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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
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RGL e-Book Cover
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MELANCHOLY!—melancholy was not the word for it! Who would not be grim and glum, I asked myself, as I stared out into the stormy night from the mouth of a hill cavern, with only too scanty "leave" evaporating every minute; a world of new forests scarcely touched of the sportsmen at my feet and all the wrath of a tropical monsoon making havoc of my hopes in front?
Back in the cavern were a dozen crouching natives, the gear they had brought up that morning into the hills piled behind them and themselves, now that the scanty evening's supper was over, sitting round the blaze so still and silent, in their gray, steaming rags, that I could almost have fancied the moldering granite gods and demigods had come down off their pedestals in the neighboring Indian temple and had crowded round my fire for shelter from the pitiless sting of the storm outside.
And how that wind was howling! It was screaming shrill notes in the bare crags above us, as though a legion of tortured furies were being done to death up there, and down below it was filling the forests with the strangest, the most unearthly moanings that ever came from waving treetops or echoed over dreary expanses of reed and grass.
Between the infernal music of the wind the rain came down, not in the halting drizzle of more temperate places, but in diluvial torrents that hung in the light of our smoky fire like a thick gray curtain across the entrance, and as that deluge scoured down the hillside in a thousand hissing streamlets every now and then as we listened silently to the hundred tongues of the storm and pictured those bridgeless rivers that lay between us and our longed-for hunting grounds, sweeping through the mountain passes in wild, yellow torrents, the lightning came down—Indra or Siva or someone stamped on the black pall of the upper sky, and through a blazing rent, not a single thread, but a gushing river of light poured forth, an irresistible torrent of brightness, which burst from the black cupola of the heavens and poured in a thousand glittering blue cascades over the ruins of the angry clouds which had suddenly fashioned at its presence, down from terrace to terrace, filling the gullies between those vapory hills with streams of ethereal fire brighter than molten lava, and, while it dropped from pinnacle to pinnacle and flooded the glistening wet country all around with its own deadly brilliancy, the mouth of our cave came out jagged and black for a dazzling second against that shine. We saw every twig and stone as though it were broad daylight, the black, swaying jungle, the hills laced with silver runnels; we saw our shadows gigantic on the walls behind us, the dead light in each other's wide-open, startled eyes, and then it was inky blackness again, impenetrable, Stygian darkness, and through the cleft where the lightning had come came the thunder, instant, overwhelming—a sound that made one's soul quake and seemed as it rolled along to be tearing the very vitals out of the stormy mother world below us.
It was no good grumbling; we made up the fire, and presently the storm abated a little and between the gusts we now and then caught the complaining of strange birds and beasts, as much perturbed by the warring elements as ourselves. There were innumerable bats in the crevices overhead, chattering and wheezing as the smoke of our bivouac found them out; a damp and dismal owl in a neighboring cleft bemoaning the weather not less heartily, if a little more noisily, than ourselves; black monkeys howling in the big trees below, and then presently, during a long pause between the gusts, the deep roar of a belated tiger flooded out of his hiding place came up through the darkness.
That grim and sinister sound somehow unloosened the tongues of my dusky followers, and soon they began to tell in low voices one to another wonderful things of tigers and tigresses, the nervous eyes and eager gestures showing how keenly those swarthy hillmen felt the point and moral of the tales they told. Seeing I was interested in their talk, Jumma, the leader of the band, a man who only lived to translate my books, presently stood up among them and, salaaming low, said to me:
"Lord of wisdom! buckler of the poor!—no man with us tonight can tell a better tiger story than old Gunish yonder; there is such a story written all over his body by the tiger's own claws, which it were well worth your listening to if he would retell it—is it your magnificence's wish that he should speak?"
"Certainly," I said. "Come out of the shadow, Gunish, and let us see what it is that Jumma says is writ upon you." And out of the dusk, where he had modestly been trying to go to sleep with his head on a bundle of hard tent-pegs the head man dragged an old tracker, a strange, weazened little man with a bent back and muscles that no mortal day's marching could tire, with a skin like half-dried potter's clay and eyes under his ragged gray eyebrows bright as the jeweled eyes of a serpent. This quaint agglomeration of bones and sinews was hustled up to the fire by his companions, his shawl pulled off by friendly, insisting hands, and there, as the light of the blaze fell upon him, I noticed for the first time that his body was a mass of ancient scars, a patchwork of healed rents and tears, while his ancient limbs were full of strange turns and bends startling and pitiful to look upon.
"Gunish knows more about tigers, sahib," said the head man, pushing this reluctant individual forward, "than any man on this side of the Kistna and hates them better than a rat hates a mungoose.
"He has cause to," I answered, "if it was indeed a tiger who wrote those caligraphics on him! Sit down, Gunish, and tell me how it happened! No common mauling could have filled your unhappy body with all those clefts and crannies and knotted your arm and given you a dozen joints where mortal never had joints before. There, light that cigar and tell me exactly how it happened."
THE old fellow, after abundant manifestations of the honor to which he had been put by my addressing him, subsided among an eager circle of listeners on the far side of the fire, and puffed at his cigar until the red bead upon it shone in the darkness like a firefly. Then he took a chew of betelnut, and, staring into the embers silently for a minute or two, shivered a little, and drew his cloth a little more closely round his lean shoulders, and glanced nervously into the dark jungles beyond where the black night wind was ever and anon stirring the leaves with a sound like stealthy footsteps. Watching him closely, I thought for a time he would not bring his courage to the point of unrolling that dreadful story he presently told me, but after an interval I saw the blue cigar smoke and his swelling vanity were conquering his reluctance. Again and again he hesitated, and then at last, with a final stir at the glowing embers, which sent a column of flying sparks up to the stony roof, and painted the thick walls about us copper-colored, he launched into his narrative.
"I WAS young when it happened," he said, reflectively, "and foolish of necessity. One folly I had above others was a firm belief that no tiger who ever puts his fangs into the nape of a fat bullock's neck was a match for me in woodcraft or cunning. So it happened that when a sacred white temple cow had been killed on one occasion near my native village, I eagerly grasped the opportunity of showing my skill and ridding the district of the sacrilegious she-devil whose memory I thus, and thus, spit upon.
"I took my matchlock, and refusing the companionship of my brother, a better hunter than myself, and in complete confidence went on the trail of the beast in the yellow hide. I tracked her into a dry reed-bed where she had retreated a mile or two from her kill, and, not to venture overlong on your magnificence's patience, I was crossing a bit of sandy ground between two arms of the dry water-course when a little bird suddenly set up an excited twittering on a thorn bush ten yards ahead, and peering into the shadow, there I made out the tawning form of a tiger crouching in the long dead grass, and watching my cautious approach with sulky, contemptuous wonder.
"It is one thing, sahib, to be brave over a camp fire like this and another to have no fear at such a moment. I was young to the work, hot-tempered, and rash, and my hand trembled like a leaf as I brought my rifle to bear and glanced for a moment down the arabesques of the long steel and gold barrel. Yet is was not such a bad shot which followed. Through the curling smoke of the blue Delhi powder I saw the tigress, with a yell of pain, stand straight up on her haunches like a yellow pillar, and then swaying for a moment, go toppling backward into the dusty stream-bed above which she had been lying—what could I think but that she was dead, and, joyful with so easy a conquest, as the tiger fell back into the nullah I ran eagerly forward to the very brink of the bank, and there found the brute directly below me sitting on her haunches and rocking stupidly to and fro as though she would fall every moment, while the blood was running in a crimson trickle down her neck from a broad wound in her forehead.
Like a fool I shouted with delight and, raising my matchlock, which I had loaded as I ran to give her the finishing shot, stepped right onto the very brink of the steep, sandy bank. How can I describe what followed! my blood runs cold through my crooked veins even now to think of it! As I made that fatal step forward and raised the gun to my shoulder a second time I felt something give, the rotten soil crumbled under my heels and quicker than it takes to tell I was tumbling headlong through a cloud of dust and rubbish right into the jaws of that snarling beast below.
"My unfired rifle was tossed from my hand, my half-drawn hunting knife hurled from my fist as we closed, and then—I hardly know what came next. I have a dim recollection of plunging my fingers in agony and despair into the hairy throat, a wild vision of flying round in a vortex of dust and blood and yellow hide, of feeling my bones crush and crack under those tremendous paws and my flesh rip and tear as we surged to and fro, and then there was a moment or two of oblivion.
"When I came to I was lying on my back on the trampled sand, the blood patches on each side smoking up to a hot Indian sun, a purgatory of fierce fires racking every bruised and broken limb, and astride of me the tiger was standing panting, her wicked face twitching with rage, within a foot of mine, while over one eye was hanging a dripping crimson flap of skin cut from her forehead by the glancing of my first misdirected shot. Now I knew why she had so quickly recovered after the shock of that wound. Wah! the knowledge that she was as sound and well as ever burst into my heart like a rush of ice-cold water as I lay there bleeding from many wounds and staring helplessly at her.
"But the end was not to come so soon as you might have thought. She, that devil whose name I thus again spit upon, stood astride of me panting her fetid breath into my face and covering me with the trickle of her great raw wound for a minute or two; then sitting down on her haunches eyed me with a malicious deliberation as though turning some matter over in her mind. I very soon knew what she was thinking of. After having gone up to the top of the bank to make sure no other hunters were upon her tracks the tigress returned and when all my wounds had been smelled with greedy pleasure she stretched me out for greater convenience as a butcher arranges the carcass of a dead sheep, and then driving her great grinding fangs into the fleshy part of my neck with a sudden jerk and lift tossed me back over her shoulders and began to move away toward the broader nullah and her home in the hills beyond.
"It was only when she heaved me up like that that I knew for the first time my leg was broken. But I knew it then, and as the bones cracked and parted under the strain and the pressure on my throat of those piercing teeth half forced my eyeballs from my head the full capacity for suffering rushed back upon me, and I screamed for the first time—screamed till all the country round echoed with it—screamed like a rat in a gin—screamed till the dogs barked in the village two miles back, but never by a hair's breadth did that brute relax her hold.
"Jolting and slipping, every moment an exquisite agony to my torn body, my broken limbs trailing behind till every open wound was filled with dust and blood, we went through the thorn bushes and over the dry reed-beds to where a trickle of water ran along the main nullah between the broad sandy levels. Near the edge of the stream the tigress put me down for a moment while she drank her fill, and I still had sense enough to scrawl, as I lay, my name with a finger tip on the smooth yellow surface of the river bed, half hoping if a rescue came upon our trail they might know by that that I lived. Then on again, carried as a cat carries a mouse, toward the rocky hill that lay sweltering in the burning sunshine a mile away. Over the steaming rice fields, past the hamlets hidden in banks of rustling banana leaves, through the prickly coppices where the green and gold snakes slipped glistening out of our way, and the little birds on the twigs fled chirruping desperately to one another as the striped terror of the jungle slouched past them.
"I knew then that she was taking me away to her lair in the hills, to be stored up against the time her royal appetite should return, but little did I know how long that thing would be delayed. We crossed the flat country, the plowmen behind the teams of sleepy red oxen dropping their goads and flying for their lives to their villages as I waved a bloody and feeble arm to them from the tiger's shoulders. Then up into the woods, at first bare and thin, where the peacocks scuttled through the dry herbage like painted beams of light, and sulky wild boars sat on their haunches champing their ivory fangs and flashing hatred from angry yellow eyes as we broke in upon their midday sleep. Up into the thicker tangles through the forests of piercing sword grass and disjointed rocks, until at last, at the foot of a bamboo clump, with a thick low roof of boughs overhead, the tigress laid me down in her den.
"It was a fair place enough, with the sunlight making patchwork on the flattened grass, the low country a mile below shimmering in the midday heat as we saw it, under the eaves of the branches, and half a dozen yards away the water of a mountain stream gathered in a deep pool among ferns and emerald mosses. That dim black basin of delight fascinated me at once. I fixed my greedy, bloodshot eyes upon it instantly, for by this time I was mad with thirst, my tongue a black lump rattling in my mouth and my veins filled, it seemed, with surging molten metal. Presently as I stared—indifferent to fate so long as I could get a drink—the tigress, who had dined too well the day before to much covet the lean meal I was to make her later on, subsided on her bed of leaves, and with a deep sigh of contentment let me roll from her side, and shortly afterward seemed to doze. I saw the sleepy lids shut all but down over those cruel sleek eyes, and though Siva was merciful—at least it was given to me to drink before I died, and inch by inch, suffering the tortures of the lost as my limb dragged behind me, pulled myself over the intervening space.
"I was within a foot of the pool, my hand was hollowed to lift the blessed fluid up to the ghastly face mirrored in the black pool, when there was a velvet soft step behind me, another face imaged in the mossy basin and before a drop of the water could touch my cracking, blood-stained lips the she devil behind had drawn me back with a playful snarl to her sleeping place.
"Again and again I tried with desperate persistence before I had been in the lair many hours to get that draught, dragging my twisted limbs over the bloody path my first exertions had made, and every time she played with me like a woman, letting me get to the edge with my crazy desire for a drink strained to madness by the sight of the fluid, then tearing me from it, until at last even my thirst could not spur me to another effort and I lay between the tigress' paws, only wondering and hoping now for signs of that new appetite in the great beast which, when it came, would, I knew, put an end to my tortures.
"Meanwhile every faculty of mine was on edge, every perception extraordinarily acute. Instead of being numbed by my wounds the poisoned fangs of that she fury and the fever of my mind had filled me with a strange, keen, fantastic life. I lay there hour by hour, with my head on my devourer's paw and swarms of flies crowding to my blackening wounds, and watched the low country through the fringe of leaves. I could see the roof ridges of the nearest villages and the women washing at the steps; I could catch the twinkle of their bangles in the sunshine, ah! I could note, so fine was my strained hearing, the fall of their washing sticks on the wet linen and the creak of the wooden yokes as the oxen turned at the head of the furrows in the neighboring fields—yet still the respite came not!
"But presently, late in the afternoon, as the sun got low, her ladyship grew playful, and would romp with me before supper time came, playing as a cat will play with a wounded mouse, hiding behind the bamboo clumps and bounding out upon me; harping on my fears, rolling on me in the pure wantonness of her cruelty, taking me between her feet, and with a playful kick or two of her hind legs tearing open my half-closed wounds, and then, suddenly changing her snarling glee in my agonies, she would with an even more dreadful pretense of affection lie down on her side, and, drawing me into her furry bosom, the great lappet of raw flesh over her left eye adding a grewsome ludicrousness to her looks, would slobber over me, rasping my face with her hot rough tongue, and so pretend to sleep again.
"But why should I make that day so long, sahib? As the sun dropped down crimson and yellow behind the hills, and the faint fine smells of evening came up from the distant villages on the blue smoke of the new-lit hearth fires, the tigress got up and yawned. With a thrill of delight I recognized what that meant; I was not afraid now of that hideous red gullet and that slaughter-house breath; it fired me with a last outburst of fury. My hour had come, I knew it, and, all my rage and suffering lending me one last fierce flash of strength, I staggered to my shattered knees and, with a savage yell of hatred and defiance, tore the bloody rags of my shoulder cloth from me and, spitting in that royal harpy's face, bared my breast and invited my destruction! As I did so, at the very instant as she, that fiend in yellow, dropped back on her haunches for the fatal spring, her face twitching with gratified expectation and her tail gently swinging to and fro among the dead brown leaves, there came the sharp crack of a matchlock from the rocks ten yards above us—a thunderous roar of pain and surprise from the great brute—a mighty crash beside me, and as a black and gold carcase rolled over dead into the bamboo clumps below, I turned and with the last reeling glance of my darkening eyes saw my brother's exulting face peering down upon me through the blue matchlock smoke."
AS the battered and scarred old hunter finished his story and drew his gray shawl across his face to hide his emotion its retelling caused him even now, a long silence fell upon us. We sat in stillness staring at the last embers of the fire camp until suddenly the head man raised his hand and pointed to the door of the cave. "The dawn, sahib! the dawn!" he said, and we looked round. We saw the rain had stopped, the night was spent, and in the east swiftly widening crevices of brightness had come in the dark web of the sky and were broadening and spreading one above the other, as the golden stairway of the coming sun was laid for him, while far overhead, from east to west, the sky was flashing brighter every moment with green and salmon color and a most heavenly breath of earliest morning was stealing over the tired and sleepy world.
"Good!" I said, "the dawn! Out with the fires; pack the kit; and you, Jumma, see that from this moment old Gunish's load is halved and his pay doubled," and as that crabbed adventurer burst into a galaxy of delighted smiles and bows we gladly forgot his dreadful story in the picturesque bustle of striking an Indian hunter's camp.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.