Tracks of the Tiger Read online

  ‘Ow.’ Peter hissed and held up his finger. The edge of a reed had sliced along it. Now there was a thin red line, like a paper cut. It wasn’t deep but it stung. He pressed down on it.

  ‘That’s why we walk backwards,’ Beck reminded him. This way, their daysacks were the first thing to meet the reeds and the reeds could slash away all they liked.

  The creepiest thing was the way the reeds rose up again once they had passed. Closing off their way back, hiding their escape, shutting them in.

  As Peter had predicted, the sun was often hidden from view; there were no landmarks at all. The reeds were too tall. Sometimes big objects under the water got in their way and knocked them off course – a large tree root or rotting trunk – and they had to work their way around it.

  Every five minutes they stopped for a drink out of their bottles. A single mouthful, careful not to let any of the swamp water pollute their supply. They used this time to check their bearings as well. Everywhere looked the same, and visibility in any direction was only about two metres, so they were doubly grateful for the compass. Without it they really would have been effectively blind. They would inevitably go round and round in circles until they collapsed with dehydration and exhaustion. Beck clutched the compass tightly.

  The depth of the swamp varied. Sometimes the mud only came up to their waists. Sometimes the bottom fell away and it almost reached their shoulders. Beck still had both arms held up, one to keep the compass steady and the other to protect his cut, and his shoulders felt like lead weights. It also made balancing hard, and before long the muscles in his arms were shrieking, but he had no choice but to keep walking.

  Peter shuddered as they started to push their way slowly through the sea of reeds again. His gaze darted all around nervously.

  One of Beck’s main concerns here was snakes. They loved dark, dank swamps, and in the black water the boys couldn’t see where they were treading. And Beck was in front. The first to get bitten if he trod on one. But he was powerless to do anything except trust fate and press on.

  ‘That trick you taught me . . .’ Peter muttered. ‘How to fight claustrophobia? It’s not working.’

  ‘Don’t think too much, just focus on keeping moving.’ When Beck had taught Peter how to look through the jungle, that had assumed there was something to see. Different kinds of tree, different levels to the terrain. You could get the shape of the jungle around you. But the swamp had no shape. It was just flat, and all you could see after the reeds was more reeds. Their best tactic was just to push on as fast as they could.

  Not only was it hot, it was also unnervingly quiet. They had got so used to the background noise of the jungle that they had stopped noticing it – until it was gone. The reeds were perfect sound insulation. Not a single squeak got in from outside. The only sounds came from their shoes squelching in the water and mud. The rustle of reeds around them. And, of course, the maddening buzz of the insects that swarmed around them. It was like being in their own little universe – hot, humid and claustrophobic. Beck wondered if and when there would be an end to this hell-hole.

  ‘If it’s any help, swamps are formed near large bodies of water.’ It was the only helpful thing he could think of.

  ‘Like the sea?’ Peter said hopefully.

  ‘Like the sea. So we can’t have that far to go.’

  Peter smiled. Beck could see the effort it took and smiled back.

  ‘Then we’d better get on . . .’

  Because they couldn’t see or hear anything more than a very short distance away, the end came as a surprise.

  They had learned to brace themselves against the mass of reeds at their backs. The resistance vanished so suddenly that they fell backwards with shouts of surprise. Beck felt himself falling and his arms windmilled for balance. Everything seemed to slow down. He even had time for a couple of thoughts. Part of him noticed the compass that he had preserved so carefully fly out of his hand. He felt annoyed that the needle would be lost in the depths of the swamp. Another part warned him more urgently that he was falling backwards into the filthy water. It would get on his arm; close over his head.

  And then he hit something solid and the breath was knocked out of him.

  Time and his thoughts returned to their normal pace. He was lying on a sandy bank. Only his feet were still in the water. Peter was lying next to him, looking equally surprised; he sat up slowly, pulled his feet out of the swamp, and began to giggle.

  ‘What?’ Beck felt a smile tugging at his own lips. The laugh was infectious – fuelled by adrenalin and relief.

  ‘You look filthy, Beck.’ Peter fell back onto the sand again, shaking with laughter. Beck looked down at himself, then at Peter, and started to laugh too. From the shoulders down their clothes were stained black and brown, and coated with slime and weed.

  In this new world of light and air beyond the smothering embrace of the reeds, Beck’s ears picked up the most beautiful, cleanest sound ever. The sound of waves hitting the shore.

  ‘Hear that?’

  ‘Way ahead of you!’

  The two boys scrambled further up the sandy bank, away from the swamp. They reached the top and gazed out over a sight that could have come out of a holiday brochure. Gentle waves rolled in from a sparkling blue sea onto a shallow slope of golden sand. They curled into tunnels and collapsed in clouds of broken spray.

  Both boys whooped and broke into a run. They shook off their packs as they went and ran straight into the sea, keeping going until the waves broke over them. The salt water felt good and healing on Beck’s wound.

  They emerged from the sea dripping wet but much cleaner. They would let the sun and sea breeze dry them off. Beck trudged back up the beach to the highest point and looked back the way they had come. The swamp before him was probably a half-mile across, though it had felt ten times that. Then there was the jungle, rising up in a gentle slope for several miles, looking so serene, so peaceful. Like a carpet of green. But hiding a world of chaos and danger beneath it. Then, on the horizon, Beck saw something he had almost forgotten about – Lasa, the volcano that had started all this. There was a gentle puff of smoke drifting up from its summit, nothing more. It obviously hadn’t been a major eruption. Beck felt a wave of anger stir inside him. That stupid volcano had chosen to blow off a bit, causing the death of poor Nakula and all the trouble since . . .

  ‘Doesn’t look much, eh?’ Peter murmured, coming to stand beside him.

  It was a little dispiriting to see how far they had come. Three days in the jungle when a car on a decent road could have done it in half an hour.

  ‘We did good in there, Peter, but we’re not home yet,’ Beck said softly, and turned away.

  He knew the beach seemed like the answer to their prayers. He also knew it was a false hope. In the jungle the trees had kept in the humidity but they also kept off the sun. Here there was no protection. If they weren’t very careful, they could dehydrate and die just as fast in the open.

  And they would need water. Their bottles were almost empty. The sea gleamed with cool, blue water they couldn’t drink – salt water was a poison that would dehydrate them and drive them mad, destroy their kidneys and ultimately kill them.

  We need fresh water, Beck thought. The swamp was fed by a river. Somewhere that water had to find a way out again, or the swamp would just burst. And it didn’t take long to find. About a hundred metres away, a wide, shallow river broke through the sand bank and flowed across the beach to the sea. The water was clear and completely free of particles.

  ‘We’re going to drink that?’ Peter asked, aghast, as Beck filled the bottles. ‘We’ve seen where it’s been!’

  ‘Exactly!’ Beck screwed the tops back on. ‘Reed beds are excellent filter systems. All the grot stays in them and what comes out is way cleaner than what went in. There are places back home – all around the world in fact – that use them instead of sewage works – farms, housing estates, any kind of ecological development. More environmentally frien
dly, better for biodiversity, no chemicals.’

  To make his point, he scooped up a handful of water from the river and drank it. Peter reluctantly followed suit, and pulled a face.

  ‘Cool.’

  Beck looked up at the sun, checked his watch, and then looked up and down the beach. They had a few hours of daylight left. But where to go in that time? A good question. So far he had just concentrated on getting out of the jungle. He had followed the river on the grounds that it would either reach civilization or the sea, one or the other. And it had. But now? The beach they had come to was a ribbon of sand between sea and swamp. It could stretch for miles in either direction.

  There wasn’t a soul in sight, not a hint of which way might be best to go. Not even a ship out on the horizon. But they needed a direction, a plan. It was important to keep going.

  He thought out loud. ‘We were south of the road between the volcano and Medan, and we came south-east, so Medan must be to the left. But it might still be miles away and there may be somewhere closer to the right.’

  ‘Toss for it?’ Peter asked, and Beck shrugged.

  ‘Why not?’

  Peter dug out a coin – one thousand rupiahs. ‘Heads right, tails left.’ He tossed it, caught it and squinted at the side that was up. ‘It’s . . . um . . . some kind of bird.’

  ‘That’s the Indonesian coat of arms, and it’s heads. So we go right.’

  They splashed through the shallow river and carried on down the beach, while the waves kept breaking on their left and the sun beat down hard on their heads.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘Hey, Beck!’ Peter called. ‘Why did the tide go out?’

  They weren’t talking much. Walking was hot and thirsty work.

  The sea breeze gave the illusion of fresh air, until you realized that your sweat wasn’t actually evaporating. They had their sleeves rolled down and shirts done up to protect their skin against the sun. If it weren’t for their hats, then their brains would have been frying long ago. Beck was glad they hadn’t reached the beach until after midday, when the sun would have been at its highest and hottest.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Beck answered. ‘Why did the tide go out?’

  ‘Because the sea weed!’ Peter sniggered and Beck rolled his eyes.

  ‘How old are you? Four?’

  ‘Yeah. Will you carry me, then?’

  They kept walking in silence for a while. They stuck as much as possible to the sand that lay below the high-water mark. It was moist and firmer than the dry, loose stuff above. Better for walking on. The line was marked out with dead wood and weed and the occasional piece of manmade rubbish. It was all baked dry by the sun, so they would have no difficulty finding fuel for a fire that night.

  Beck carefully studied every bit of flotsam that they came to in case there was something useful. A grimy length of rope, embedded with bits of weed. An old crate, which he could break up for firewood. An empty two-litre plastic bottle that had once held a fizzy drink.

  ‘Might come in handy,’ he said, and put it in his pack.

  When the afternoon rain came, they stood out in the open under the heaving sky. It was good to be able to wash, and to fill their bottles with fresh rainwater.

  But the rain didn’t last long. Then it was back to more walking.

  ‘OK, why does the sea roar?’ Beck asked eventually.

  ‘Don’t know . . .’

  ‘So would you if you had crabs on your bottom!’

  Peter snorted. ‘How long were you thinking that one up?’

  ‘About an hour.’

  ‘My legs really ache. And this is me talking, not a four-year-old.’

  ‘I know.’

  Beck felt it too. The slight slope of the beach meant that their right legs were taking shorter steps than their left, and that made their hips ache. There wasn’t much that could be done about it.

  A good excuse to rest soon came along. Beck’s eyes lit up at what he saw ahead on the beach.

  ‘Fancy a break?’ he asked.

  The sand between the sea and the high-water mark was dotted with green specks. They were whelk shells – spirals like ice-cream cones the size of a clenched fist. Some of them moved, scuttling along on some journey that only made sense to the inhabitant.

  Beck stood over the nearest one and quickly picked it up. Six spindly legs stuck out from beneath the shell, but their owner pulled them in the moment it realized someone had got it.

  ‘Shellfish?’ Peter asked.

  Beck passed it to Peter, who turned it in his hands as he studied it. It was just possible to make out a brownish-purple crustacean lurking in the depths. ‘Hermit crabs. They don’t own these shells, they just borrow them. And tonight we’re going to eat them.’

  Peter’s stomach rumbled at the thought. It seemed a very long time since they’d eaten the fish from the pool in the jungle.

  He helped Beck gather up every crab they could find. They put them in their packs, zipped them shut and carried on walking.

  The end of the day came as quickly as it had in the jungle. Out in the open, they could actually appreciate it. They were on the east coast of Sumatra and the sun sank down in the west, on the other side of the island. Red light scattered across the jungle and the beach, and their shadows stretched down to the sea like those of giants. The sky to the west was streaked with bands of orange and purple. To the east the dark came rushing in at them off the sea.

  It only took a few minutes. The colour leached out of their vision and left only black and white and shades of grey. Night time scarcely made a difference to visibility because the moon was up – almost full in a cloudless sky. The boys could still see each other quite clearly and they kept on walking without a break.

  And then, very faintly, the wind carried the whisper of a roar. It came from across the swamp, out of the jungle. They had no difficulty recognizing it.

  ‘Um,’ Peter said, ‘you know you said tigers are nocturnal . . .’

  ‘He’s got no reason to cross the swamp,’ Beck told him as they trudged on. ‘Not when he’s got the jungle to himself again. He’s just saying goodbye.’

  But even though his tone was flippant, they both glanced with respect in the direction of the roar. Beck knew that it might well be the same tiger they had seen. They were solitary animals and patrolled a wide territory.

  ‘It could have killed us,’ Peter murmured, ‘just like that, but it didn’t. We’re only alive now because it let us be.’

  ‘So we use that gift,’ Beck said.

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To make sure the authorities hear about those loggers.’

  They kept going for another couple of hours, finally calling a halt when the tide came in, forcing them off the firm sand. There was a cluster of coconut trees on the highest point of the beach, between sea and swamp, which Beck thought would make a good campsite.

  He wasn’t wrong. For a start, there was a slight hollow between the trees that would shelter them from the sea breeze during the night.

  ‘Welcome to Hotel Peter and Beck!’ He clambered quickly up the nearest trunk. Long leaves exploded out in all directions at the top of the tree. Beck started to hack away clumps of them, as well as a cluster of coconuts sheltering in their midst. The coconuts hit the sand below with a satisfying thud that told him they were full of milk and flesh.

  Peter, without even being asked, was building a fire out of the remains of the crate Beck had found earlier. Handfuls of crumbling dry seaweed provided the kindling. Beck jumped down and handed him the fire steel. Peter struck the fire’s first sparks and blew gently on the smouldering palm fibres to encourage the flame while Beck arranged the coconut leaves into two mats.

  ‘We’re just sleeping on the sand?’ Peter asked. He sounded faintly surprised.

  ‘No, we’re sleeping on the leaves on the sand. Why?’

  ‘I’d just read about this disease . . . um, leishmaniasis? You get it from sand flies and it gives you really nasty sores,
so you’re supposed to sleep off the sand . . .’

  Beck grinned. ‘But you don’t get it in Southeast Asia. You get it in America, north and south, and Asia, and the Middle East . . . but not here.’

  ‘Wow. You mean, someone somewhere is actually cutting us some kind of break?’ The fire had caught nicely with the bone-dry wood. Peter sat down next to his friend and held his hands out to the warmth. ‘That’s the nicest thing that’s ever happened to me.’

  ‘Well, there was not being eaten by the tiger. That was quite cool.’

  ‘OK. Second nicest thing . . .’

  They cracked open the crab shells with a rock and killed the crabs with a single blow. Each one of them had a single large claw and Beck showed Peter how to twist it off.

  ‘All the flesh is on the inside, and the claw is the bit with the most of it,’ he said. ‘And cooking is easy . . .’

  Cooking was just throwing the shells into some embers at the side of the fire to cook slowly. That bit really was easy. What was much harder was waiting while the smell of cooked crab tickled their noses and twisted their empty stomachs into knots. But when they finally ate, the taste of cooked food in their mouths was like an explosion of flavour and texture and juices. The wait was so worthwhile.

  They used the crowbar to open up a couple of coconuts too. The lukewarm, oily coconut water inside was the perfect dessert.

  ‘It’s like being back in the desert again,’ Peter commented afterwards. Beck looked up from his work. He was sharpening a pair of sticks into points; the next morning they would use them for fishing. Peter was lying on his back next to the fire and looking up at the stars. He yawned and stretched; Beck gave him about five minutes before he fell fast asleep. ‘Except we’re next to the sea, it’s not freezing cold at night and no one’s had to pee on anyone.’

  Beck chuckled. Back in the Sahara, they’d had to wrap damp T-shirts around their heads to protect them from the desert heat – and the way to make the T-shirts damp without wasting water was, yes, to pee on them. He remembered Peter’s horrified reaction to that news, and smiled.