02

Tiger, Terror of the Jungle

Mary Hastings Bradley

To us in America the tiger is an interesting animal; but to the people of the jungle he is a constant terror, inspiring fear in every living thing. This story tells how one feels when he meets a tiger face to face in the jungles of Asia.

Mary Hastings Bradley, the author of the story, and her husband, Herbert, live in Chicago. They are both great lovers of the out-of-doors, and have made many trips to Africa and Asia to study the animals and the wild tribes who live there.

A DAY OF WAITING

Before dawn we were up, in the blackness of the early tropic hours, buckling on cartridge pouches and seeing to the guns, in order to start the moment the light permitted tracking. Suddenly a native appeared like a ghost out of the darkness by our tents. The tiger had eaten of the dead buffalo with which we had hoped to bait him!

Excitement gripped us. A tiger—our chance at last! "Are you sure that it is a tiger which has eaten?" we wanted to know, remembering the day when we had waited and waited and a giant reptile, not a tiger, had appeared.

The tracker was positive. The buffalo had been eaten as a tiger begins eating—at the tail. The tiger must be somewhere near, ready to return. We must hurry to reach our bush before the light came. Hastily we swallowed some hot coffee and snatched a bite or two of bread while the horses were led up; then we mounted and set out, the tracker running along ahead of us as guide.

The land was ghostly with the first signs of morning, and through the grayness the giant pines rose darkly like columns in some dim underground vault. The guide circled in and out the trees, and our horses followed closely. Then we dismounted and stole through the brush on foot till we were on the edge of the ravine, directly above the dead buffalo. More than halfway down the steep slope was the bush, across which a screen of reeds had been built, and the buffalo was a hundred and fifty feet beyond that, directly in front of the green wall of the jungle.

Down the slope we crept, crouching low, and being as silent-footed as possible in the attempt to deceive the stealthy beast, who might be in any bush before us at the moment. If he saw us, the hunt was probably finished before it was begun. We should spend our weary hours there in vain.

We reached the shelter of the blind and cautiously raised the leaves that covered the tiny holes left for peepholes. There was a long stretch of tall, waving grass sloping down before us with bushes on each side, then the dark blue that we knew to be the dead buffalo, and beyond, the blotting darkness of the jungle.

My husband, Herbert, and I took our positions, each with an eye at a peephole, our guns leaning beside us. The tracker squatted on his heels at our side, patient and motionless. It was growing lighter and lighter; the darkness paled as the brightness gained in the east. There were little morning noises, the familiar sounding crow of the wild cock, the cropping of a family of wild pigs on the grassy slope to the right, the bark of a distant deer.

The sun seemed to shoot up in the sky, and its heat poured out on us as if a door had been opened from a furnace. We stood still there, motionless, staring out intently. There was nothing to do but stand and wait and watch. I kept telling myself that somewhere out in that green into which I was straining my eyes was the great striped beast we had hunted so long, sleeping, or perhaps padding about on stealthy feet, staring through the jungle at us.

Six o'clock. Seven o'clock. Eight o'clock. Nine o'clock…Our friends, the Kings, had got their tiger at a quarter to nine; so I had decided that nine would be our lucky hour, but nine o'clock passed with nothing happening. Then I remembered a story I had heard about a tiger that had been seen at eleven o'clock, and I set eleven as the time at which things would happen.

The minutes passed with unbelievable slowness. The sun burned hotter and hotter. We would not stir. One of us could have rested while the other watched, but we were too excited for that. Our nerves were tense.

Eleven o'clock. Nothing happened. Then twelve. The sun was high overhead. I felt burning up; the blood throbbed in my temples. I thought of the nights on an African mountain when we had stood on guard against plundering elephants, shivering with cold on the windswept heights, and I wondered why I had ever objected to cold and wind.

From the jungle beyond us came the sound of splashing water. Tigers play in water. Was it the tiger—or was it the herd of wild cattle we had seen the day before? I looked questioningly down at the tracker; he grinned back at me as if he, too, thought it were a tiger.

A little later it seemed to me that I could see the gleam of a striped face for an instant between the green jungle growths. It was gone even as I thought I saw it, and I told myself that it was all a trick of my straining eyes. I was getting so that I could see tigers all over the place.

At two o'clock came a rush of clouds, which gave warning of the storm that was sweeping up toward us. The darkness shut swiftly in about us, the heavens opened overhead, and all the waters in them came crashing down on us. The tracker shivered and slipped softly away up the ravine. We put our guns under our coats to keep them dry, and for the next two hours we stood there in the soaking downpour, wondering if we had really been nice and dry and hot a short time before. Then the rain ceased and the sun came out more faintly; the tall grass about us, bending with rain, began to straighten, while the glistening, beaded drops on it dried. We now took turns sitting down close by the blind, cautiously stretching a cramped arm or leg. There was little hope—just determination left.

THE TIGER COMES

The day was fading fast. Five-thirty.…Five-forty…In a few minutes it would be too dark to see to shoot if anything did come. As soon as it was dusk, the tiger might begin to prowl, and do his prowling anywhere about us. We began to glance over our shoulders rather cautiously.

Only fifteen minutes more in which it would be possible to shoot, I thought, glancing at my wrist watch. It was just five forty-five. I was at the blind, peering through the peephole at Herbert's side, and Herbert was directly behind me, sitting down. There was a feeling in the air that the day was done. And then, as I looked out, realizing that every moment was slipping by bearing away forever the chances it might have held—I saw something.

Out of the wall of distant shadows came a gleam of gold and black—vivid as lightning against the green—and the tiger walked out of the jungle!

Never in my life had I seen such a picture. Elephants by moonlight, lions at dawn, gorillas at blazing noon I had seen, but nothing was ever so beautiful and so glorious as that tiger walking out of his jungle. He was everything that was wild and savage, lordly and sinister. For a moment I could imagine I was dreaming. He stood clearly outlined against the background of the forest, and he looked enormous. The great striped roundness of him was like a barrel. Then he moved, and seemed to flow along the ground, nearer and nearer.

He stopped, and looked up at our bush. I could hardly breathe. If he should take alarm! He stared with a threatening look; then, as if satisfied, he turned his head toward the dead buffalo and walked over toward it.

Then I dared let the leaf go back into place while I turned to Herbert behind me. My lips formed, "Tiger here," and over Herbert's face came a look of deepest pity. "Poor girl," he thought, "she has dreamed tigers and she has looked for tigers—and now she thinks she is seeing them!"

Then his face changed. He rose, and I moved to his side as he stepped forward to his place. Noiselessly we lifted the leaves over our peepholes and raised our guns to fill the opening. My eyes raced down the barrel of my rifle in frantic fear lest the tiger be gone.

The tiger was there, to the right of the buffalo, a picture of savage life and death. So he must have stood many times over his kills, cautious, yet bold in his great strength, lording it over all the jungle and inspiring terror in every living thing.

I dared not extend my gun as I wished; I leveled it as best I could, stepping backwards, and aimed at the head for the brain-shot I had been told was the best. "Ready?" I breathed; then, before Herbert's signal came back, the tiger began to move his head from side to side, looking up at us.

I had been told to wait till he began to eat, when I would have a chance for a clear aim, but I dared not wait. I shifted my aim hastily from the brain to a black stripe across the backbone at the top of the shoulder. I never felt so cold and tense in my life."Ready," breathed Herbert. I was to fire at any time now, and he was to follow with his big gun in case mine had missed. He was giving me the shot, but we weren't going to lose that tiger if we could help it.

I fired on the instant, and the roar of his gun followed mine. Then the roar of the tiger drowned them both.

I tore out around the corner of the blind where I could see in the open, and Herbert plunged after me. The tiger was down; we could not see him in the deep grass, but his snarling roars told us he was out there.

"He's down!" we said, and then, "He's gone!" for now we had a clearer outlook and saw that he was gone from beside the buffalo. The snarls were going away.

THE END OF A TERRIBLE KILLER

Now we had been warned not to follow a wounded tiger, but to wait a few hours and then track him. It was good advice, but this was a case not for advice but for action. It was darkening each instant, and there was no time to waste.

So down we went through that long grass, step by step, watching each side for there might be a tigress anywhere. We came to the buffalo and followed the flattened grass trail leading back into the jungle. It was dim in there, but there was light enough to see. The tiger was lying stretched out, about fifty yards from the buffalo. As we came up, he roared with fury, dying as he was. Every night of his life he had fed on some defenseless creature, and now a sudden, sharp blow had struck him down. He had been terrible in life, and he was terrible in death.

With guns ready, we stood watching that last moment of his life, keeping ourselves on guard for the possible tigress. The native tracker had heard the shooting from the top of the ravine where he had come out to wait for us, and now he and his men came stealing in to us, the tracker with his own gun alert, for he, too, feared a tigress. When they were quite sure the tiger was dead, they all took hold of that great barrel of a body and staggered with it into the open. It was all the eight men could do to carry it.

He was a huge beast, big and fat, with a gorgeous skin. One shoulder, the left, was smashed from Herbert's bullet. But my shot had gone to its mark, straight through the black stripe into the backbone. That tiger was a dead tiger the instant he fell, yet such was his dying strength that he had pushed himself fifty yards downhill into the jungle.

Quickly now and loudly we counted the whiskers and tied them with grass to protect them from the natives. For tiger whiskers are the most useful sort of magic—just one of them ground up and slipped into the food of a neighbor is considered a strong enough charm to kill him. From the anxious way in which the natives stayed about the tiger's head we imagined that there were several unpopular neighbors in the village that they wished to work upon.

The size of that tiger gave us a thrill. We had grown so hopeless that we would have been thankful for any tiger, and here was a great killer in the strength of his powers, second, we found out later, to the record for height.

The natives were as excited as we were. A tiger, the over-lord of the jungle, the enemy of everything with life, had been killed. Chanting and singing, they carried the tiger, slung to a pole, back to the camp. Night had now fallen, and we carried a light. We could see its reflection shining in the eyes of staring deer. Then, as they caught the scent of their dead enemy—or us—they would snort and fly.

Down before the tents the natives put the tiger; so live-looking was his pose that he seemed alive. There were wild doings of triumph about the natives' fire that night, but there was great peace about ours.

All through the night I kept waking. The moon stood high overhead, its light white as snow upon the still earth. The shadows of the pines were like little pools of ink about the base of each tree. In the clear moonlight the great tiger lay brilliant in gold and black beauty, proud and perfect in his death as when he had stalked over those plains in life to seek his quivering prey.

NOTES AND QUESTIONS

1. Give one reason why you think Martin Johnson would not call tigers good citizens of the jungle.

2. Find a short sentence on page 16 that best tells how the Brad-leys felt at the thought of facing a tiger.

3. On page 18 the author calls the tiger a "stealthy beast." Make a list of four other words or groups of words by which she makes us understand what this animal is like.

4. Here is a list of phrases that the author used to help us see what she saw and feel as she felt. In one column write the phrases that help us see. In another, write those that help us feel.

could hardly breathe

dim underground vault

appeared like a ghost

straining eyes

heat poured

blotting darkness

gleam of gold

green wall of the jungle

blood throbbed

nerves were tense

glistening, beaded drops

wall of shadows

clearly outlined

frantic fear

so cold and tense

reflection shining

like little pools of ink

great peace

5. What short paragraph describes the moment of greatest excitement in the story? Give the page number and the first four words.

6. What did the natives believe about the tiger that shows how deadly they considered him to be?

7. For each word in the first list choose a word or words from the second list that mean the same. Write the pairs together.

(1) sinister, intently, tense, vivid, stealthy, cropping, prowl.

(2) strained, search cautiously, quiet and cautious, eating grass, earnestly, evil, brilliant.