Tiger, Tiger

by Philip Caveney

  Outside, the night was humid and cacophonous with the chirping of a myriad insects. Some large fat moths flapped vainly around the lantern that overhung the entrance to the Mess. The grizzled old trishaw man who had appointed himself Harry’s customary driver for this journey eased his creaking vehicle around to the base of the white stone steps. In the glow of his oil lamp, beneath the wide brim of his coolie hat, the man’s wizened face looked almost skeletal. He grinned gummily.

  “Selamat petang, Tuan. You leave early, yes?”

  “Yes, we leave now.” Harry smiled warmly at the old Chinese man, whose name he had never enquired after. He could never remember Chinese names anyway. “Tonight not good for me. Too noisy.”

  The driver nodded. He too was a seeker after peace and understood only too well. He waited patiently while Harry climbed onto the seat, then gratefully accepted the cigar that was passed to him. He leaned forward as Harry’s lighter flared, and inhaled with slow satisfaction. Then he leaned back, removed the cigar, and grinned again.

  “Good,” he murmured. “Good cigar. I thank the Tuan.” He engaged his sandalled feet on the pedals and his skinny legs performed the motion they had been making half his life. The trishaw accelerated away from the Mess, crunching on the gravel drive and then turning out onto the deserted road, its lantern blazing a lonely message in the darkness. They began to pick up speed, the wheels making a dry whirring sound as they sped past the black silhouettes of secondary jungle that flanked their path. Riding in this way, smoking with his old travelling companion, Harry felt a peculiar peace settle around him, and he found himself wishing that time could be suspended, and that this long gliding ride through the night might somehow last forever.

  CHAPTER 2

  HAJI WAS still patrolling the western end of his extensive home range. It was always necessary to keep on the move, because potential prey soon became alerted to his presence in an area and promptly moved on. It took Haji around ten to twelve days to complete a trip around his territory, which consisted of a rough triangle of fifteen square miles. Right now, he was prowling the secondary jungle that ran beside the coast road, for he had long ago learned that troops of monkeys often chose to congregate there, thinking themselves safe so near to the wandering grounds of the Uprights. When they thought themselves to be beyond danger, they sometimes got careless and were slow to react to an unexpected attack … but tonight, Haji was out of luck. Somehow the monkeys had got wind of his notion and stayed safely in the topmost limbs of the Meranti trees.

  Haji was unhappy, but quite used to such hard times. Even when the hunting was good, he could expect eighteen unsuccessful stalks for each triumph. The rest of the jungle creatures conspired against him. The monkeys gibbered his presence from the tall trees and the birds, hearing this, quickly took up the cry. The rusa uttered their distinctive “pooking” sound to alert their brothers, whenever their sharp noses picked up the merest trace of that distinctive, musky, tiger smell. Hampered as he was by his wound and his advancing years, Haji was doing well to bring down one kill in thirty, and in between he could expect nothing but long bouts of frantic hunger. When at last he did succeed in killing something, a rusa, a wild pig, sometimes even a fat seladang calf (provided he could snatch the creature away from its massive, highly aggressive parents) then he would gorge himself until his stomach was a bloated obscenity, consuming maybe eighty pounds of meat in one sitting. It had been three days since he had devoured what remained of his last kill, an insubstantial mouse deer that hardly warranted the effort it had taken to stalk it. But hunger dictated its own rules and the instinct for survival kept him moving.

  He paused for a moment to listen. Far away to his right, deep in jungle sanctuary, the lonely sound of an argus pheasant calling to his mate. Silence for a moment and then a barking deer sounded an alarm as the wind carried a familiar odour to his nostrils. Haji growled softly to himself and was about to move on, when a new sound came to his sensitive ears. He froze in his tracks, snapped his gaze to the roadside at his left. The sound was not made by any kind of animal that he knew of. It was a rapid whirring noise, much too loud to be produced by the wings of any insect. Haji slunk beneath the cover of some large ferns as a light came soaring out of the darkness. He twisted around, holding himself ready to run if need be. For an instant, the twin orbs of his eyes mirrored the bouncing reflection of the light.

  A curious vehicle sped into view, a gleaming, clattering, froglike thing in which two Uprights were riding. Haji could see them quite clearly for an instant in the glow of the light, which swung from side to side in front of their heads, like a dangerous firefly. Haji could see the naked wrinkled sternness of their faces, as they gazed unswervingly at the road ahead of them. How foolish to travel in such an unthinking manner, always looking forward when danger might lie in the shadows at either side of them; or was it simply that the Uprights were so powerful, they did not fear the beasts of the jungle? They did not look very powerful, that was for sure.

  The Uprights left a curious smell behind them on the wind, a fragrant burning-leaf smell that lingered on the warm air for some moments. Haji sniffed, grimaced, watched as the Uprights sped away into blackness, taking their light with them. For some time, he was still aware of the constant whirring noise, fading gradually into distance. Then his thoughts returned to the sound of the barking deer he had heard before the interruption. He emerged from the bushes and moved right of his original path, heading deeper into jungle, his head down, his mind intent on the long hunt ahead of him.

  The barking deer sounded again and Haji homed in on the noise, moving with the calm, silent intent of one who had been hungry for far too long.

  The trishaw driver came to a halt outside Harry’s bungalow, part of a small estate just off the coast road, a mile south of the nearest village, Kampong Panjang, which they had passed on the two-mile journey from Kuala Hitam barracks. Harry alighted and pressed a dollar into the driver’s arthritic hand. The fare was always the same, whatever the distance, and the old man would probably have been insulted if Harry tried to give him more than that.

  “Safe journey back,” he told the Chinaman.

  “Of course, Tuan!” The old man grinned, waved briefly, and pedalled gamely away, hoping to reach his own home safely. Few trishaw owners ventured to drive at night, preferring to leave it to the taxicab drivers, but this engaging fellow had somehow discovered Harry’s regular Mess nights and would not have dreamed of missing a single one of them. Neither, for that matter, would Harry have dreamed of using another driver.

  “You get to a certain age,” thought Harry, “and all your life becomes a ritual. Has to. The only way you can make any bloody sense of it.”

  He unhinged the metal gate and strolled into the large, neatly ordered garden. The path was wide enough to take a car but curiously, in all his years in the army, he had never learned to drive. There had always been somebody to ferry him about and that was the way he preferred to keep things now. He strolled up the path, past banana and papaya trees, whistling tunelessly to himself. The bungalow was like many others, purposely built for British tenants. A long, low, white-painted building with a green slate roof and an adjoining verandah; it was compact, practical and possessed no particular style whatsoever. The windows were comprised of slatted bars of frosted glass that could be levered open, like venetian blinds, to admit fresh air. These were reinforced by metal bars that had been disguised as wrought-iron decorations in an attempt to make them look more attractive. In fact, they looked quite hideous. Harry, who believed in calling a spade a spade, would have preferred plain upright bars. A more acceptable feature were the sliding metal grills that could be padlocked across the front and back doors of the house. A legacy of more Communist-threatened times, they were still very useful weapons in the constant war against house-thieves that had been going on for many years and showed no signs of letting up yet.

  No sooner had Harry inserted his key in the front door and stepped into the house, than
Pawn, Harry’s aged amah, came bustling up to greet him. There was a toothy smile of welcome on her wizened little monkey-face and she still held a straw broom with which she had presumably been dusting somewhere. Pawn never stopped work while she was in the house and when there was no work, she quite simply invented some. She lived at Kampong Panjang and usually went home to her own family at five o’clock. But on the nights that Harry went to the Mess, she insisted on staying the night in the amah’s room at the back of the house, to ensure that the “Tuan” was properly looked after when he came in. Harry would quite happily have looked after himself, but once Pawn had an idea fixed firmly in her mind, it was impossible to shake it.

  “Tuan have good time soldiers’ Mess?” she inquired; and before waiting for a reply, she was hurrying off to the kitchen to prepare the cocoa and biscuits that Harry always had before retiring for the night.

  He shook his head ruefully, wondering just exactly how it was that he had managed to get himself saddled with a cranky old creature like Pawn. Most of his acquaintances had pretty young Chinese amahs to care for their needs. It was easy enough to organize: There were countless agencies in Kuala Trengganu that specialized in providing the girls. You simply had to tell them what your preferences were and if the girl turned out to be lazy or inefficient, you simply sent her away and ordered another one. But Pawn now, she’d been a legacy of sorts. She’d worked for the previous occupant of the house, a mining engineer, and the day Harry had moved in she’d just arrived on his doorstep, walked past him into the house, and commenced work. Mind you, it was not as if Harry had any cause for complaint. She was an excellent worker, worth every cent of the one hundred and twenty dollars a month wage she received. This worked out at about fifteen pounds and was considered a decent wage by Malay standards. She was far too proud to accept anything more than her basic salary, but Harry had found that she was not adverse to accepting little gifts from time to time, particularly if they were intended for her grandson, Ché, of whom she was very proud. The boy was a bright, articulate twelve-year-old, who sometimes accompanied his grandmother to the “Tuan’s” house and had, as a result, become a great friend of Harry’s. In fact, if the truth were known, Harry doted on the boy, reserving for him the kind of affection that he would have given to his own son, if he had ever sired one.

  A photograph of his late wife, Meg, stood on the sideboard. Harry walked over to it now, as he often did, picked it up, and stared thoughtfully at the face he had loved for so many years. She had always been a rather frail sort of creature and it was a wonder that she had ever taken to a life in the tropics as well as she had. She had died quite suddenly, in 1950, a cerebral hemorrhage. They had tried for children most of their married life, but something was evidently wrong with one of them. Ironically enough, the night before Meg had died, the two of them had discussed the possibility of adopting a Malaysian child. They had both been strongly in favour of the idea. Later, that same evening, Meg had awoken from sleep complaining of a terrible headache. She got up to go to the bathroom and fetch some aspirins, but halfway to the door, she had spun around to look at Harry, her face suddenly drained of colour and she had spoken his name once, softly, in a tiny, frightened tone. In that instant, he had somehow known that it was all over for her, that he would never hear her voice again. She had crumpled lifelessly to the floor before Harry could reach her and there was not a thing in the world he could have done to save her. Then, his grief and torment had been indescribable; but now, looking back with the advantage of hindsight, he knew that when his time came, this is how he would want it to be. Quick, clean, a minimum of fuss and pain; far better than lingering on in some hospital ward, a useless, incontinent old fossil. His own father had died that way, during the war. Harry had only been allowed leave to visit him once and he vividly remembered leaving the hospital room for the silence of the corridor outside, where he had proceeded to cry like a baby for several minutes, unable to stop himself. It was not the grief of losing his father that had affected him so; it was more a horror at the appalling loss of dignity the old man was suffering. He had been incapable of doing anything for himself by this time. In Harry’s opinion, all a man had was his dignity. Lose that and you had lost the reason for living. But his father had lived on, a horrifying eighteen months longer in that tiny cheerless hospital room. It was Harry’s personal nightmare to find himself with a similar prospect at the end of his life.

  Pawn came bustling in with a silver tray holding the mug of cocoa and two digestive biscuits that constituted Harry’s usual bedtime snack. He sat himself down in his favourite armchair, the tray placed on the table beside him. He glanced through the day’s news in the Straits Times, but there was little that took his interest. Pawn excused herself and retired to her little room. Harry sipped at his cocoa and watched the antics of a couple of chit-chats on the ceiling above his head. The smaller of the two, presumably the male, was chasing his somewhat larger mate around the room, but she seemeed to resent his advances, and consequently their antics took in every square inch of wall and ceiling. Harry soon tired of them and, after locking doors and windows and switching off the lights, he retired to his bedroom. He changed into a pair of silk pyjamas, climbed into bed, and let the mosquito net down around him. He lay down for a few moments with the bedside light on, staring blankly up at the ceiling above his head. A varied collection of moths and other flying insects had congregated in the pool of light reflected on it, but Harry was hardly aware of them. He was thinking of the boorish Australian he had seen in the Mess earlier. For some reason he was not entirely sure of, he felt vaguely threatened by the man’s presence. Perhaps he felt that this man represented the new order here on the archipelago, and perhaps he also realized that his kind was disappearing fast from these parts.

  He smiled wryly.

  “I’m an endangered species,” he murmured, and reaching out he switched out the light. He slept and dreamed he was riding in a trishaw.

  CHAPTER 3

  HAJI WOKE from a fitful doze and the world snapped into focus as he opened his large yellow eyes. The first flame of dawn was still an unfulfilled promise on the far horizon and it was cool. The damp, shivering land awaited the first rays of warmth to ignite the spark of life. Haji stretched and yawned, throwing out a long rumbling growl that would have sounded more content had it been fuelled by a full belly. Wasting little time, he struck out along a well-worn cattle track into deep jungle, his eyes and ears alert to anything they might encounter. They were his greatest aids, much more developed than his comparatively poor sense of smell, and the day that they began to fail him, would be the day that Haji would admit defeat. But now, there was a terrible hunger, knotting and coiling in his belly, and while his legs still possessed the strength to carry him he would hunt to the best of his ability, and somehow stay alive.

  The jungle was beginning to come awake. There was a distant whooping of gibbons in the forest canopy, interspersed with the distinctive “Kuang! Kuang!” cry of an argus pheasant. Black and yellow hornbills fluttered amongst the foliage and there was the familiar weeping tones of the bird that the Malays had named, Burung Anak Mati or “bird whose child has died.” But none of that distracted Haji from his quest for what was good to eat and within his reach. Presently, his ears were rewarded by a rustling in the undergrowth some eighty yards ahead of him. He stopped in his tracks and listened intently. He could hear quite clearly the crunching of a deer’s wide jaws on a bunch of leaves. Haji flattened himself down against the ground and began to move around to his right, keeping himself downwind of his intended prey, hoping to get it in sight. He moved with infinite care and precision, knowing that one telltale rustle in the grass would be enough to frighten the creature away. Slowly, slowly, setting down each foot in a carefully considered spot, he began to shorten the distance between himself and the deer. After twenty minutes, he had worked himself close enough to see it. A rusa, he could glimpse the rust-red hide, dappled by the rising sun. The rusa was nervous. H
e kept lifting his head between mouthfuls, staring skittishly this way and that. On such occasions, Haji remained still, not moving so much as a muscle. Each time that the deer returned to its meal, he inched forward again, his eyes never leaving the creature for an instant. In this way, another half-hour passed and now Haji was within twenty yards of the rusa; but here, the cover ended. There was a clearing now, over which he could not pass undetected. His only hope was to rush the beast and trust that the resulting panic would confuse his prey long enough for Haji to leap upon it. He flexed his muscles, craned forward, ready to rush upon the deer like a bow from an arrow; and in that instant, another deer further upwind caught the familiar smell of tiger and gave a loud cry of warning.

  The rusa wheeled about with a snort, and with a bellow of rage Haji broke from cover, propelling his four hundred pounds of body weight along with tremendous bursts of power from his heavily muscled legs. For an instant, the rusa seemed frozen to the spot with fear, but abruptly the instinct for survival maintained itself and the deer turned and bolted across the clearing with Haji mere inches from his flying heels. But where Haji was already at top speed, the rusa was just approaching his. He lengthened his stride, sailed effortlessly across a fallen tree stump and was off, gathering speed all the time. Haji followed for just a few yards, knowing only too well when he was beaten. He dropped down onto the grass, panting for breath while he watched the rusa recede into distance, tail flashing impertinently at his would-be killer.