Tracks of the Tiger

by Tracks of the Tiger (retail) (epub)

  ‘We’ve got to get back to civilization,’ Beck said. ‘End of.’ He looked up at the canopy above them. ‘But first we need to— Arghh!’

  He had reached up with his right hand to wipe the sweat from his eyes. The cut in his arm had died down to a dull throb, but the movement made it spark with pain again.

  ‘You need to bandage that,’ Peter said decisively. He swung his pack off his back and started to rummage around in it, carefully pushing the seat stuffing to one side.

  ‘There wasn’t a first aid kit,’ Beck muttered sourly, but he knew Peter was right. Even if he couldn’t bandage it, he could clean it up. He started to look around for anything he could use. Peter’s triumphant ‘Ta-da!’ made him turn back.

  Peter had produced a clean T-shirt from his pack. ‘Mum always packs me a spare,’ he explained. ‘Will this do?’

  Beck’s face creased into a grin. ‘She fusses, but she knows her stuff!’ he replied. ‘I can cut it up and make several bandages out of it . . .’ He glanced quickly at the shirt’s owner. ‘If that’s all right with you?’

  Peter shrugged. ‘Be my guest. It’s only an old school one. If it was my favourite Marmaduke Duke T-shirt then you’d just have to bleed.’

  ‘I didn’t know you liked Marmaduke Duke.’

  ‘It’s a recent thing!’ Peter added wryly.

  ‘OK.’ Beck laughed. ‘Anyway, first up I need to put some disinfectant on the cut.’

  ‘You said there wasn’t a first aid kit.’

  ‘There wasn’t’ – Beck had seen what he needed – ‘but there is this!’

  Every tree in sight was draped with vines. They snaked their way through and around the trunks and interwove with other vines. Beck was after one in particular. Its stem was thick, three or four centimetres, and its leaves were thin and spiky.

  ‘This is rattan,’ Beck explained. He poked about through the leaves – gingerly in case he disturbed something with teeth or a stinger that didn’t want to be disturbed. ‘It looks like a vine, but it’s actually a palm that thinks it’s a vine. It has about a hundred and one different uses, and one of them . . . Hah!’

  Beck had found a cluster of rusty brown-red berries that clung to a stalk sprouting from the vine. ‘And one of them,’ he repeated, ‘is as an antiseptic. It’s used a lot in Chinese medicine.’

  He picked five or six of the berries, held them in the palm of his hand and pressed his hands together. He felt the berries split and their juices spurt against his skin. Beck rubbed his hands together to work the mangled berries into a red paste, which he wiped onto his right palm.

  ‘Um – could you roll my sleeve up for me . . . ?’

  Peter folded the sleeve up to Beck’s shoulder and got his first close-up view of the wound. It was long and jagged but he was glad to see that it seemed quite clean. The skin had been torn roughly by he wasn’t sure what, but there was hardly any debris or dirt in the wound. That was a good sign at least.

  Beck dabbed the fingers of his left hand into the paste and cautiously wiped it onto the cut.

  ‘Ee-ahh!’ His breath hissed between clenched teeth. It stung like an army of ants gnawing into his flesh.

  Peter opened his mouth and Beck glared at him. ‘If you say anything your mum would say, like If it’s not hurting it’s not working, then I’m leaving you here.’

  Peter closed his mouth again.

  ‘Now, get some water and pour it on. It’ll just start to fester if I leave it in the wound.’ He realized he was sounding a little curt. ‘Um, please?’

  Peter silently did as he was asked, pouring water up and down Beck’s arm out of one of their bottles so that it washed over the wound. It streamed red with lumps of rattan fruit and clotted blood. Next Beck used the glass knife to cut off a broad strip of clean T-shirt and a couple of shorter, thinner strips. Peter wrapped the broad strip around his arm, over the cut, and used the thinner strips to tie it in place.

  ‘How does that feel?’

  ‘Much better. Thanks.’

  It still ached like anything, but Beck felt better knowing that it was clean and covered. He let his sleeve fall down again and buttoned it up at his wrist.

  ‘So, what do we do now?’ asked Peter.

  ‘First . . .’ Beck studied the nearest tree carefully. Its trunk was sturdy, it wasn’t too wide and there were enough branches to provide footholds. ‘I want a look at that volcano. See what we’re up against. Could you give me a hand up?’

  Peter wrapped the fingers of his hands together and held them out at waist height in a stirrup. Beck put his foot into it and found that he could now reach the first of the tree’s branches. After that it wasn’t hard just to keep going up. His arm ached but he seemed to be managing.

  Beck made his way up through the layers of jungle. For the first six or seven metres it was all bushes and saplings – young trees. Above them was the fruit layer. Hiding away in the confusion of leaves he saw clusters of green bananas, twenty or thirty to a bunch, and the smooth green balls of figs, among others.

  This was where the branches began to get thinner and he had to take a bit more care where he put his feet. Every time he moved a foot to a new place, he checked it carefully to see if it would hold his weight. He climbed trees exactly the same way he would climb rocks or cliffs. The human body has four points of contact – two hands, two feet. Beck had always been told to keep three of those steady and only ever move one foot or one hand at a time. That way you always kept yourself supported, even if one point of contact failed.

  Up and up. After the fruit was the layer of palms and ferns and bamboos, all covered with lichens and mosses. And finally there was the tree canopy. It was a solid blanket of leaves strung together by liana vines that provided natural bridges for the animal life up here. And it all took its energy from the sun, which powered the ecosystem of the rainforest. Beck emerged, blinking, into the sunlight.

  He felt like a small animal poking his head out of the ground. The jungle canopy was a green plain that stretched away on all sides, a mad mixture of shapes and shades of green. He didn’t have time to admire it. Mount Lasa occupied all his attention.

  It was about a mile away. At this time of day – mid afternoon – Beck knew the sun would be halfway between the north and the west. The sun was behind his left shoulder and he was looking straight at Lasa, which he knew was to the north. Streaks of glowing red lava ran down its sides, but the most impressive sight was the smoke. It was a black, sulphurous, fan-shaped cloud that billowed up from the peak. It rose up and up until Beck’s neck ached trying to see how high it went and he almost fell backwards out of the tree. It looked more solid than the mountain – like some hideous growth, a massive organism that had burst out of the earth.

  Towards the top it leaned over, blown towards the east. Beck let out a cautious sigh of relief. Medan was to the north-east. If the smoke and ash from the volcano was heading due east, it would miss the city and Peter’s family.

  It still lay between them, though.

  Beck took a final look around but there was no sign of civilization – no hint of the hand of man. They really were on their own. In the middle of the jungle.

  Thoughtfully he started to climb back down again.

  Peter was waiting for him at the base of the tree. Beck sat down next to him and reported what he had seen.

  ‘The jungle’s not on fire. That’s maybe the key thing.’

  ‘There won’t be any helicopters flying while the volcano’s erupting,’ Peter pointed out. ‘They’ll miss us but they won’t be able to come looking.’

  ‘Nope. We need to go to them. So . . .’ Beck thought for a minute. ‘The question is, do we head back or go on? I mean, if we just went back along the road, we’d get to the sanctuary. Eventually. And walking along the road’ll be a whole lot easier than getting through the jungle.’

  ‘Yes, but the volcano will be throwing out lava and hot pumice in all directions. We want to head away from it.’

  Beck
grinned. ‘Let me guess – you did a school project on volcanoes?’

  ‘No, I just paid attention when we went to see Pompeii. You’ve heard of Pompeii?’

  ‘Ancient Roman town buried by a volcano? OK, we go forward.’

  And that, Beck thought, was a key decision. That simple little choice put them into a survival situation. Instinctively he began to run through a list in his head. The four priorities of survival – protection, rescue, water, food. Protection? First of all from the lava – that meant they had to get moving. Rescue? Not while the volcano was erupting – if they were to survive, they would need to make it happen themselves. To self-rescue. Water and food? Plenty of that around . . .

  ‘We need to head south-east,’ Peter said firmly, derailing Beck’s thoughts. ‘The coast is to the east, so that’s where we’ll find people, and west would just take us further into the jungle.’

  Beck blinked in surprise. ‘Absolutely,’ he agreed. ‘But Medan’s to the north-east. Let’s just skirt around the volcano. We can move faster than lava . . .’

  ‘No.’ Peter shook his head emphatically. ‘We really don’t want to go under that cloud. Not if we can avoid it. For a start, it’ll be raining ash down on us. And then there’s the pyroclastic flow.’

  Beck felt like his friend had just lapsed into a strange new language. ‘The paralytic what?’

  ‘Pyroclastic flow. It’s when you get this huge column of rock and ash and stuff, right, all getting blown into the air by the volcano. And because the air is so hot, superheated, it stays up. That’s what you saw. And we’re talking thousands, millions of tons of it. But sooner or later the volcano cools down again, and the air isn’t hot enough to hold it up . . . and all that stuff comes crashing down on top of you.’

  ‘OK . . .’ Beck shifted uneasily. ‘So if it happens, we take shelter—’

  ‘No. No.’ Peter was waving his hands in the air in frustration, trying to weave his words together in a way Beck would understand. ‘Doesn’t work. Look. Pompeii was destroyed by Vesuvius, which is five miles away. Witnesses saw the pyroclastic flow get there in about a minute, and it buried the whole town completely. That’s how much there is of it, and that’s how fast it travels. And did I mention – yeah, I think I did – there’s thousands of tons of it – and, oh, it’s about a thousand degrees . . .’

  ‘Tell you what.’ Beck held up his hand to shut off the flow of words. ‘I’ve had a really great idea. Why don’t we get out of here and head south-east, away from the volcano?’

  ‘Wow,’ Peter said admiringly. ‘That’s leadership! Take my idea and make it yours!’

  They pushed themselves up to their feet.

  ‘We can argue those finer points on the move.’ Beck smiled in return. ‘Oh – but there’s one other thing you need to know . . .’ he added.

  ‘What’s that?’ Peter replied, all unsuspecting.

  ‘We’re also in tiger territory,’ Beck said grimly, and this time he wasn’t joking.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘This,’ Peter muttered, ‘is blinkin’ tiring.’

  The sounds of the volcano were muffled behind them and the jungle was regaining its natural voice. Beck’s sense of direction and the occasional glimpse of sky told him they were heading the right way.

  They had paused in the green gloom of the jungle to finish off their water bottles. The best way to carry spare water was inside you. Back in the Sahara, every drop had counted and an accidental spillage had almost caused disaster. Many things might happen to them here in the jungle, but one thing that was not on the cards was dying of thirst. There was plenty of water around and Beck knew how to get it.

  But Peter was struggling already. In the Sahara you could choose a direction and start walking. Even here, the jungle wasn’t an impenetrable barrier as long as you approached it properly. But Peter was finding that with every step the vegetation seemed to push you back.

  ‘Imagine you’re back home in London,’ Beck said. He tried to put it in terms that Peter could understand. ‘Oxford Street, the last weekend before Christmas, right? What’s it like?’

  ‘The streets are totally packed,’ Peter said with a shudder.

  ‘Exactly. Crowds everywhere, blocking your way. There’s no way you can walk straight from A to B. So you have to twist and turn and bend your body and shorten or lengthen your stride. You don’t walk straight ahead, you slide through at all sorts of angles.’

  ‘Oxford Street, weekend before Christmas,’ Peter said ironically. He took a look around at the branches and vines that hemmed them in. ‘Got it.’

  ‘Think twice before you do anything or touch anything,’ Beck added. ‘One bite from the wrong creature can kill you. Even one sting can disable you, and that’ll kill you in the long run.’ He stomped on the ground for emphasis. ‘Don’t sneak about. Walk with a good heavy footfall.’

  ‘Because of snakes?’ Peter guessed.

  ‘Because of snakes,’ Beck confirmed.

  ‘Wow, it’s like being in the desert again, isn’t it? Apart from, you know, all the trees and rain and animals and total lack of sand.’

  Beck laughed. ‘There’s differences too. The snakes are less afraid of you here. They won’t get out of your way so quickly. If one’s on a branch that’s next to you, say – well, it might not move at all. Until you accidentally reach out and touch it. Then it’ll bite you.

  ‘And here, we do not walk at night. Not at all.’

  In the desert they had done most of their walking by night, out of the blistering heat of the sun.

  ‘Night is when the nasties come out, and here on the equator night falls very quickly. Day and night are the same length. So . . .’ Beck checked his watch. It was getting on for four in the afternoon. ‘In another hour, five o’clock, we’ll stop, and get some food together, and make a shelter.’

  Food. The lack of supplies was another matter that was weighing on Beck’s mind. When he had been thrown into a situation like this before, he had usually had a small reserve of food to start with. Not this time, though.

  ‘So where are we walking to?’ Peter asked quietly. Beck glanced sideways at him. His friend’s face was set and thoughtful. Beck’s stomach gave a lurch as he registered it.

  They were in an environment even more hostile than the Sahara. The Sahara could have killed them with heat, thirst or starvation. The jungle held all those dangers too, although there was always food and water to be found if you knew where to look; plus there were insects and animals that could poison them, creatures that could eat them, and bacteria that could just make them rot inside. And yet Peter was quietly trusting him to get them through this.

  ‘If all else fails, we’ll keep going in this direction,’ Beck said, ‘but if we find a stream or a river then we’ll follow that. It’ll head towards the sea and we can get help at a town on the coast. Rivers generally go somewhere. Follow one and you usually end up at civilization.’

  ‘Right.’ Peter still sounded quiet, subdued.

  Beck shot him another look. He was hugging himself, arms wrapped around himself as if he were cold. Beck wondered if it was some kind of delayed shock, but then he noticed the anxious glances Peter was sending in every direction – up, down, all around. Now Beck thought he understood. He had felt much the same way in Borneo.

  ‘Kind of presses in, doesn’t it?’ he said.

  Peter immediately nodded, grateful that Beck saw it too.

  It was claustrophobia. The jungle does something to your mind. You are surrounded by vegetation on all sides; you can’t see the sky; in fact you can rarely see clearly for more than a couple of metres in any direction. It isn’t like being in a small room, which you know you can simply step out of.

  Here in this jungle, Beck knew that beyond what they could see would be miles more of the same. If you got past that bush over there, there’d just be another beyond it, and then another, and another still. That is why jungles can be such killers: they tend to just keep going on and on, with no wa
y out. And they sap your energy so fast.

  ‘It’s all around,’ Peter said. ‘I mean, it’s just everywhere. It’s like we’re at the bottom of a very deep pit . . .’

  Beck realized he had to show him. ‘Actually we’re on quite a wide, flat bit of ground,’ he said, ‘but look – there’s a small rise, and a much steeper bit in that direction.’

  ‘Huh?’ Peter strained his eyes into the distance but clearly couldn’t see anything different.

  ‘It’s a trick you have to learn,’ Beck explained. ‘Don’t let your eyes stop at the nearest bit of bush. Look through it. Don’t just concentrate on what’s right in front of you – that stops you seeing everything else. Look, see those ferns?’

  Over to one side was what looked like a solid wall of ferns. It was a mad jumble of spiralling stalks and rough, jagged leaves.

  ‘About halfway along, you can see they bulge out towards you.’ The wall of ferns seemed to be crumbling at that point. ‘They’re growing up a tree and that’s where the trunk is. On the right you can see it’s a bit darker between the leaves than on the left. That means there’s a little more open space behind it. And you can see the patterns of the leaves are going up. That means it’s on sloping ground.’

  ‘Yeah . . .’ Peter said doubtfully. He looked again at the ferns. ‘Maybe. If you say so.’

  Beck laughed. ‘You’re not going to learn it immediately, but practise as we walk. We’re not just surrounded by branches, right? Tell yourself that. There are thousands of different shades of light and textures and contours, and they all mean something. They tells you about where you are.’

  ‘Still a lot of jungle,’ Peter muttered defiantly, but Beck thought he heard a bit more life in his voice.