The two tiger cubs, romping in the jungle undergrowth near their den, prick up their ears.
While they play by themselves, they always half listen for their mother’s return. But these sounds are not what they want to hear. They are strange and alarming. Loud, staccato beats, clattering and banging – hacking and chopping – a trampling of green stems. And voices. Not animal voices, all familiar to them. These are voices alien to the jungle. And when they begin, other sounds, the sounds that make a constant, reassuring background to the cubs’ lives, fall silent.
They look around, anxiously. Something is coming. Where is their mother?
As the barrage of noise gets nearer, there is a sudden wild whirring over their heads. They look up, and see a blur of colour and affrighted movement as a flock of birds takes flight, disturbing the leaves.
Next, bands of monkeys go fleeing hand over hand through the canopy above, chattering and screaming in terror.
It is a signal. Beasts that have been hiding, spring up. The cubs see a buck stumbling clumsily among the trees, not far from them. At a greater distance, they hear an elephant trumpet a warning. Smaller creatures flee invisibly but audibly through the undergrowth. Every sound they hear seems to urge them to run. But they do not. The flight instinct conflicts with their mother’s training – they must stay by the den, where she can find them.
They crouch together, keeping low. There is a brief pause. Then suddenly the line of hunters breaks through the jungle thickets into the small clearing in front of the den.
The bigger cub tries to run now, but it is too late.
He is pounced on, seized by the scruff of the neck, and thrust into a sack. He squirms and squeals and tries to bite his captor, but it is useless. The smaller cub doesn’t even manage to struggle – he is enclosed in a dark, noisome place, and swung upward. They can see nothing now, but they hear the sound of trampling underneath them, and the ear-hurting other sounds fade. They are bumped up and down, their bodies distressed, their minds blank with bewilderment.
*
The two hunters who carry the sacks reach the edge of the forest where their horses wait. They hand their burdens to others while they mount, then take the sacks again and loop them over the pommels of their saddles.
The horses can smell the tiger-scent and begin neighing and curvetting, trying to get away from it. Their skilled riders use this fear to urge them forward. The tigress, they know, cannot be far away.
Behind them, in the jungle, the noise of the beaters continues. More beasts are being hunted and trapped.
The moment their heads are freed, the horses rear up, then gallop for the riverbank, where the boats wait.
With their goal in sight, the riders’ hair stands suddenly on end as they hear behind them the ferocious roar of a charging tiger. The horses bolt. Reaching the ramp that connects the bank with the first boat, the leading horse bounds up it. The one behind utters a scream as it feels the tigress’s claws tear its haunch – then, wild-eyed, it plunges up on to the deck.
The hunters disengage the sacks and fling them expertly to the waiting sailors. Then they jump from their horses, and turn at the rail to watch as others repel their pursuer.
As the cubs are carried down to where cages wait in the grim bowels of the ship, they cannot know that their last chance of rescue lies at the foot of the gangway with a spear through her heart.
The two cubs huddled together, their front paws intertwined, their heads and flanks pressed to each other.
Darkness crushed them, and bad smells, and motion. And fear.
The darkness was total. It was not what they were used to. In the jungle there is always light for a tiger’s eyes. It filters down through the thickest leaves from a generous sky that is never completely dark. It reflects off pools and glossy leaves and the eyes of other creatures. Darkness in the jungle is a reassurance. It says it’s time to come out of the lair, to play, to eat, to learn the night. It’s a safe darkness, a familiar, right darkness. This darkness was all wrong.
The smells were bad because there was no way to bury their scat. And there was the smell of other animals, and their fear. And there was a strange smell they didn’t recognise, a salt smell like blood. But it wasn’t blood.
It was bad being enclosed. All the smells that should have dissipated on the wind were held in, close. Cloying the sensitive nostrils. Choking the breath. Confusing and deceiving, so that the real smells, the smells that mattered, couldn’t be found, however often the cubs put up their heads and reached for them, sniffing in the foul darkness.
The motion was the worst. The ground under them was not safe and solid. It pitched and rocked. Sometimes it leant so far that they slid helplessly until they came up against something like hard, cold, thin trees. These were too close together to let the cubs squeeze between them. Next moment the ground tipped the other way. The cubs slid through the stinking straw till they fell against the cold trees on the other side. When the unnatural motion grew really strong, the whole enclosure they were in slid and crashed against other hard things, frightening the cubs so that they snarled and panted and clawed at the hard non-earth under their pads, trying in vain to steady themselves.
They would put back their heads and howl, and try to bite the cold thin things that stopped them being free. Then their slaver sometimes had blood in it.
When the awful pitching and rolling stopped and they could once again huddle up close, their hearts stopped racing, and they could lick each other’s faces for reassurance.
They were missing their mother – their Big One. They waited for her return – she had always come back before. But she was gone for ever. No more warm coat, no rough, comforting, cleansing tongue. No more good food, no big body to clamber on, no tail to chase, pretending it was prey. No more lessons. No more love and safety.
All their natural behaviour was held in abeyance. They no longer romped and played. There was no space and they had no spirit for it. Mostly they lay together and smelt each other’s good smell through all the bad smells.
As days and nights passed in this terrifying, sickening fashion, they forgot their mother, because only Now mattered for them. Now’s bewilderment, fear, helplessness and disgust.
There
