Tracks of the Tiger Read online

  It was the perfect antidote to all their jungle adventures.

  And now it was their last day. In an hour’s time they would be in a taxi heading for the airport.

  The plane trundled to a stop at the end of the runway, then started to turn. Out of the window Beck caught a glimpse of the long stretch of tarmac, swinging round as the plane aligned with it. Then the engine sound rose to a roar, the seat pressed into his back and the plane moved forward to take off.

  ‘You’re doing it again,’ Peter said as the plane tilted up. Beck had been fingering his neck thoughtfully. It always felt odd without his fire steel dangling there. The airline crews had a bit of a thing about passengers taking fire-making equipment on board. Whenever he flew he had to put the fire steel with his main luggage in the hold.

  Sumatra fell away beneath them. The suburbs of Medan turned into small, tightly packed squares. The ground around the city was flat and green with paddy fields. And then the plane banked and turned over the jungle. Beck looked down at the canopy – the rises, the falls, the wisps of steam, all the way to the horizon – with wary respect. He couldn’t say he’d enjoyed the experience. But he couldn’t say he hadn’t enjoyed it either. He was just glad to be seeing the back of it – for the moment, anyway.

  And then he thought of the one thing they would have liked to do. He and Peter would have liked to meet Nakula’s family to pay their respects. But that had not been possible; it turned out he didn’t have any family. They had met Nakula’s fellow keepers and learned that the job was his life. Protecting the orang-utans, keeping the jungle safe and free from human greed – that was all Nakula had ever done.

  Beck was consoled that they had achieved something the dead keeper would have approved of. Mrs Grey had been right. Maybe they couldn’t bring all the illegal logging activity to its knees, but they had done what they could, and Nakula would be proud.

  Over the noise of the engines, Beck reckoned he could hear the roar of a tiger, agreeing with him.