When the Tiger Was King

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When the Tiger Was King Page 6

by Ruskin Bond


  All this time I had been creeping slowly backwards, fascinated by that prancing striped yellow body. The shotgun still hung open over my left arm. Should I suddenly snap it shut and try for his head with the buckshot in the choke barrel? It might come off – but it was a very long shot indeed.

  Then I saw something that ruled this idea right out. From the corner of my eye I suddenly spotted the tigress. She was sitting up like a big domestic cat before a fire, just a few yards to my right, under a small kakra tree. And she was watching the scene before her with a pleased, gentle smile on her face.

  When I saw her, I realised that the situation was well-nigh hopeless; everything became unpleasantly clear – these two were mating. That explained her extraordinary behaviour when she had seemed to ignore my presence, so near the kills, a little while earlier. For it is not uncommon, when the female is in season, to find her going about in a kind of dazed, ecstatic trance.

  There was no hint of any ecstatic trance about the male! He undoubtedly meant business – if anything, he was getting more excited. For this encounter was just what he wanted: it was giving him an excellent opportunity to show-off before his sweetheart; and if that charnel house in the nullah was anything to go by, this tiger had put in quite a lot of practice.

  I was still moving slowly backwards, but the tiger had decreased the distance between us. Suddenly I came up against a small tree, so I began to edge round the slender trunk; at last I had reached the limits of that little clearing. But this could not go on: something must happened soon; indeed, it was surprising that the tiger had already waited so long.

  Help came from the most unexpected quarter. A thin tongue of lightning flickered down in a brilliant, violet flash, and this was followed almost instantaneously by a mighty crash of thunder right overhead. It stopped the tiger dead in his tracks; then he looked about him, seemingly puzzled. The rain came hard on the thunder: first, a few large drops spattered against my hat and bare arms; then, only a moment later, the deluge roared and hissed down with the noise of an express train.

  A solid sheet of water was cascading before my eyes, and soon it was splashing up from the ground in a thin mist. Hastily taking advantage of this heaven-sent diversion, I moved farther behind the shelter of my tree. I could still see the tiger; but now it seemed as if all the ardour had been soaked right out of him as the rain rattled and bounced off his streaming back. Watching him closely, I put another buckshot cartridge in the right barrel and slowly closed the gun; then I slipped forward the safety catch.

  But he had given up. With a great shake of his rain-soaked body he wheeled abruptly and trotted away. Almost at once the tigress joined him, and together they went bounding off towards some broken land to find shelter.

  With that first downpour, the monsoon set in without the usual break. There followed for me a very busy period: all the planting had to be done, and there was less time to think about tigers. In any case, it was hardly likely that those two would hang about, for during the rains these animals seldom stay long in one spot. But I did, at odd times, think of the carnage in that nullah: I had never come across anything like it before. I believed that both tigers had surprised the leopard soon after he killed the stag. And spots (for some leopards are very bold indeed) may have refused to give way over his own kill. Then the tiger may have gone for him: not so much for possession of the carcass as to show-off to his mate. The tiger had attacked the boar too; and, I think, found him a worthy antagonist as soon as the fight began. So the tigress may have waded in to help him, and got, for her trouble, that long gash on her side. But that is all supposition: there are many other possible solutions. Sometimes I picture the scene of what might have happened if I had shot the tigress as soon as I saw her. It is not unlikely that the tiger would have appeared, to see what all the noise was about, when I was bending over the dead body of his lady love, quite unsuspicious of any further developments. Then, no thunderstorm in this world would have kept him off. . . .

  But the tigers did not move on. Almost immediately there broke out an orgy of cattle-killing all around us. And it seemed a senseless slaughter: few of the animals taken were eaten, and the tigers never went back to a kill after the first feed.

  Then, one day – about four miles away – a man was attacked and done to death. Certainly his demise was caused by a tiger, or tigers, but the body was found intact; no part of it had been eaten. Nevertheless, almost immediately after, the dread cry began to ring through the forests: Adam Khor! A man-eater stalks abroad!

  The news spread with amazing rapidity. But I did not believe that this was the work of a man-eating tiger. It seemed, on the evidence, more likely to have been the result of a sudden, chance encounter such as had befallen me; but this time the victim had been unlucky. And I think I was right: there were no further human kills – at least for a considerable time. So, as the cattle slaughter stopped too, the scare gradually died down.

  All this time at least one tiger was still about, and remaining very much on the same beat. For very often during the nights there came the sure signs that some carnivore was patrolling the jungles; and on two occasions I came across recent kills. Several times also I found the fresh tracks of a tiger.

  These were very interesting; for they showed that it was dragging its left hindleg. So it was reasonable to suppose that this was the tigress that had been wounded by the boar. It was on account of this limp that she eventually acquired the name 'Langra'.

  She gave us no trouble: her behaviour was exemplary. In fact, I was quite glad of her presence; for as the months went by, the ripening groundnuts began to attract the attention of the wild pigs. A good watchful tigress, with a known taste for pork, was of decided value; much more so, in some ways, than the night-watchmen we were employing. For these men just sat on high wooden platforms in the fields and drove away the marauding sounders with an occasional shout – if they happened to be awake.

  One night, however, the Langra Tigress disgraced herself. On the other side of the river she dragged a man down from his platform; killed him, carried him off, and then ate some of his body. Or so went the report that came in to us.

  In actual fact, she did nothing of this: she only got the blame for it. When rumour and panic had been sifted from the truth, there was no real evidence against her. Admittedly, I was late on the scene: the dead man was not one of our own people but lived in a village some distance away; and he was not found for a whole day and night, for nobody made any serious effort to look for him. Then, when he was eventually discovered in some thick jungle, heavy rains had washed away any clues there might once have been. The body had been so thoroughly savaged that it was very obviously not the work of a tiger; for that animal is a clean killer. It looked much more like the mess that a large, solitary wild boar leaves after a mad, berserk attack. But in this opinion I was definitely alone. Once again the cry of 'man-eater' rang through the jungles; and this time it went on ringing.

  All our night-watchmen struck work, leaving the groundnut crop wide open to the invading sounders of pig. Nor would any arguments of mine make them change their minds. No others for a considerable distance around, they earnestly assured me, were now watching on their land after dark. Moreover, they also pointed out, all of them were family men.

  Some other arrangement to guard the fields had to be made at once: they could not be left unwatched for even a single hour after dark. At such short notice the lot must inevitably fall on me; for only my sister and myself live on the estate besides the servants. Each night I would have to go round the groundnuts on foot and keep the pests away as best as I could, until some other solution was found. It was not a pleasant prospect; and the first night gave me a nasty taste of what I was in for. Indeed, I liked it so little that I had another go at the watchmen the following morning: but again I failed to shift them, they stubbornly refused all the inducements I held before their eyes. So I resolved to beat for the tigress – and made matters far worse than they already were. For the mon
soon is no time for this kind of sport; the jungle is too thick, and gives the animals every chance to slip out of the drive and get away in the dense cover quite unseen.

  I was grasping at straws; there was no certainty that the tigress was lying up anywhere near us. But on the second day we got her moving. I heard the excited shout go up as she was discovered. Then came an alarming medley of frightened screams and yells as she broke back, swiping one man out of the way, and treeing the rest like a lot of gibbering monkeys.

  Now, that going back on her part was very strange; for she was being driven gently in the direction which all her natural instincts must have told her was the safest one – yet she deliberately chose the hard way out. But after that, beating was stopped, and I had no alternative except to settle down to the nightly patrols around the fields in earnest.

  'Do not be so foolish, sahib!' warned old Sama, the head watchman. 'All the others round us have given up their crops to the care of god – no one is going abroad after dark. And your land is particularly dangerous.'

  Unfortunately the old man was only too right: all the fields in which the groundnuts had been planted were the ones we had recently hacked out of the jungles. And to make matters more difficult, they were not yet consolidated, but scattered haphazardly throughout the forests wherever the soil had been good. So it meant a walk of nearly two hours – mostly through jungle – to visit each field in turn. This was distinctly uninviting; for, apart from tigers, the estate holds leopards and bears, and the chances of disturbing these about their lawful occasions are much greater at night than during the day.

  The scare lasted for three months. All that time the tigress was seldom away for long. And during this period I had to keep going after those pigs during darkness, just as soon as the sun had set. Nearly every night I learnt something new; for moving through a pitch-black jungle alone is very different from a daytime walk over the same ground. In the dark, although at first it may not be realised, the sportsman is almost entirely protected from danger by his sense of hearing. The number of small, insignificant sounds that will stop a man dead after dark would be disregarded during the day or, more likely, not even noticed.

  The pigs were extraordinarily troublesome. One lone boar in particular was bad-tempered and very aggressive. He resented interference with his meals so much that on one occasion he charged me from the rear, and in the ensuing fracas removed my shorts. But I got the pigs under control and pursued them relentlessly throughout the nights from field to field, never allowing them to settle down for long.

  After some weeks of this night stalking I began to have much more confidence in myself. I was quickly learning to ignore dozens of little sounds by finding out just what they were. And my shooting after dark improved too. In the early stages, I had wasted a great deal of ammunition on the pigs; now I was hitting them more often. Nearly every shot had to be taken off-hand, quickly, and at an animal (probably moving) that was illuminated only by the light of a torch mounted on the weapon. In practice I found that the maximum effective range, under these conditions, was not more than forty yards for a dead certain kill. Beyond this distance the torch showed little except the staring eyes of the animal looking into the beam; usually the body was quite invisible.

  Tigers were never long absent from my thoughts: nearly every night the jungle told of some carnivore on the prowl. Whenever one was near, the night would be charged with an electric tension; as if the whole forest waited with bated breath. Then, at intervals, would come the sure and certain warnings. The sharp, grating rasp of the sambur, the high-pitched 'Wow-ou! – Wow-ou!' of the terrified spotted-deer; and if the monkeys started to send up their coughing and sneezing alarm from the tree-tops, some large cat was certain to be passing beneath them. On one occasion – it was so near that it froze me to the spot for a full half-hour – there came the sudden, bloodcurdling scream of the lone jackal. And he, nearly always, precedes a prowling tiger.

  After a time I realised that the nights of alarm were rather too many to be normal. For one thing, we have not as many tigers as all that and, secondly, the rains were still on. Even if a tiger should choose to stay for long in one place, he generally works round some regular beat which may take him ten days or so to complete. Yet the Langra Tigress – and I felt certain it was she – was remaining almost static on the estate. Was she now so lame that she could hardly get about? If this was so, what the devil was she eating? Certainly she was not addicted to human flesh; for, apart from that one very doubtful incident, there had been no further kills. Neither was she worrying cattle any more, so, somehow, she must be hunting her natural food – the jungle game.

  The answer was simple, when I knew it, and I should have thought of it much sooner; for I had held all the clues from the start. But had I known the truth earlier I should have been much more worried than I already was; for I liked to believe that the tigress haunting the land was a sporting one, and would never dreamt of interfering with the absurd, two-legged creature who made such a noise moving about her jungles.

  The night on which I finally learnt the truth about the Langra Tigress was a dreary one of high winds and stinging, driving rain. It was difficult to hear anything above the howling of the storm; and without my hearing I was feeling completely lost, and moving about very slowly. At three o'clock in the morning the wind suddenly dropped and the dark clouds overhead began to break up, leaving clear patches of sky through which the stars shone down. Wet through and miserable, I was making my way across one of the regular fields of the farm which was down to tili – a valuable oil-seed crop. This too needed watching: sambur stags and their hinds relish it, nibbling off the juicy green pods, and at this time of the morning I was quite likely to find some of these animals near the edges of the field.

  I was to be disappointed; for just then, the tigress, too, was taking an interest in those samburs. Suddenly, from the direction of the river, came the sharp, clear alarm call of a hind. She seemed to be about four hundred yards from where I was standing. Soon it became apparent that something unusual was going on; because the sambur continued to call for much longer than was ever normal, and all the while she was moving very slowly nearer to where I stood. Never have I heard such a long alarm – it lasted for a full fifteen minutes. Then, suddenly, her cries redoubled, carrying with them a pitiful, almost pleading note. Shortly came the end of that hind's agony.

  From a patch of teak forest, away across the field, rose a sudden crash as though some heavy body had been hurled down upon yielding, leafy cover. A strangled cry went up, immediately stifled in the throat, then complete silence. But not for long – soon there was a heavy scuffling and rustling among the crisp, dripping undergrowth, and then something moved off, making a great scraping noise as it passed through the big, rough teak leaves; a large animal was carrying away some heavy burden. I continued to listen as the sounds died away – there was no doubt in my mind that I had just heard the Langra Tigress killing her prey. Slowly I moved across to find the scene of the tragedy. It was not difficult to discover: the torch lighted upon a large patch of trampled ground, in the midst of which were two wrecked teak saplings.

  Then I saw the tracks. That sambur hind had been defeated from her very first alarm call; for she had been up against not one tiger – but three !

  Or so she must have thought. Because in the soft earth of a game-path the pug-marks of the Langra Tigress were very clear; and now it was obvious why she had remained for so long. She was accompanied by two small cubs, and they were just at an age to be taught how to kill. With the death of that hind, they had recently completed another night's lesson. And somewhere, probably among the hills up in the north corner of the estate, the tigress must have found a snug retreat.

  With this new-found knowledge I was even more careful than before on the night rounds; for now there was real danger of a sudden attack. It would be enough just to place myself, however innocently, between the mother and her cubs to invite trouble. No longer was it possible to
believe that I was being helped with the pigs by a tigress with sporting instincts. About the only instincts the Langra Tigress possessed now were maternal – perhaps the most dangerous of all. From that time I always carried a twelve-bore as being the handiest weapon, with a ball cartridge in the right barrel and buckshot in the left.

  Six more weeks went by and still our paths had not crossed – as far as I knew. Soon the groundnuts would be ripe, and then I would be free to resume a normal life. Nor would I be sorry: these night vigils had been something of a strain; and now, although the rains were over, bitter cold weather had set in which did nothing to make the patrols more pleasant.

  I met the Langra Tigress again just before harvest time.

  It was a brisk, frosty night, and very dark with a fine Scotch mist rising off the river. The pigs, as usual, had been troublesome, and I had a mile to go before reaching home. My way led through what we called 'Whistling Wood', a small patch of mixed jungle, in the middle of which stood an enormous pipal tree. Many years previously, one of the great limbs of this forest giant had been struck by lightning, and it stood out, just a charred and withered member, pointing barrenly up to the sky. Time and termites had hollowed it out, and in some peculiar way it had become endowed with a remarkable characteristic.

  When the wind from a certain direction had built up to a proper strength, a low melodious note suddenly boomed out, sounding not unlike the opening bars of Ave Maria played on an organ. During the hours of darkness it was an eerie and rather frightening sound, if you did not happen to know just what it was. Even so, none of our jungle folk would go near the place after nightfall. And not only for this reason; for there lay in that little patch of jungle the ashes of a great hunter, whose last wish was to rest among the forests and animals he had loved so well. Local superstition had it that a shadowy figure was generally to be seen stalking through the trees, with a rifle at the ready. Certainly the animals were there to keep him company: that little spot was a veritable Piccadilly Circus of game-tracks and, at night, about the most dangerous place along my route.

 

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