by Peter Tonkin
He did not know it, but the last eyes that had looked upon this mountain from here, the last foot that had trodden the sand below him awaiting the print of his own large foot, had belonged to Francis Drake.
15
Watery sunshine pierced the jungle canopy. The light was thin but powerful enough to push the temperature in the humid hothouse between the trunks into the upper thirties Celsius. The wreckage left by the passage of the storm still lay in sodden piles on the forest floor but already moulds and fungi were attacking; termites in massive numbers were burrowing, ants and insects of all sorts and sizes were snipping and chopping. Flies and beetles were swarming and consuming. Even the iridescent butterflies had jaws to chew as well as probosces to sip, but these were nothing compared to the mouth-parts of the huge tiger-striped centipedes. The vegetable detritus was rotting and being broken down with feverish speed. Even the roots of the massive trees supporting the leafy roof were astir, piercing the fallen lobes of juicy petals and incorporating nutrient-rich twigs and leaves. The soil was poor, thin and salty to support such an abundance; all the nutrients needed were contained in the plants and the creatures, so in order to survive they had to feed on each other. It was hard to draw a line between the acts of rotting and eating.
The storm had been the worst in a century or so. It had thrown more than orchids out of the high branches. Beside the piles of leaf-skinned twigs lay almost indistinguishable piles of skin-covered bones where half a dozen monkeys and even some of the indri and lemurs had fallen to their deaths. If the lichens, moulds and even the rapacious fungi found this fare too rich, the ants, centipedes and scorpions had no such qualms. The whole forest floor was aswarm with ravening hordes of them.
The great predators of the insect world were by no means alone. Birds soaring between the awesome tree trunks shrilled down in swoops like dive-bombers to peck at the caterpillars and the grubs. Hawks followed them down through the rents in the solid canopy and dropped like thunderbolts unexpectedly — foreign as they were to this protected air. Swift snakes, some as short as a finger and some as long as an articulated truck, wound their way among the busy roots, only the speed of their movement distinguishing them from their surroundings. Slow monitors, as big as Komodo dragons, some of them, moved through the bustle, joining in the feast. Wild pigs also came and went, rooting noisily and consuming unselectively, omnivorously; plant, carapace, flesh and bone, it was all one to the pigs.
In from the nearby shore ran crabs of various sizes like odd-coloured spiders earthbound, and their hairy cousins crouched beside them, almost as big, or hid themselves in cunning traps to catch birds instead of flies. And following the crabs from the shore came the occasional ocean-going crocodile, dwarfing even the monitor lizards and frightening even the great black-shouldered boars. All in all, the floor of the jungle on Tiger Island was a place to be treated with distant respect so soon after a storm.
She lay along a low branch, therefore, apparently indolent but actually concentrating fiercely. The sunlight rested unremarked upon her shoulder, throwing into blazing perspective the red pelt and the thick black stripes on her flank. She lay almost sprawled upon her belly, limbs wide spread for comfort and security, legs dangling a little, long tail brushing the back of the right one, swaying lazily as though stirred by the last of the thick wind. The shadows of the leaves moved over the supple, powerful curve of her back as it arched lazily down into the naked power of her loins, the breadth of her shoulders echoed by the solid swell of a brindled haunch.
The wide gold eyes were concentrating absolutely upon the forest floor below and to the right, for this was no siesta; this was a hunt. Below the huntress a narrow path, a nascent pig run, led up from the shore and into the darker, more mysterious and dangerous interior. Up and down this all morning various mammals, and several large reptiles, had been scurrying, but now as the weight of the noon sun began to add some substance to the watery morning light, the rustling, bustling cacophony began to die away a little. And in the gathering quiet, individual snufflings could be heard and the fierce gold eyes in the tree widened a little and concentrated all the more.
The thick foliage below the branch parted hesitantly and a little jungle pig poked its head out into the clearing. It stood almost a metre high and was little more than a metre long. Its hide was dark pink and would go stripy brown if it lived long enough. As soon as its square head came free of the undergrowth it stopped, raising its blunt snout and pricking its floppy ears to test the bustling, fetid air. The hunter stopped breathing. Every muscle in her long, pale body tensed, every thew becoming outlined beneath her skin. Her nostrils flared, drinking in the rich scent of the pig. Her lips parted, breathing out silent air with just the faintest hint of a growl. Golden eyes focused relentlessly on pale shoulders where the piglet’s hair was just beginning to gather into thickness and darkness. For a moment the whole rainforest seemed to stand still.
Then the little pig trotted out into the pathway under the hunter’s branch. In a dazzling golden twinkle of movement she threw herself down upon her prey, landing square across its back. The weight of her knocked it sideways and down, and, while it scrabbled wildly among the rotting richness beneath for a foothold, the huntress attacked it with all the fierce power at her command. Legs clutched it to her belly. Teeth tore against thick, bristling hide; steel talons tore at shoulders and upper forelegs. The pig screamed like a tortured child and the huntress roared like the tiger she so closely resembled. But her teeth were short and blunt. Her talons were two short fishing knives caught up from the lifeboat’s tiny store of equipment. The muscles of her chopping arms and gripping thighs were strong and her death lust overpowering but her skin was soft and too much of her lay at risk of injury. The piglet, bloody but unbowed, made slippery by its own blood, wormed free and ran screaming up the path into the heart of the darkness Sally had not dared explore as yet.
Ruefully she picked herself up and trotted down the path until it opened between a fringe of long-trunked, leaning coconut palms on to the back of the white sand beach. The only clothing she wore were her deck shoes and she was glad of them now, for even through their thin rubber soles the heat of the sand burned her feet. She had worn the shoes in spite of the fact that they made tree-climbing more difficult, very careful to keep her feet clear of ants, centipedes, scorpions, thorns and splinters. She broke into a run, keeping on the balls of her feet, and sprinted across to where the lifeboat lay tilted half on its side with Richard crouching in the shade it offered, hard at work.
‘This Jungle Jane stuff is for the birds,’ she said as she arrived. ‘I did everything right. I covered myself all over with stripes of mud to break up my outline and cover my scent. Jesus, I even wore this poor dead monkey’s skin because it was the only thing I could find that smelt worse than I do. And what happens? Just look at me!’
Richard looked up at her. Her naked body was smeared with blood as well as mud. The roughly flayed skin of the dead monkey had been tied round her waist with two little black hands making an incongruous bow just below the shallow cup of her navel. The square of the pelt covered her buttocks like an open nappy and the tail hung down almost to the back of her knee. In a track as broad as his hand, from the insides of her knees, along her thighs then up across her belly to the wide-floored valley between her breasts, was a series of scratches as though she had slid down a rose bush and then tried to stanch the flow with sand. She had told him what she was going to do and he had told her the most likely result. At least she wasn’t badly hurt. His eyes lingered for a moment on the swollen lipstick-coloured scar reaching up her right thigh to her groin. ‘We eat fruit and wait to be rescued,’ he said. ‘If you don’t like fruit, then maybe we try for crabs or fish. Hunting is too risky.’
She looked down at him while the sand-thickened blood ran sluggishly down her in a red-gold stream until it became lost in that striking abundance of identically coloured hair. ‘I tell you what,’ she said, tearing off the stinking monke
y. ‘You look for fruit. You dig around for crabs. I’ll rig up some traps and eat roast pork for supper. How about that?’
Richard knew she wasn’t going to be told; there was something going on here that he did not fully understand and could not hope to control. ‘Watch out for yourself,’ he said. ‘It has to be incredibly dangerous in there.’
‘That’s part of the fun of it,’ she answered and he saw at once that she was serious. And even in the gathering heat of the tropical afternoon, his blood began to run a little cold.
After he had beached the game little craft and opened the perspex canopy to smell the glorious island air, the pair of them had climbed out and pulled the boat up to safety on the gently sloping beach. Then they had clambered back aboard, closed up against the lingering rain and collapsed into a damp, cramped but restorative sleep. They had been awoken by the afternoon sun as it fell below the base of the sluggishly departing clouds. They had done little other than relieve themselves, look dazedly up and down the beach, exchange some desultory speculation as to the fate of the crews of the two ships they had abandoned more than twelve hours earlier and go back to sleep. The ships were hull down on the eastern horizon and by the time Richard thought to look for them, they were concealed by the gathering shadows.
Only at sunset had a gleam of light far on the distant edge of the reef the better part of ten kilometres distant revealed that something at least was still above the surface of the sea, but by that time both of them were tucked into the snug little cabin again, dead to the world and its dangers.
Neither of them had been disturbed by the returning bustle of life as it gathered across the rocky, jungle-covered refuge they had found. If they heard the roars of the island’s other large predators hunting in the darkness, or the busy snuffling of the exploring pigs at the side of the boat, or their rapid retreat followed by scaly whisperings as a couple of massive crocodiles came crawling up from the sea, they did not stir. It was the howling song of the indri which woke them, even before the watery sunshine of the post-storm dawn.
Sally had woken first and clambered quietly out on to the cool sand to find the air already warm and the rose-red promise of dawn painting the undersides of the last departing high cirrus as it came up over the sinister black castellations of the two dead ships away to the east. Something in her survival, in the day and in the weirdly beautiful songs of the primates called to her, awakening a sense of wild adventure deep within her. The restrictive bonds of civilisation and of clothing were discarded at once. She stripped off the life jacket and the soiled white overall with a kind of gleeful excess, as though she would never go clothed again. Then, as though the freedom of her fair flesh had taken her back in time by several millennia, she crouched and inspected the tracks around the pale hull with the proprietorial air of a born hunter. Having looked at the tracks and glanced speculatively up at the jungle and down to the sea, she rose and stretched like a wakening cat. Skipping like a child on holiday, she ran down to the hissing heave of the waves. She waded in until the restless foam of the last of the storm wrack plucked at her knees, then, eyes busy for sharks and whatever had made the great slithering tracks that stopped by the boat, she stooped and washed herself. Then she turned and waded back ashore, looking like Botticelli’s Venus might have done had her hair been cut short.
If Richard particularly remarked Sally’s nudity, he made no comment. There were important things to occupy his mind on waking. Things that Sally could appreciate but somehow could not get enthusiastic over. He wished to make an inventory of what they had brought with them; she wished only to explore. He wanted to discover whether they possessed any way of communicating with the outside world; she wanted her island idyll to remain undisturbed. He wondered whether it would be possible for the crews of the distant ships to come ashore or for the pair of them to get back to the ships at a pinch; she sought to forget all about their experiences of the last week and especially of the last day. He wanted to check rations, work out survival routines and begin to formulate plans; she wanted to hunt and kill. He was a down-to-earth character out of one of her army survival manuals. In spite of the fact that they had been here for only a few hours, in spite of her background and profession, suddenly she felt like something out of Tarzan and she loved it.
As Richard looked up at her now, he realised he could not expect her to settle down and come to terms with the mundane realities yet. Time enough for that if they did turn out to be marooned here. Thoughts of Robinson Crusoe and Ben Gunn came unbidden; or, more realistically, of Alexander Selkirk, the real-life inspiration for both. And in any case it was only because he was so organised, so driven in his need for control that he was trying to reduce their little world to subservient order before they had even explored it.
He rose to his feet and looked past Sally, his eyes narrow against the noonday glare. How swiftly the last of the storm had departed from the air while he had been cataloguing the lifeboat’s contents. Along the rear of the white sand beach stood a line of palm trees leaning as elegantly as the necks of giraffes out towards the sea. Behind them the jungle gathered, deep and green. The noise of the indri and the courting birds had abated with the heat so that the incessant hissing buzz of insect life was all he could hear. The jungle rose steeply, level after level of dark green climbing abruptly behind the wall of liana-wreathed tree trunks backing on to the leaning palms. Its shape was clearly dictated by the swell of the land which pushed up to a square-topped, suspiciously volcanic-looking peak about two kilometres distant, perhaps five hundred metres high. Somewhere on the lower slopes of this, the jungle ceased to be a rainforest of tall trees knee deep in black shadow and started to be canopy, looking like green scales on the back of a sleeping leviathan. In the heat, with the very slightest of winds astir, it seemed to be breathing gently, as though it was alive. If only Robin were here, he thought, how close to paradise this would be.
‘You’re the expert in this sort of terrain,’ he said quietly. ‘What will we need?’
As Richard spoke he saw the strange shift in her expression as the natural woman before him had to throw some deep mental switch in order to access the highly trained sergeant of Special Forces. There was a kind of revelation dawning as Sally swung back to look at the jungle wall. ‘Weapons and protection,’ she said at once. ‘Some kind of guidance system. Water and supplies in case of accidents.’
‘We want to travel light, though, surely,’ he ventured. ‘It’s only a couple of kilometres up to the top of that hill, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, but we’re starting out from a seriously unprotected base here. Wouldn’t take much to happen in there and we’d be stymied. Maybe bird bait. I guess you were right, Richard. Dropping on porkers was fun but dumb.’
‘No harm done,’ he said. ‘And anyway, I wouldn’t mind some roast pork myself so let’s take the makings of some traps with us as well.’
There was never any doubt between them that they would start by exploring the jungle and climbing the mountain at its heart. Practicalities dictated that they explore the coastline first; that they look for fresh water, work out how to communicate with would-be rescuers in the absence of a radio, set up some fishing lines and snare a few crabs. But the beach stretched away featurelessly until it seemed to meet the sea in the middle distance on either hand; the lifeboat was stocked with enough water and emergency rations to keep a dozen people going for a week. And it never occurred to either of them that the two ships just beyond the reef would have failed to send emergency signals and distress calls during the collision. The main priority, in fact, seemed to be to explore this place and live out a few schoolchild fantasies before rescue came.
Sally could not bring herself to get dressed again, but she cut off the trouser sections of the boiler suit at the knee and made herself simple puttees which would protect her calves and shins. Time would tell whether her front and breasts needed similar covering. In the absence of eyes other than Richard’s, only sharp things really worried he
r. She could never quite get out of her subconscious the feeling of that bamboo spear that had jolted into her nervous system as it slid up through her thigh muscle to jar against pelvic bones. Even though she did not expect there to be any drug smugglers’ traps out there, she might very well need protection against anything from thorns to boar tusks. Neither of them had any idea that there were tigers hunting the forest.
They took the two knives she was wearing like a gunslinger’s Colts, as well as line and rope which they proposed to use in the traps; water in plastic bottles, strong plastic bags in case they needed to carry anything back with them, like fruit or nuts or meat, torches, a compass, two of the flares supplied with the life-saving equipment, and the whistles which came with the life jackets, in case they became separated.
The first thing they did after the canopy closed over them was to pause at a bamboo clump and cut themselves a six-foot spear each, both weapons armed with the steel-hard natural point of virile young bamboo plants. Sally, inspecting hers critically, said something about baking them hard in a fire when they were cooking their supper tonight but Richard was hardly paying any attention. Years before, he had gone up the River Mau, just to the north of the mighty Zaire River in west Africa. There he had seen the dry remains of a drought-stricken rainforest which must once have been like this. It was a revelation to him. The mighty trunks of the hardwood trees soared upwards like the columns in some infinite cathedral. Between them rose an apparently impenetrable undergrowth of massive ferns, bamboo groves, saplings straining for the impossibly distant sky. From them hung great fronds of liana creepers, the aerial roots of parasitic orchids whose flowers bloomed like huge clumps of butterflies high above. Up them wound creepers like ivies gone mad, the least of them as thick as his body and most of them thicker than his body and Sally’s put together. And up where these great gnarled creepers became lost to sight, the first branches sprang out like high cathedral arches spanning the spaces between trunk and trunk. Only on one or two of the smaller trees nearer at hand were there low branches like the one Sally had hunted from earlier. Most of the trees did not bother to throw out branches lower than the thirty-metre mark. Above the lattice of branches, the canopy spread, for the most part impenetrable, thinned here and there by the storm, with patches of blue showing incredibly high above the intense greenness of the leaves.