds and falls. Others of them sprawled haphazardly, blown nearly in half by Ansen’s shotgun or decapitated by the powerful European rifles with which his men were armed.
But these painted devils faced off now, not against modern rifles, but against a weapon instead that the colonials considered a holy terror when their wagon trains crossed the wilds of America back in the day as they sought to wrest lands from the heathen.
With knife, bow and axe those ancient natives battled the more heavily armed pilgrims in olden times, but of them all the tomahawk had been as revered among ‘the people of the nations’ as it had been feared amongst the European pilgrims.
With this type of weapon the people had split skulls and scalped men and women alike for centuries. But today the axe in his fist severed limbs from and blasted into red ruin the foreheads of savages in an island chain whose very existence remained unknown to the rest of the world.
Ansen never thought to question how the movie producers, come to these savage parts to film several “jungle scenes” for their movie, had learned of this dark and savage place. But none of that mattered at the moment.
He had lost sight of Cecil Sennet at the first onslaught of the attack. For all he knew the whining, pestilential coward had already fled back to camp where he would, in all likelihood, hide behind the quaking porters and his film crew. But for now the Norwegian had no time for thoughts of Sennet or any other, only to slay and slay - until he himself lay among the fallen dead.
Dragged from his perch by a native who’d clutched his ankle to save himself from falling, the American now stood amidst the trampled grasses of the little moonlit clearing. He’d never found time to reload his shotgun which was now lost to him, the weapon having been tossed aside to fall into the underbrush earlier, so he stood clutching his bloody tomahawk in one raw-knuckled fist, trying to recall if he’d fired four or five shots from his automatic; it only held seven rounds.
The howling natives converged on him now, seeming to wish to take him alive, it seemed. He guessed wildly that they would torture him slowly over many grueling days and nights, and that they would soon assault the camp, taking the porters and the remaining film crew at the end of their poison darts and spears.
Surrounded on all sides he saw that they could not shoot him with their darts for fear of hitting their own and so must come at him with their spears. Ansen took a firmer grasp on his axe. Alone now, he did the only thing he knew to do - he fought. It was the only part of the equation of which he had any control. So he whirled and spun and slashed as he best knew how, determined to take as many of them as possible with him into the spirit world.
The handle on his tomahawk had long since become smeared with red gore, the weapon killing and maiming with his every motion. One side of the hatchet’s wedge-shaped, star-metal head had been forged into a straight-edged blade spanning approximately four inches. On the opposing side protruded a blunt hammer-like surface, used to deal crushing blows - or drive tent pegs. The handle, a thick piece of mammoth ivory studded with brass studs for additional tactility, ended in a spiked shape for stabbing. Ansen well knew from experience how quickly that spike could turn a healthy eye into an empty socket.
Ansen ripped the weapon from the face in which he had buried it only to send it back-handedly into the face of another native, the flat hammer completely disintegrating the savage’s nose and upper teeth and sumping roughly two inches into his skull where it killed him instantly. The action of jerking the weapon free destroyed the dead man’s upper palate, leaving the corpse’s face looking like a human travesty as it fell back amongst its fellows who utterly disregarded it, shrieking and trampling the body underfoot to come at the white man.
In pure berserker frenzy the Norseman fought now, his long hair - wetted by contact with the blood of his enemies - flying outward in gory tendrils as he twisted and gyrated this way and that, spinning his body, clutching the short, brutal axe two-handedly so that when it hacked into the neck of its next victim the body fell nearly decapitated. The pile of bodies surrounding him mounted and yet still they came, there seeming to be no limit to the numbers they were willing to sacrifice to take him.
At any time they could have withdrawn and cast their spears. But whenever any one of them offered to thrust at him with the long blade of their spear, Megrodomigran, their chief, shrieked threateningly at them, at which point the offending warrior would retreat and approach the blonde-haired barbarian with the blunt end of his weapon raised as a bludgeon.
This only continued for a few minutes before Megrodomigran cried out new instructions. The glistening bodies of his warriors – wet from their own sweat and the blood of their cohorts – withdrew at his command. From encircling him they now slightly opened up their numbers into the shape of a quarter moon, but still yet closely pressing the man that he might not flee into the forest. Instantly, a dozen poisoned darts flew towards their target from men positioned all about him. Each of the barbs jabbed into the bare breast of Ansen Grost.
The Arapaho warrior felt the barbs pierce his body, and instantly recognized the sting of the poison as it coursed through his veins, the blood pumped forcefully by a heart that hammered wildly in his chest after nearly thirty minutes of vigorous hand-to-hand fighting. His chest rose and fell as the warriors in view before him dimmed and then split into many blurry mirage-like images of which he could no longer tell which were real, and which were the phantoms.
The natives had withdrawn out of reach of Ansen’s tomahawk but that did not matter since the man no longer had the energy to wield his axe. But he did manage to drag his automatic clumsily from its leather scabbard at his side. The weapon barked three times before it ran dry with the slide locked back.
Two natives fell to the ground.
The white man stumbled to his knees.
The blacks, chanting some mumbo jumbo that sounded bassy and rhythmic to his Westerner’s ears, moved in closer in concert, their spears raised with the blunt ends toward him.
Without conscious thought Ansen dropped the slide on his auto and crammed it into its holster just before the first of many blows from the enraged islanders’ spear hafts rained upon his pate – but he was already unconscious and never knew it.