Tracks of the Tiger Read online

  ‘Yeah, there is, and if we stop and mope about it, then we’ll just turn into mulch like this.’ He kicked at the thick carpet of leaves beneath their feet. ‘So we keep moving, keep achieving something, but we also tell ourselves we’re not in a hurry. We keep calm, we take our time and we keep moving at the jungle’s pace, which is slow. We don’t work ourselves up into a state. We stay relaxed, we go round obstacles, we don’t fight it. That way the jungle stops trying to press you back. And above all . . .’ Beck laughed again out of sheer joy, then held out his hands and tilted his head back. ‘It’s the jungle, right? There’s plants and animals and insects and birds . . . There’s a million different forms of life here, and it’s all interconnected.’ Peter was chuckling now as well. ‘Everything affects everything else. It’s wonderful. It’s extraordinary. And—’

  Leaves rustled in front of them and a lizard poked its head out. One word blazed out in Beck’s mind: Food!

  The head was about thirty centimetres long, blunt and scaly. The eyes met Beck’s for just a moment and then, in a flash, the lizard turned and disappeared back into the vegetation.

  Beck flung himself forward, hands outstretched. He landed on his front with an ‘Oof!’ that drove the breath from his lungs, but he managed to grab hold of the tail as the rest of the lizard fought to get away into a thicket. The tail was cool and leathery in his hands. He scrambled to his knees, maintaining his grip, and dragged the lizard backwards out of the bush. Its legs scrabbled on the ground and flung a spray of torn-up leaves up into his face.

  Beck stood up, a little wobbly because both hands were occupied holding the lizard by its tail at arm’s length. Immediately its feet were off the ground it stopped trying to escape. Now it just writhed, trying to arch and twist its body in order to bite him.

  ‘Man, watch out! What is it?’ Peter shouted.

  ‘Monitor lizard.’ Beck grinned and studied it as closely as he could, though he still held the wriggling creature away from him. It was an ugly animal. Its body was dark brown with white stripes and it didn’t just feel like leather, it looked like it too. The scaly hide was loose and baggy, as if a small lizard had borrowed a larger lizard’s skin.

  ‘Here.’ Beck angled it towards Peter. ‘Take it. Hold it where I’m holding it. Mind the teeth and the claws – some of them are poisonous. Even if they aren’t, there’s so much bacteria in a single bite that you are going to get a serious infection.’

  ‘OK . . .’ Peter nervously reached out with both hands and took a grip just below Beck’s hands. ‘Weird. You sort of imagine a lizard is going to be slimy. It’s dry. And cold.’

  ‘It’s cold blooded, remember?’ Beck shucked his pack off and delved into the back pocket for the glass knife. ‘Keep a good hold . . .’

  And with one slash he cut the lizard’s throat, just behind the angle of its jaw bone. Dark blood splashed out onto the ground. The lizard twitched violently for a moment, and then went still.

  ‘Wow.’ Peter swallowed. ‘Uh – a little warning next time?’

  Beck grinned. ‘Who to? You or the lizard?’

  ‘Whoever . . .’

  ‘So what exactly did you think I was going to do to it? OK, you can put it down now.’

  Peter laid it on the ground and watched as Beck started cutting its head off.

  ‘I dunno,’ he said in answer to Beck’s question. ‘Adopt it. Teach it tricks. Call it Fido.’

  ‘Maybe the next one. This one we’re going to eat. Plenty of meat in the tail. We’re lucky. I was expecting to be living off fruit and termites—’

  ‘That’s not a joke, is it?’ Peter said ruefully.

  Beck laughed. ‘Nope. Hunting takes up a lot of energy. Fine if you were raised here in the jungle and you know all its ways. But we’ve got more important things to spend our energy on – like getting out. Still, if an opportunity just jumps out at you, like this guy did, you take it. There.’

  He had been sawing back and forth with the knife and finally the head came free.

  ‘Why cut off the head?’

  ‘Like I said, a lot of bacteria on the teeth. That’s where the bite is. Plus it’s extra dead weight!’

  Beck lowered the lizard’s body into his backpack, which he zipped shut. He prodded the head with his foot. ‘Give it an hour or so and the ants will have stripped that to the bone. Come on.’

  As they walked on, they found the ground sloping upwards a little. It levelled out after about ten minutes into an area that was less densely planted. Peter waited while Beck scanned the ground closely, then craned his head to look up at the tree canopy.

  ‘We’ve found our campsite,’ he declared, sounding pleased.

  ‘Not five o’clock yet,’ Peter pointed out, checking his watch.

  ‘Yeah, I know. But look – we’re on high ground, which means we’re out of the way of flash flooding and we’re less likely to be on an animal’s route to water. And look up.’

  Peter followed his gaze upwards but obviously couldn’t see much that was important. ‘More leaves,’ he said, ‘surprisingly like the leaves I’ve been seeing so much of lately.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s just leaves. No coconuts, no dead branches – nothing likely to fall down on us. Did you know that falling dead wood kills more people than anything else in the jungle?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that,’ Peter admitted.

  ‘And if you look down, you’ll see there are no columns of ants marching through.’ Beck swung off his daysack and put it on the ground. ‘I think we’ve earned ourselves a drink.’

  Peter watched while Beck reached out for some vines that clung to the nearest tree. He checked to see he wasn’t about to grab hold of a snake, then gave them a hard yank away from the trunk. Next he reached out to make a cut in one just above head height.

  ‘Capillary action inside the vines draws the water upwards,’ he explained. ‘So first you kill the action with a cut. And then . . .’

  He grabbed the vine at waist level and sawed through it with the knife. Fluid started to trickle out over his hand. ‘And then you let gravity do its job and the fluid flows back out.’

  ‘Cool . . . They’ve all got water in them?’ Peter asked, looking around at all the vines he could see. ‘You mean, we’re surrounded by pipes?’

  ‘Sort of . . .’ Beck cut another vine and cupped some of the fluid in his hand, sniffed, then wiped his hand dry on his trousers. ‘You need to check it really is water coming out, not just sap, and if the sap is red or yellow or milky – like this – then forget it and try again.’

  He had more luck with the next vine. Water dribbled out of it as if from a leaky tap. He tilted his head back and let it drip into his mouth. It was warm and musty, but it was still water.

  Beck passed the vine to Peter, who almost snatched it out of his hand.

  Water, Beck thought, watching his friend drink. Just a simple little chemical . . . but you couldn’t even last a few days without it, and just a few drops made such a difference. He could feel the energy flowing back into him.

  ‘Wow,’ Peter gasped when the trickle from the vine finally died. ‘I needed that. So what do we do next?’

  ‘You start gathering wood for a fire. I spotted some bamboo back there – which is going to make us a bed for the night.’

  The bamboo Beck had seen was a dense cluster wrapped in vines and clothed in spindly, dark green leaves. He cleared away the mass of foliage, once again checking for any wildlife that might lash out with a sting or a bite, to reveal the thick wooden stalks that disappeared up into the layers of canopy above. He could just get his hands around them. They were segmented, as if they had been put together from smaller wooden tubes.

  Beck chose some thin young stalks and used the glass knife and the flat, sharp end of the crowbar to cut himself several pieces, each two or three metres long. Once he had sliced through them at the base, he still had to pull and shake them to free them from the grip of the vegetation higher up. Eventually he managed to drag th
em back to the campsite. Even though they were thin, they were strong – which is why bamboo is often used as scaffolding in the Far East.

  ‘Beats flat-pack furniture any day,’ he said cheerfully. ‘It’s not just pandas who find this stuff useful . . .’ Beck paused. ‘What’s up?’

  Peter was scowling. He flung a stick down on the ground so hard that it bounced. ‘Gather wood for a fire, you said. Easy, I thought, we’re surrounded by the stuff.’ He kicked a tree. ‘But it’s damp! Everything’s damp! Look. I made a pile.’ He gave the small heap of twigs a kick. ‘And it’s dripping. We’re surrounded by wood and we can’t make a fire!’

  Beck carefully laid down his collection of bamboo. ‘The jungle’s very humid,’ he said. ‘You’re right, it’s hard to get stuff to burn here – but that’s lucky, ’cos otherwise the volcano would have burned all this up long ago. But if you know where to look, you’ll find that some of it’s dry.’

  He crouched down by a bush. Peter knelt next to him and followed his gaze. Beck reached out for the dead leaves and twigs that always hung down at the bottom.

  ‘These will be dry.’ He broke off a twig to prove it and it came away with a nice dry snap. ‘Plus there’ll be larger stuff, dead branches, hanging off trees. Gather those up too. And then I’ll show you where to find some dry kindling.’

  ‘OK.’ Peter sounded a little more encouraged.

  Beck kept one eye on him as they went to work on their separate tasks. But Peter was a quick learner and Beck was pleased to see that he had soon gathered quite a pile. He himself could get back to his own job.

  First he cut one of the lengths of bamboo in half. Then he gathered up some lengths of creeper and tested it for strength, gripping it firmly in both hands and pulling. It was just as strong as a good bit of rope.

  He lashed the two half-lengths of bamboo together at one end, then pulled the other ends apart to make something like a giant letter A, but without the crosspiece. Then he repeated the process, cutting another length in two and tying those pieces together as well, so that now he had two of the A-frames.

  Peter had collected a decent pile of wood now and had stopped to watch him. Beck got him to hold the frames upright and propped a length of bamboo across them, connecting the tips of the two As. He used more creeper to tie them together. Now the two As could stand upright on their own, joined at the top by the crosspiece.

  ‘We’re going to need vine,’ he said as he worked. ‘Lots of it.’

  ‘I’m right on it!’

  Peter headed over to a thick cluster of rattan vines while Beck turned to the next stage of his work. He was still only half finished. He needed to connect the legs of the two frames with two more lengths of bamboo, each one at least thirty centimetres off the ground. These would be the bed poles.

  He picked up the first length of bamboo, then stopped as he heard a scream and saw Peter leaping about halfway across the clearing. He staggered, tripped and fell over backwards.

  ‘It moved! It moved!’

  Beck threw down the bamboo and hurried over. ‘You all right?’ He held out a hand to help his friend up; he noticed he was panting and his eyes were wild.

  ‘If it had bitten me, I’d know it, right?’

  ‘If anything bit you, yes, you certainly would.’

  Peter’s panting was slowing, though he had to lean forward, resting his hands on his knees. He forced a brave smile. ‘In that case it didn’t bite me.’ He nodded at the cluster of vines. ‘Snake. In there.’

  Beck took up the crowbar and used it to poke the vines cautiously apart. If there was a poisonous snake in there, it could blunt its fangs on steel, not his hand. In amongst the vines something moved. The snake’s body was a fifteen-centimetre-wide cable of solid muscle, covered in dry, waxy scales. The scales were mostly dark, with a faint diamond pattern.

  Beck let his eyes follow the body – up, and then up some more. It looked like the snake was climbing the tree: its head was already much higher than the boys.

  He let the vines fall back. ‘It’s a python,’ he said, ‘and quite a big one. But it’s no danger to us.’

  Peter bit his lip. ‘From now on I’m going to take more care.’

  He had stuck his hand into a clump of vines where he couldn’t see what he was about to touch. In the jungle, that was always a mistake, but Beck doubted he would be doing it again in a hurry!

  ‘Probably won’t be the last of those we see, Peter,’ he told his friend. ‘There’s well over four hundred types of snake in Indonesia. That’s a lot of snakes!’

  So Peter carried on cautiously, and Beck went back to the frame to finish his work.

  Peter had soon cut him a good supply of rattan vine. Once you had shaved off the leaves and hooks, rattan vine was like steel cable wrapped in plastic. It almost looked manmade. Beck lashed it between the two bottom horizontal poles of the sleeping frame, over and over, until it looked like a baggy net.

  ‘And this is our bed,’ he said proudly. He stepped back to admire his handiwork. It was a sleeping platform held off the ground, away from ants and scorpions, by the two A-frames at either end. Even snakes would be more likely to crawl under it than go up.

  Peter looked at it without much enthusiasm. ‘Those creepers are going to dig in,’ he pointed out.

  ‘It’s under control,’ Beck assured him. ‘Still a couple of things to do . . . Why don’t you start the fire?’

  ‘Where’s the nice dry kindling you mentioned?’

  ‘Right here.’ Beck knelt down by some of the bamboo he wasn’t using and scraped the glass knife across it. The outer layer was waxy and glistened with moisture, but as damp peelings curled away beneath the blade, they exposed wood beneath that was yellow and bone-dry.

  Beck handed the knife to his friend. ‘Shave off some of that, and you’ve got your kindling.’

  ‘Cool!’ Peter went to work.

  Beck could very easily have made the fire on his own, and in half the time, but he wanted to keep Peter busy; his help was valuable and Beck wanted him to know it.

  Peter had picked up a lot of cool survival tips from Beck over the years. Now he showed he had remembered some of them himself. He used the knife to cut some of the seat stuffing up into shreds and gathered it up into a small pile a few centimetres high. He laid the shaved bamboo kindling on top of this. Finally, above that, he made a small pyramid of dry sticks and twigs that he had collected with Beck’s guidance. There was still a larger pile of sticks left over to feed the fire with.

  Meanwhile Beck had cut down a clump of palm leaves. Some of these he laid across the vine hammock he had made. Peter had been right – they would dig in, but the palm leaves would act as a very basic mattress.

  Beck had other uses planned for the leaves. They were long and thin, and seen in cross-section, they were v-shaped. He laid these along the horizontal top pole of the sleeping frame, from one end to the other, to act as a makeshift roof. But the roof had another purpose as well. Beck took one last length of bamboo and used the crowbar to split it from end to end, into two halves. He was left with two rough half-tubes of wood, each divided into sections. The cut wasn’t very smooth, but the halves would hold water, which was the main thing.

  ‘Guttering?’ Peter asked. He had finished his task first and was watching Beck, lending a hand when needed.

  ‘Yup.’ Beck laid the half-tubes on the ground alongside the frame, and positioned them under the ends of the overhanging palm leaves. ‘When it rains – and it will rain, ’cos this is a rainforest – the leaves will keep the water off us, but it’ll also flow down them into these. And in the morning we fill our bottles and drink it. How’s the fire?’

  Peter stood proudly by the pile. ‘All ready for you to light.’

  ‘Well, OK, but . . .’ Beck felt for the cord round his neck. ‘Why don’t you do the honours?’

  Peter’s eyes lit up. ‘Really?’

  ‘You’ve watched me do it enough times.’ Beck pulled his fire steel over his
head and chucked it over.

  The fire steel, Beck’s most vital possession, consisted of a small metal rod and a flat steel square. The rod was made of ferrosium, a volatile combination of metals that gave off extremely hot sparks whenever it was scraped with something hard and sharp. That was what the steel square was for. Beck had taken it with him all over the world.

  The principle was simple, but the technique needed some practice. With each scrape the ferrosium sheered off sparks, and in the gloom beneath the trees it gave off an orange light that was quite spectacular. But they didn’t have time to admire it: both boys were huddled over the small pile of tinder and kindling, willing the sparks to catch. Just as Peter was beginning to get frustrated, a flurry of orange sparks showered down, and a small corner of the stuffing started to smoulder. Immediately Peter leaned close and blew on it gently, giving it a steady supply of oxygen to turn the embers into a flame. Finally the stuffing caught light. It slowly grew into a glowing ball of fibres, and then the bamboo began to catch too. The shavings curled slowly in the heat, blackening in the flame. And finally the flame reached the sticks.

  Beck always reckoned a fire was a success when he heard that crack – the distinct sound wood makes when water trapped inside it turns to steam and bursts out under the pressure. More and more cracks sounded as the flames spread up through the pile. The warmth beat against the boy’s faces. An equatorial rainforest is not a cold place, but this warmth was comforting. It was dry and hot and life-giving. Just the sight of a good fire, Beck had always found, raised his spirits.

  ‘Supper time!’ he announced. He unzipped his daysack and pulled out the dead lizard. The smell of blood and dead meat came out with it.

  ‘Man alive.’ Peter pulled a face. ‘I think your pack’s going to need a wash, Beck.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll just give this one to you as a present – if we get out of this mess, that is!’ Beck held the lizard up for inspection. It hadn’t had time to go off in the time since he killed it, and because he had kept his pack zipped up, the flies hadn’t been able to get at it. ‘Could you set up a spit?’ he asked. ‘A couple of tall sticks either side of the fire and a horizontal piece over the top . . .’