Tiger, Tiger. Philip Caveney

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СКАЧАТЬ side with the Gurkhas for half his life, and he thought them one of the most agreeable races he had ever encountered. Likewise, he loved and respected the Malays, Indians, and Chinese who peopled the Peninsula; the homely Burmese people he had met in the war. He had even come to honour the Japanese nation against whom he had fought for so long. But try as he might to be fair and totally objective, he could not bring himself to like the Australians. He imagined that, somewhere, there must exist an antipodean male that was not loud, boorish, and obsessed with booze and dirty stories. Unfortunately, he had yet to meet this man.

      ‘Here, this one’ll kill ya! There’s this bloke, see, goes to the doctor cause he can’t get it up anymore. His sheila’s goin’ berserk with ’im, reckons he don’t love her anymore. Anyway, the doctor tells ’im to drop his trousers and when he does, the bloke’s got this great big …’ The rest of the story was obliterated by a burst of raucous laughter from the young officers.

      Harry was quietly outraged by this lack of respect. In his day, a certain restraint had always been observed around the Mess; it had been a place where gentlemen congregated. Of course, there had always been room for a certain amount of high-spirits, but the telling of off-colour jokes in a voice loud enough to wake the dead seemed to illustrate just how drastically standards had dropped in the last decade. What seemed most upsetting to Harry was the fact that the young officers were openly encouraging this oaf to do his worst. Well, it was plain that somebody had to draw the line, even if it simply meant removing oneself from the scene of the outrage as quickly as possible. Harry drained his glass, banged it down on the table with just enough force to turn a few heads at the bar. Then he stood up, nodded curtly to Trimani, and strolled out of the room. Trimani smiled apologetically as Harry passed by him. He, at least, understood.

      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 into 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,’ СКАЧАТЬ