Unhappy Hunting

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John Lever runs a farm in Queensland with 3,000 crocodiles and has bagged more than 90 in the rough, including one that was five meters long. How hard could it be to trap a 1.2-meter specimen discovered in a fetid creek in an industrial area of Hong Kong's New Territories? Lever tried last week but quickly found he wasn't in Queensland anymore.

Night One: Lever goes straight from the airport to the creek, signs autographs and predicts he will snare the animal within four days. "I plan to catch it with my hands," he brags.

Night Two: Lever's plan is to stun the crocodile with a flashlight at night and then grab it. He manages to spot the croc twice and even touch it. But his boat's propeller gets tangled with plastic bags, and a crowd of 500 onlookers and media people—many with cameras and flashlights of their own—scares the animal away.

Night Three: The crowd swells to 1,000. Lever spots the croc and heaves his personally designed, nonlethal bamboo harpoon. He misses. He then shines his flashlight over the water and thinks he catches the red reflection of the croc's eyes. He's mistaken: they are bobbing Coke cans.

Day Four: Lever again readies his harpoon but realizes he has the wrong target: "It was the biggest rat I've ever seen."

Night Five: The crowd, now down to a couple of hundred, starts booing, chucking rocks into the creek and offering alternative suggestions. "We should blow it up," says Backy Iftikhar, an unemployed 29-year-old from Kashmir.

Night Six: The animal doesn't surface. "You can't catch a crocodile," Lever says philosophically, "if you can't find it."

Night Seven: Lever announces he is off to Bali but promises to return: "Now it is a personal challenge." A local solon announces he may try his hand at the croc, claiming to have expertise—"because we work with them every day in the legislature."