Evening Star Newspaper, December 15, 1929, Page 120

_20 THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C., DECEMBER 15, 1929, ey On the Trail of the Tiger in Sumatra By Mary Hastings Bradley. In the Land Where Hungry Beasts Have Attacked Natives in Their Own Homes. Lion Hunters in Quest of New Game. Beating the Jungle. FRICA lay behind us, a blue blur on the horizon. Zanzibar, white sands and jade-green reef water, slanted palms and scent of cloves, was slipping farther and farther away on the bright seas of the Indian Ocean. We were off to the Indies, to British India, to the Dutca Eest Indies, to French Indo-China. There were the four of us who had just jour- neyed 3,500 miles through Africa—1,400 of them on foot—my husband and myself; our small Alice, who had her ninth birthday in the in- terior of Africa, and Miss Williams, a trained nurse, Alice’s guardian-companion. We had a variety of interests in the journey ahead of us, studies of colonial expansion, native rights of property, comparison of the native life with that of the tribes of Africa—and the tiger. My personal horizon was striped orange and black with that tiger. We knew nothing of tigers. There are no tigers in Africa, though novels of South Africa speak of tigers because the Boer farmers often give that name to leopards. The very newness of the game appealed to us, in ‘imagination, at rest in our deck chairs. > We were lean and leg-weary from tracking el>phants through the depths of the Ituri for- est, as offerings to the cannibal tribes with whom we were sojourning, from stalking buffalo through deep grass, from hurrying across end- less plains after lions that had four legs to our two. VE had made the first expedition through the untouched mountains west of Lake Ed- ward in the Belgain Kongo—a little jaunt that 2 recommend to those travelers who wish to escape from the luxuries of the too-easy beaten path cf Africa!—we had stood all night on shiveringly cold African highlands, our guns at attention, while raiding elephants pillaged with- in 30 feet of us—we had faced angry, uproarious cannibals—we had done a lot of things that would never be dull in our memories, so for the moment we were greatly content to be doing n:thing at all more violent than looking forward to pleasantly distant activity. In India we were merely travelers. We had no designs upon the Bengal tiger, for shooting tigers from an elephant was no part of our plans. My husband always hunts on foot, though not from any love of walking. It is the mcst difficult and the most dangerous of hunt- ing, and the most rewarding in experience. Shooting from an elephant is certainly a test of marksmanship, but you must lose that thrill danger which is the exhilaration of hunting ig game. Moreover, we had read so much about that way of hunting, and we heard so much from the English passengers, on the Karagola, that we fancied we should feel ourselves enacting a familiar drama. The clamorous drive * * * the beaters advancing * * * the slinking, tawny form slipping through the reeds—then the rifle’s roar, the snarl of the wounded beast and the striped fury flinging itself upon the elephant, plucked opportunely off by the elephant’s trusty trunk. ¢ * ¢ 4 No, we'd go to our rendezvous on foot. For us the pastures new of Sumatra, where tigers were said to abound, and initiation to whatever type of hunting prevailed there. So across India we went as travelers and our oniy encounter with tigers was in the Victoria Gordens at Bombay, where we stood and watched the great striped beasts weaving to and fro in their cramped cages, and wondered if we were actually to meet them face to face in their native jungles. The tiger in captivity gives a keener impres- sion of the natural wild animal than any other. The lion has a dignified, bored apathy to a man- made world; the Indian elephant—I have never s2ezn an African captive in the zoos—is a melan- choly creature of routine; the buffalo becomes a dull, grazing brute; but the tiger is forever un- reconciled to his imprisonment, forever ruthless Those implacable green eyes staring out of the bars at you, the throaty snarl and the tongue hot for blood, the lashing tail and the at muscles rippling under the gorgeous skin, impatient for their old, free launching through space—all these create for you the un- dying savagery of the tiger's soul. Nothing that I saw of captive tigers made me underestimate the beast we were to meet. India we saw briefly as a succession of pic- tures. Teeming bazaars, clamorous with acqisitiveness, veiled women with clinking anklets, wandering sacred cows, filthy fakirs with matted locks and whitened faces, golden temples, palaces of breath-taking beauty, mud viilages of heart-breaking squalor, mosques and acches, starving dogs, gaunt ribs of hunger, j>wvels of glittering splendor; rainbow silks, rivers of scwage. » Burma and the Streets of Shimmering Silk. FROM Calcutta we sailed for Penang. We stopped at Rangoon, lured there by the glamour of the gold-pinnacled pagoda of Schwe Dagon, parting the clouds of east and west, and to see the “elephants a-piling teak.” Rangoon was bright with color, the Burmese were a plump and jolly lot, apparently pleased with existence. The streets shimmered with silk. There was nothing somber about even the priests who strolled about in yellow robes under brown umbrellas—the left shoulder bare if in the first stage of priesthood, the right if in the second. The Burmese girls were the prettiest things we had seen for a long time, soft, brown crea- tures with vivid silk drawn tight over slender hips, black hair sleek as a raven’s wing, a whitc magnolia in place over the ear. The whacking white cheroot was there, too, in the picture. But we were through with onlooking and be- gan to be gripped by the tension of a definite purpose and the uncertainty of its success. The tiger hunt was drawing near. We took a Dutch boat across the straits to Sumatra. Our first objective was Brastagi, on the pla- teau of Kara, 4,300 feet high. The place lingers in my memory as one to which I must sometime, for sheer pleasure, return. There was an agree- able hotel, mainly occupied by English on holi- day from Siam or the Malay Peninsula, set out among rose gardens with mountains and wil- derness flung all about it. There were seven volcanoes on the horizon. I had felt rich, in Africa, with two vclcanoes at once. Seven seemed to me a plutccratic plethora. There was a tiger at Brastagi. We heard of him through the head forester. This tiger was in a certain strip of hilly jungle. A tiger has u way of taking over a certain territory for his own, roving up and down it, now here, now ihere, as the hunting cffers, until, at his death, another tiger takes over the place. The jungle this particular tiger was known to inhabit was a strip about five miles long, just about big enough to keep him in small game. The forester felt that he was the very tiger for us. Inquiry discovered that the natives had glimpsed him not long since. The thing to do, we were told, was to crganize a hunt, engage a flock of beaters to get the tiger on the move, then try to waylay him on some of the little grass trails he might be moving on. It was not much of a chance, but it was some- thing of one, and the head forester set himself to engaging beaters and making arrangements. He was to notify us when everything was in readiness. It did not seem to us possible that success could come from any proceeding that involved so little preliminary effort on our part, but we were at liberty to hope. At any rate, there was a tiger there, a big tiger, the natives said. For years they had seen his footprints in the paths, as they gathered wood on the mountain or went about the work of road-making with which white dominion oc- cupies the dark brothers' time, and sometimes they had casually glimpsed him. In Africa 1 had always had to work long and hard for any big game that I had got, but I felt there was no reason why Fate should not relent and throw me, offhand, just one ravening tiger in the path! While we -waited, Herbert and I vented our impatience in dashing about the country on the little stallions of the Batuks, mad horses thai know no law but speed, going full tilt uphill or down. I took curves with angles that swung me out over abysses where I could look down and see the pretty green spot, 2,000 feet below, where the body would land. * * * The rivers under ma were silver threads, the village fields were pygmy checker-boards. Each return from a ride was like a return from a hunt—full of fresh miracle at being alive. A Then the forester announced that the beaters were secured and that the hunt could take place EAGERLY we got out the familiar khaki, bleached with African sun and the hard soap of many washings, opened the gun cases and unpacked the cartridges:- We were very warlike figures as we marched out of the hotel at dawn, and I felt foolishly incongruous to hotels and rose gardens; more so when the for- ester met us in gray tweeds, with white spats for leggings and a gray Homburg hat. His costume was more suitable than ours for the motor into which we climbed, that whirled us 10 miles away to a point where the forested mountain rose sharply from the road. About 25 ragged beaters rose from their atti- tudes of waiting and streamed leisurely after us as we left the motor and started up a way like a bridle path into the forest. The path mounted so steeply, with such interminable zig- zags, that Herbert and I confided our regret that we were not on horseback—already the comfort of Sumatra had made us slothful. Densely the jungle closed in about us and we felt at home again in the familiar green dimness, i\ififll i Wksoeers Y TR i Finally the tiger made such an opening that he reached down with a long paw into the tiny room. with its delicate intricacy of detail, with shafts of sun, striking arrowlike, on the tree boles, and splashes of it in open glades. Hardly had we begun the ascent when the voices of the beaters were heard behind us, in premature din, and the forester hurried back to silence that effort and explain their work all over again. They were to allow us time to reach a certain place he had in mind before they be- gan to work up to us. Up we went hastily, for an hour or more, lug- ging our guns, which I hate, for though I am an enduring walker I am a poor carrier. I wished heartily that I had taken one beater off the outcry business and made him the bearer of my gun. At last we came to a sort of saddle where the trails over the mountains crossed, and here we chose our positions, the four of us at wide dis- tances from each other, each guarding a trail. The idea was to lie in wait while the beaters made the forest so disturbing to the tiger that he would move, and move, it was hoped, along cne of those paths. 3 The tiger, it was reported, was an unhurried and lethargic animal, given to sauntering along paths. These forest . ways were his private trails; he had been living here unmolested for several years, living upon the deer, the wild pig and the smaller fry of the jungle. He seemed to have done no harm to the natives and they spoke of him with tolerable intimacy, almost friendliness. But he might not be so amiable when met face to face! And there were probably a good many shady things in his past that had never come to light—Ilittle, unconsidered deer, for ex- ample! The forester wished us good luck and turned back to meet the beaters with heartenings, and we took up our separate stations behind the bushes and began the business of watchfui waiting. We waited, with a sharp lookout, most un- eventfully till the morning was half over, then I began to hear a dismal-sounding din stealing through the forest. It was compounded of a banging of pans and a lugubrious, desultory yelling. * * * I wondered if the tiger found it annoying enough to rout him out of a morning nap. * * * The sounds worked nearer and nearer, and every once in a while some suddenly impas- sioned yell would indicate a private misfortune on the part of the yeller—a toe stubbed against a rock or an inadvertent bed of thorns. Nearer and nearer the noise came. Now was the time, it seemed to me, for some- thing to happen. I watched the trail; I tried to watch the entire surrounding scenery. The sun was nearly vertical and the shadows were underfoot like pools of darkness; the light struck down in bars of brightness and I saw orange and black stripes everywhere. Every rustle of a branch was a possibility; every stirring of the breeze an alarm. : BUT nothing continued to happen. Only the noise climbed higher and higher, until four of the performers limped into sight, and, dis- covering the locality and our probable prese ence, went off into a perfect riot of beating. I$ was the sort of noise which would make any right-minded tiger stay prudently at home, I thought. In the enthusiasm which their cer- tainty of being observed produced, the beaters plunged whooping down a gully before them which proved full of thorns and as they struge gled out of that they did some of the most earnest and individual work of the day. Its spontaneity left nothing unsaid. Other beaters were now emerging from the forest, but no tiger. So we climbed out from our thickets, told them to wait and rest a while, and we climbed for an hour higher up the mountain and hid ourselves anew while the beaters began again working up to us. There was no more mountain to climb and the beaters—there were 50 of them collected now— panting feebly on the earéh or extracting thorns from their. anatomies—indicated by every pos- sible attitude that no beating was left in them. ‘There seemed no point in continuing the ex- perience. It would take hundreds of men to comb the jungle properly; the tiger could have evadéd our little squad for a year. * * * We had tried a thousand-to-one chance because it was the only chance that offered, but enough was enough. We shouldered our guns and marched down the mountains, with the tiger probably watching us with sardonic amusement from behind his bush. Then, undoubtedly, he went to sleep again, to make up for lost time, and get ready for the night when he would emerge, yawning and stretching, twitching his whiskers, to scent his prey in the grateful hush of the night air, and steal out upon his business of dinner- getting. We went on to Kota Nopan, and we wished we had been there six nights earlier. For then & tiger had killed a buffalo just six miles away, The natives, with their spears, had gone after it and the tiger had adroitly circled and ate tacked one of the men, clawing him badly, That had put an end to the hunt for the time, but in a day or two the men got together again and tracked the tiger, which was wounded, till they came to where it was lying up. Then they flung their spears and stabbed it to death. The story gave us a nice reassured feeling— all but the clawing part. If a tiger had been here only six days ago we were at liberty to hope for other tigers before very long. The question was how to get at them. That was a game we did not know at all. None of our experience with lions was any use with tigers. No plains here to tramp over, beating out the thickets—no use rising before dawn in the hope of chancing on a tiger returning from the night's hunting. They were as stealthy and elusive as the African leopard, and even more noiseless. They hunted in silence, so there was