Evening Star Newspaper, December 29, 1929, Page 86

THE SUNDAY STAR., WASHINGTON, D. The Great Str Facing the Overlord of the Jungle at the Height of His Arrogant Strength; Terrible in Life and Terrible in Death—A Triumphant Adventure Related by a Woman Hunter. EDITOR’S NOTE: Mrs. Brad- ley, noted novelist and big game er, here concludes her series of articles on trailing the tiger in the Far East. With her hus- band, Herbert Bradley, she had come from triumphant experi- ences with lions in Africa, only to meet with failure in hunting tigers at Sumatra. So they ship- ped to Indo-China and went out into the jungles. BY MARY HASTINGS BRADLEY. T seemed strange to us that there were people anywhere who elected to stay in their beds or yawn at plays or doze at operas. They should come out at night, on foot, into tiger land, step by step into the mysterious dark, with a thread of light throwing its will-o’-the-wisp ray into the shadows . . . listening to the bark of the deer and the leopard’s cry . . . hearing soft rustles that make them stiffen in their tracks and their blood pound so that it seemed the tiger's thud. . . . The taste of life was never so keen on my lips as in those times. :fore dawn we were up, in the blackness of early tropic hours, buckling on cartridge pouches and seeing to the guns. We hunted gsur, buffalo and deer, but still we failed to find a tiger. Then one morning a native materialized out of the darkness by our tents like an appari- tion. A tiger had eaten the dead buffalo we had set out as bait. Excitement gripped us. A tiger—our chance at last! But chance had betrayed us so often that we had no elation of hope, only a tense de- termination to seize this new opportunity and see what happened. “Are you sure that it is a tiger which has eaten?” we wanted to know, grimly mindful of our day when we had waited and waited and a glant reptile, not a tiger, had emerged. The tracker was positive. The buffalo had been eaten as a tiger begins eating—at the tail. ‘The tiger must be lying up near, ready to return. We must hurry, to reach our bush before the light came. No more gaur hunt now. Hastily we swallowed some hot coffee and snatched a bite or two of bread while the horses were led up, then we mounted and set out, the tracker running along ahead of us as guide. The land was ghostly with the first intima- tions of morning, and through the grayness the glant pines rose darkly, like columns in some dim crypt. The guide circled in and out the trees and our horses followed closely. HEN we dismounted and stole through the s on foot, till we were on the edge of the ravine, directly above the dead buffalo. More than halfway down the steep slope was the bush, across which a reinforcing screen of reeds had been built, and the buffalo was 150 feet beyond that, directly in front of the green wall of the jungle. Down the slope we crept, crouching low, and being as silent-footed as possible in the attempt to outwit the stealthy beast, which might be in any bush before us at the moment. If he saw us the hunt was probably finished before it was begun. We should spend our weary hours there in vain. We reached the shelter of the blind and cau- tiously raised the leaves that covered the tiny holes left for peepholes. There was a long stretch of tall, waving grass sloping down before us, with bushes on each side, then the dark blue that we knew to be the dead buffalo, and be- yond, the blotting darkness of the jungle. Herbert and I took our positions, each with an eye at a peephole, our guns leaning beside us. The tracker squatted on his heels at our side, patient and immobile. It was growing lighter and lighter; the dark- ness paled and retreated as the brightness . gained in the east. There were little morning noises, the familiar sounding crow of the wild cock, the cropping of a family of wild pigs on the grassy slope to the right, the bark of a dis- tant deer. The sun seemed to shoot up in the sky and its heat poured out on us as if a door had been ed from a furnace. We stood still there, mlm staring out intently. The buffalo was clearly seen now. Clearly discerned, in every meaning. It was a long- dead buffalo and it asserted its deadness with every breath of the rising breeze. I had known an African cannibal once who for days cherished a lion’s paw that he used as a sort of savory at the end of his regular meals, and I had thought that lion’s paw was the deadest thing in the world. But I was wrong. It did not seem to me that any tiger, that any animal on earth, could take an appetizing interest in anything so vociferously dead as that buffalo! I tried to steel myself against it by calling on all my nature-loving soul to observe the exquisite » lemon green of the morning sky and the misty delicacy of the leafy tree tops. . . . Nothing to do but stand and wait and watch - . . & dragging business if you are not keyed up by hope. . . . I kept telling myself that some- where out in that green into which I was strain- ing my eyes was the great striped beast we had hunted so long, sleeping, or perhaps padding about on stealthy feet, staring through the jungle at us. Six o'clock. Seven o'clock. Eight o'clock. Nine o'clock. . . . Priends of ours had got their tiger at a quarter to 9, so I had set 9, mentally, as a lucky hour, but 9 passed uneventfully. Then I remembered a story I had heard about a tiger that had been seen at 11 o'clock and I set 11 as the time at which things would happen. Tn'l: business of standing motionless on yeur feet for hour after hour had a way, I noticed, of losing its first charm of novelty. By 11 o'clock I felt I had exhausted all the possi- bilities for joy in the situation. I never-wanted to stand still again so long as I lived. I knew Herbert was sharing my emotion. Our only diversion was to glance warningly at each other if we rattled a leaf. There is no strain on the family tie, or on any tie of friendship, com- parable to hunting! A little matter of clear~ ing the throat or munching chocolate or scuf- fling the feet separateth very friends. You al- ways know that if the other had not made just the noise he did, at the moment he did, you would have got your lion or whatever you were after. E will say for Herbert and myself that no violets were more unobtrusive by their mossy stone than we behind that bush. He is a fisher- man, anyway, and watchful waiting comes easier to him than to me, but nothing could have surpassed my dogged determination not to give a hint of our presence to betray us to that tiger. The minutes passed with incredible slowness, The sun burned hotter and hotter. We would not stir, One of us could have rested while the other watched, but we were too strung up for that. Our nerves were tense. Eleven o'clock. Nothing happened. Then 12, The sun was high overhead. burning up; the blood throbbing in my temples, I thought of the nights on an African moun- tain when we had stood on guard against marauding elephants, shivering with cold on the wind-swept heights, and I wondered why I had ever objected to cold and wind. From the jungle beyond us came a sound of splashing water. Tigers played in water. Was it the tiger—or was it the herd of gaur we had seen the day before? I looked question- ingly down at the tracker and he grinned back at me, confirming my tiger hope. A little later it seemed to me that I could see, through the swimming waves of heat, the gleam of a striped face for an instant between the green jungle growths. It was gone even as I thought I saw it, and I told mystelf that it was all a trick of my straining eyes. I was getting so I could see tigers all over the place. At 2 o'clock came a rush of clouds, fore- warning of the storm that was sweeping up with equatorial fury. The darkness shut swiftly in about us, the heavens opened overhead and all the waters in them came crashing down on us. The tracker shivered and slipped softly away up the ravine. We put our guns under our coats to keep them dry, and for the next two hours we stood there in the soaking down- pour, wondering if we had really been nice and dry and hot a short time before. Then the rain ceased and the sun came out more faintly, and the tall grass about us, bend- ing with rain, began to straighten while the glistening, beaded drops on it dried. We took turns now sitting down close by the blind, cautiously stretching a cramped arm or leg. In my turn I beguiled myself by writ= ing out a telegram to be sent back to our com- panions if thie hunt turned out well. T wrote: “Aristide passed away at 5:15 this afternoon.” Then I stopped—5:15 was too near. If I set that as a time and it passed, uneventfully, I should be robbed of hope. So I wrote 5:45 in- stead. I added, “The end came suddenly, while fie was dining.” I printed this out carefully and held it up for Herbert to look at, but from his perfunctory smile I could see that hope was not radiant in him. There was just doggedness left—the thing was an endurance test. THE day was fading fast. Five-thirty , . . Five-forty. . ., . In a few minutes it would be too dark to see to shoot if anything did come. As soon as it was dusk the tiger might begin to prowl, and do his prowlinng anywhere about us. We began to glance over our shoulders rather warily. Only 15 minutes more in which it would be possible to shoot, I thought, glancing at my wrist watch. It was just 5:45. I was at the blind, peering through the peep- hole on Herbert's side, and Herbert was directly behind me, sitting down. There was a feeling in the air that the day was done. And then, iped B I felt. C, DECEMBER 29, 1929, B—— | Out of the wall of distant shadows came a gleam of gold and black—vivid as lightning against the green—and the tiger walked out of the jungle. as I looked out, realizing every moment slipping by as something palpable, bearing forever away the chances it might have held—I saw some- Out of the wall of distant shadows came & gleam of gold and black—vivid as lightning against the green—and the tiger walked out of the jungle. e Never in my life had I seen such a picture. Elephants by moonlight, lions at dawn, gorillas at blazing noon I had seen, but nothing was ever so beautiful and glorious to me as that tiger walking out of his jungle. He was every~ thing that was wild and savage, lordly and sin- Ister. He seemed to materialize like something in @ dream, and for a moment I could imagine I was dreaming. He stood, projected vividly against the forest, and he looked enormous. The great striped roundness of him was like a barrel. Then he moved, and seemed to flow along the ground, nearer and nearer. He stopped and looked up at our bush. I could hardly breathe. If he should take alarm! He stared, his head lowering, then, apparently reassured, he turned his head toward the dead buffalo and walked over toward it. Then I dared let the leaf go back into place while I turned to Herbert behind me. My lips formed, “Tiger here,” and over Herbert's face came a look of sheerest pity and commiseration. “Poor girl,” he thought, “she’s dreamed tigers and she’s looked for tigers—and now she thinks she’s seeing them!” Then his face changed. He rose and I moved, mechanically, to his side as he stepped forward to his place. Noiselessly we lifted the leaves over our peepholes and raised our guns to fill the opening. My eyes raced down the barrel of my rifle in frantic fear lest the vision of that tiger be gone. The tiger was there, to the right of the buffalo, a picture of savage life and death. So he must have stood many times, over his kills, wary, yet arrogant in his great strength, lording it over the jungle, inspiring terror in every living thing—superb and terrible. I dared not project my gun as I wished; I leveled it as best I could, stepping backward, and aimed on the head for the brain shot I had been told was best. “Ready?” I breathed; then, before Herbert's signal came back, the tiger began to weave his head from side to side, looking up at us. I had been told to wait until he began to eat, when I would have a chance for a clear aim, but I dared not wait. I shifted my aim hastily from the brain to a black stripe across the backbone at the top of the shoulder. I never felt so cold and tense in my life. “Ready,” breathed Herbert. I was to fire at any time now, and he was to follow with his big gun, in case mine had missed. He was giving me the shot—but we weren’t going to lose that tiger if we could help it. I fired on the instant, and the roar of his gun followed mine. Then the roar of the tiger drowned them both. I tore out around the corner of the blind, where I could see in the open, and Herbert east of Indo-Chin plunged after me. The tiger was down, we could not see him in the deep grass, but his snarling roars told us he was out there. “He'’s down!” we said, and then, “He’s gone!” for now we had a clearer outlook and saw that he was gone from beside the buffalo. The snarls were going away. Now, we knew all about the counsel not to follow a wounded tiger, but to wait for two hours, until he was stiffer, and then track him, It was good advice, but this was a case not for advice, but for action. It was darkening each instant and there was no time to waste. So down we went through that long grass, step by step, watching each side, for there might be a tigress anywhere, We came to the buffalo and followed a flattened grass trail leading back into the jungle. It was dim in there, but there was light enough to see. TH! tiger was lying stretched out, about 50 yards from the buffalo. As we came up he roared with fury, dying as he was—dying by violence as he had lived. Every night of his life he had been nourished on the blood and pain of some defenseless creature, and now a sudden, sharp destruction had struck him down. He had been terrible in life and he was terrible in death. With guns ready, we stood watching that last moment, searching the shadows for the possible tigress. The native tracker had heard the shooting from the top of the ravine, where he had come out to wait for us, and now he and his " men came stealing warily in to us, the tracker with his own gun alert, for he, too, feared a tigress. When they were quite sure the tiger was dead they all took hold of that great barrel of a body and staggered with it out into the open. It was all the eight men could do to carry it. He was a huge beast, big and fat, with a superb skin. One shoulder, the left, was smashed from Herbert’s bullet, for he had shot to cripple. It would have been a fatal wound. But my shot had gone to its mark, straight through the black stripe into the backbone, The bullet had entered by the smallest of holes, but it was hollow ground and had expanded and smashed out a portion of backbone as big as my two hands. That tiger was a dead tiger the instant he fell, yet such was his dying strength, his amazing vitality, that he had pushed himself 50 yards down hill into the jungle. Quickly now and loudly we counted the whisk- ers and tied them with grass to protect them from the natives. For tiger whiskers are the most useful sort of magic—just one of them ground up and introduced into the food of a neighbor is considered a strong enough charm to kill him. From the anxious persistence with which our Mois hovered about that tiger’s head, we fancled that there were several unpopular neighbors in the village that they wished to work upon. The sheer size of that tiger gave us a thrill, Continued om Nineteenth Page