by Justin D'Ath
‘We’ve got to get right away from here,’ I whispered.
I dragged Rani out of the carcass. She was wet and all slimy. She smelled putrid. I didn’t want to hold her. And I especially didn’t want to be scratched again. I took off my shirt – it was wrecked anyway – and wrapped it around the grotty little tiger. The sleeves went around her twice. I knotted them at the back, with just her head poking out like a human baby in a papoose. It wasn’t as secure as a sack, but Rani didn’t struggle. She was fat-bellied and sleepy after her big feed. A lot easier to handle than before. There were bleeding, red claw-marks on my chest and stomach to remind me what happened last time.
‘Which way will we go?’ whispered Kasime.
I looked around the clearing. The adult tiger could be anywhere. But there was a good chance it was sleeping. Like Rani, it would have a full stomach.
‘Follow me,’ I said, turning back the way we’d come.
‘What about the maharaja?’ Kasime asked.
I hadn’t forgotten the maharaja. ‘We’ll sneak back until we can see him, then decide what to do.’
With Rani lying heavily in my arms, I led the way back through the shadowy forest. We didn’t get far.
‘What’s that noise?’ I asked.
‘It is a car,’ whispered Kasime.
The noise drew closer. It sounded too loud and rattly for a car. More like a truck. It rattled to a stop at the edge of the forest. Then we heard voices.
‘It must be the person the maharaja was talking to on the phone,’ I whispered. That explained why he was wasting time having afternoon tea instead of coming straight after us. ‘He called for reinforcements.’
Kasime gave me a blank look. ‘What is ree … in …?’
‘Reinforcements. It means someone has come to help the maharaja look for us,’ I explained.
I was partly right. The maharaja had been waiting for reinforcements. But they weren’t the kind of reinforcements I was expecting.
From the forest’s edge came a sound that made my blood run cold – savage barking.
Holy guacamole! The maharaja was coming after us with hunting dogs!
21
SHISHKEBAB!
It seemed like people had been chasing me ever since I’d arrived in India. So far I’d got away every time. But now they were chasing me with dogs. That changed everything.
Kasime gave me a frightened look. ‘We should run, Mr Samfox,’ he breathed.
I shook my head. This time running wasn’t going to work. Dogs are too fast. And their noses are too good.
But they can’t climb trees. Towering over us was a big teak tree with lots of protruding branches. I led Kasime over to the trunk.
‘Challo,’ I said.
You can’t climb a tree when you’re holding a tiger cub, so we did a kind of relay. Kasime climbed up until he was just above my head, then I gave him Rani and climbed up until I was just above his head. Then I held Rani while Kasime climbed up past me. It wasn’t the fastest way to climb a tree, but it worked. We got about four metres off the ground before the dogs arrived.
There were three of them. They looked like foxhounds. Not the scariest dogs in the world, but good at what they’re bred for – following an animal’s scent, then bailing it up until the hunter arrives. Mission accomplished.
Except Kasime and I weren’t animals, and the maharaja wasn’t there yet.
‘Shoo!’ hissed Kasime, tossing twigs and bits of bark down at them. ‘Go away, bad dogs!’
That made it worse. Running in circles around the tree and jumping up against the trunk, the dogs barked and yelped and howled.
‘Don’t rev them up, Kasime,’ I whispered. ‘They’re scaring Rani.’
She had started squirming and wriggling inside the knotted shirt, making me worried about dropping her. But I was more worried about what would happen when the maharaja showed up. I started working out what I was going to say. If I threatened to report him to the International Wildlife Protection Authority – or to the people who run that Ramid Tiger Project I’d seen on TV – he might change his mind about taking Rani from me.
But I didn’t get to say my speech. Because suddenly the dogs fell silent. All three turned and looked off into the forest. Their noses quivered. Next moment they went racing off, barking, yipping and howling like hounds on a scent.
They didn’t go far. I heard them stop a short distance away. But their racket didn’t stop. It got louder and more excited. They’d bailed something up.
Kasime climbed a little higher up the tree. He craned his neck to see out through a gap in the leaves and branches surrounding us. ‘It is something in a hole,’ he whispered.
Holding Rani against my chest, I wriggled up, one-handed, to take a look. The three foxhounds were gathered around a small hole in the ground, where an old tree stump had rotted away. Yipping and barking, they danced in circles around it. Something was in there, all right. Something more interesting than two boys and a baby tiger in a tree.
Then we heard voices. Kasime and I froze as the maharaja jogged beneath us with his rifle. Two men jogged behind him. They weren’t the waiters from the train. They wore khaki-coloured uniforms and green hats. In two seconds, all three men had disappeared beneath the thick foliage of the tree next to ours.
I looked back through the gap in the leaves that gave us a view of the dogs. They were still gathered around the hole, barking and howling and carrying on. But they fell silent when the men arrived. One of the men in khaki clipped leads onto the dogs’ collars and dragged all three of them away from the hole. The other man and the maharaja looked in.
I heard the maharaja laugh. He lay his rifle on the ground and knelt next to the hole. The other man jumped in. It was quite deep – the sides came up to his waist. Bending down, he lifted a small furry bundle out of the hole. A yellow-and-black-striped furry bundle.
‘It is Raju!’ gasped Kasime.
Now I knew why Raju hadn’t made it to the deer carcass. He must have fallen into the hole on his way there. Kasime and I watched the maharaja take the cub from the other man. He kissed Raju on the nose, then scrambled to his feet, clutching his new pet to his chest.
Back to square one, I thought. Raju would never be returned to the wild.
But we still had Rani.
The man with the dogs was coming back in our direction. I held my breath as he walked under our tree. One of the dogs whimpered and pulled towards the trunk. The man growled and jerked its lead, pulling it into the forest after him. Lucky dogs can’t talk.
Half a minute later, the maharaja and the other man followed. The maharaja carried Raju, and his companion had the rifle. They stopped right under our tree. Raju had started to struggle. He must have smelt his sister in the branches above him. (She did pong a bit!) The maharaja tried to control the wiggling cub, but Raju got one paw free and raked it across the back of the maharaja’s hand. I knew what that felt like. The marahaja grunted in pain and jerked his hand away, losing his grip on the cub. Raju tumbled to the ground. He landed on his feet and shot between the maharaja’s legs. The maharaja spun around and went charging after him. Raju ran in a big circle with the maharaja in hot pursuit. They disappeared behind the tree and reappeared around the other side. Raju ducked one way, then the other, always staying a metre or two ahead of the maharaja. The other man leaned the rifle against the tree and joined the chase. When Raju doubled back behind the maharaja, the two men nearly ran into each other.
Go Raju! I thought.
Kasime and I had a grandstand view of the chase. Not once did Raju go more than four or five metres from our tree. Whenever the chase took him in the opposite direction, he ducked past the men and came looping back. He must have known his sister was up there. But tiger cubs can’t climb trees and the men weren’t giving up. Suddenly Raju changed tactics. Instead of looping back towards the tree, he kept going. Straight into the forest in roughly the same direction the man with the dogs had gone. The maharaja and the other man we
nt charging after him.
Kasime and I stayed in the tree, waiting for them to come back. The seconds ticked past and nothing happened. After about a minute, my eyes were drawn to the rifle leaning against the tree trunk below me. I looked up at Kasime.
‘Hold Rani,’ i whispered.
But Kasime’s hands didn’t move when I held the cub up to him. He was looking down past me. There was a strange expression on his face.
‘Kasime, could you take Rani please,’ I said, growing impatient.
He continued to stare past me.
‘Baagh,’ he whispered.
Slowly I turned my head. I looked where Kasime was looking. And my heart nearly stopped beating.
SHISHKEBAB!
22
HOWZAT!
I knew tigers were big. They’re the largest cats on earth. But the tiger standing below me looked too big to be real. It looked like a digitally enhanced special effect from a movie. Land of the Giant Animals or something.
I didn’t want to be in that movie.
Nor did I want to be halfway up a tree in India with an adult tiger staring up at me. The sheer size of it, and the calculating look in its big golden eyes, made my blood run cold.
I was pretty sure tigers couldn’t climb trees. But did it actually need to climb? Kasime and I were just a few metres above its head. One jump and it could reach us.
But the tiger had no reason to come after us. It had just eaten a deer. So why was it hanging around?
‘Scram!’ I said.
Normally a wild animal will run away when you make a noise. The tiger on the ground didn’t move. But the tiger bundled up in the crook of my arm chose that moment to open its little mouth and let out a loud, cat-like yawn.
Bad timing, Rani.
The big tiger’s ears twitched forward. It sniffed the air, then looked right at Rani. And growled. It was a terrifying sound. Doubly terrifying because now I knew why the tiger was standing at the base of our tree. The barking dogs had disturbed its after-dinner nap. It had woken in a bad mood and smelled other tigers in its territory.
Now it had come to get rid of them.
Like the maharaja, this tiger was obviously used to getting its own way. It was top of the food chain. A boy saying ‘Scram!’ wasn’t going to stand between it and what it wanted.
What it wanted was Rani.
With another loud growl, the tiger sprang.
Luckily there were branches in the way. The tiger didn’t quite reach us. It dug its claws into a big branch just below my feet. And hung there, its body, back legs and tail swinging like a pendulum as it struggled to hang on with just its front paws. Fall! I thought. But the tiger didn’t fall. Its back paws found another branch to grip further down.
I saw a ripple of muscles beneath bristly orange and black fur as the tiger prepared to spring the rest of the way up.
I couldn’t climb any higher because Kasime was in the way. Anyway, I was holding Rani. Leaning back against the tree trunk for balance, I reached into my pocket and grabbed the cricket ball.
Just as the tiger jumped, I hurled the ball.
CLUNK!
Right on the nose.
Cricket balls weigh 160 grams. They’re rock hard. It must have hurt.
The tiger crashed down through the branches and hit the ground in an explosion of bark fragments, dust and leaves. Picking itself up, it bounded away. I had never seen an animal move so fast.
‘Howzat!’ I said, my voice a bit shaky. And looked up to see what Kasime thought about my tiger-fighting technique.
He wasn’t even looking. He was staring off in the direction the tiger had gone.
‘Raju!’ he gasped, pointing.
My eyes followed his finger. Uh-oh. The tiger had stopped a short distance away. Facing it was a much smaller tiger. Raju must have eluded the two men chasing him and come back to find his sister. Instead he met the big tiger coming the other way.
Both animals stopped when they saw each other. I knew they wouldn’t stop for long. Run Raju! I thought.
Too late.
As quick as lightning, the adult tiger sprang. Raju didn’t have a chance. It landed right on top of him.
In two seconds it was over. Raju lay still. He looked like an abandoned soft toy – a Tigger doll sprawled on the ground with the huge adult tiger standing over him.
My eyes filled with tears. They blurred my vision and I started imagining things – like the Tigger doll had come to life. I wiped my eyes and blinked a few times to be sure. Raju was alive! A little paw waved in the air, batting the adult tiger’s nose.
Don’t do that, Raju! Play dead!
Too late. The adult growled and bit Raju’s belly. It bit him several times, but still Raju didn’t die. He fought back. He whacked the big tiger’s ears and nose and face with his little paws as it continued to bite him. It took me a few more seconds to realise they weren’t real bites, they were play-bites. The tigers were playing!
Raju rolled from side to side, waving his paws in the air and twitching his fat stripy tail. It was a display of submission, just like what a puppy does when it meets a big dog that isn’t its parent. By rolling around on his back, Raju was letting the adult tiger know that he wasn’t a threat or a rival. It was working. Snarling and growling to show who was boss, the huge adult tiger nuzzled Raju’s exposed white belly without really biting him.
But to someone who’d never had a puppy, it must have looked pretty bad – like the adult was killing the cub. I guess Kasime had never owned a puppy. He twisted past me and shinned down to the ground before I could stop him.
‘KASIME, NO!’ I yelled. ‘IT ISN’T TRYING TO KILL HIM!’
If Kasime heard me, he gave no sign of it. He went running towards the tigers, yelling in Hindi. There was only one word I understood – Raju. Poor Kasime. He had lost his brother Raju in the tsunami. Now he thought he was going to lose the tiger cub he’d named after his brother.
But instead, he was going to lose his life.
When the big tiger saw Kasime coming, it sprang away from Raju and spun around to meet the boy. And it roared. It was a terrifying sound, so loud the air seemed to shake.
I didn’t see what happened next because I was climbing down the tree. It took all my concentration because I was holding Rani. And it seemed to take forever. My one free hand and my two feet seemed to move in slow motion from branch to branch to branch. It was like a bad dream, one of those nightmares where you’re being chased by something horrible but can hardly move. But in this nightmare I wasn’t the person in danger. Kasime was the one in danger. And I was his only hope.
My head was filled with sounds. The tiger snarling and roaring. Kasime yelling. My own grunts and gasps.
Then I heard another sound: dogs barking.
At last I was on the ground. I needed two hands to use the rifle, so I put Rani down. She was still securely wrapped in my shirt and couldn’t run away. I turned to pick up the weapon.
Shishkebab! It wasn’t a real rifle at all. It was just a tranquiliser-dart gun, like scientists use to knock out wild animals so they can measure them or fit them with radio tracking collars. But it was all I had. Releasing the safety, I swung around to face the action.
A lot was going on. Three dogs and the huge adult tiger were spinning around each other in a whirlwind of tails and legs and flying fur. In the middle of it all stood Kasime. Somehow he’d got hold of Raju and was clutching him against his chest. The boy wasn’t moving a muscle. He couldn’t move – the fight was going on all around him. It was a miracle he and the cub were still alive.
But they wouldn’t be for much longer. I had to do something.
The dogs were brave, but they were no match for the huge angry tiger. A paw the size of a boxing glove sent one of them flying. It landed in a bedraggled heap and lay still. One down, two to go. And once the tiger was finished with the dogs, it would turn on Kasime and Raju.
I walked slowly towards the fight with the dart gun raised. It had s
ights like a normal gun, but they wobbled in my shaking hands. Another dog went flying. It staggered to its feet and limped away.
Two down, one to go.
Suddenly the fight was over. Realising it was alone, the last dog turned tail and ran. The tiger chased it for a short distance, then stopped.
It turned around and started stalking towards Raju.
BANG!
23
DEEP TROUBLE
It was Nathan who taught me how to shoot. He’d taken me trap shooting with his shotgun a few times. I was quite a good shot. Six times out of ten, I could shoot a moving clay target out of the sky at thirty metres.
You’d think I could hit an almost stationary tiger at half that distance. Wrong. I was shaking so badly that the bright red tranquiliser dart hit the ground near the tiger’s foot, spraying the huge angry cat with flying dirt and leaves. It jumped two metres into the air and landed facing me.
It bared its massive, curved teeth.
It growled.
Tranquiliser guns hold only one dart. I was in deep trouble.
I started backing slowly away from the tiger, still pointing the empty dart gun as if it was loaded. Hoping it might fool the animal. It crouched facing me. Its long striped body was low to the ground, its tail was twitching.
‘It is seeing Rani,’ Kasime said softly.
I had forgotten about Kasime. He was about twenty metres from the tiger, behind it now and backing slowly in the other direction. I’d forgotten about Rani, too. I’d left her trussed up in my shirt on the ground next to the teak tree. She couldn’t get away if the tiger went for her. Couldn’t even roll on her back to do the submissive puppy thing. She’d be totally helpless.
I risked a quick peek over my shoulder. Rani wasn’t quite as helpless as I’d thought. She had wriggled free from the shirt and was padding towards the adult tiger. I stepped sideways and scooped her up as she went past. She struggled a little, dangling from the crook of my bent left arm, but not as much as before. Her full stomach had made her docile and easier to handle.
