Tracks of the Tiger (14 page)

The noise of someone crashing though the jungle behind them made Beck look round. The logger! He was the least of their worries now. Beck tried to swallow, clear his throat, shout a warning. But his body wouldn't obey him. It felt like some force was compelling him to keep quiet.

Then he remembered that tigers like to attack from behind. He whipped his head back to face the animal. That was one thing he did know about encountering a tiger – try to keep facing it. This one didn't seem very impressed by the show of resistance. It snarled and lashed its tail.

The tiger's face was narrow. The deep fur around its eyes was striped white and black. Beck suddenly felt he was looking into the eyes of an old, wise man. They were golden, he saw now, not just yellow, and the tiger's gaze seemed to bore into his skull. And Beck suddenly felt goose pimples up his back. He felt their minds connect.

And through all his terror, Beck felt such respect for the tiger. It was an amazing creature. A perfect killing machine. Every particle of it belonged in this humid, overgrown world. It didn't matter how hard Beck and Peter tried, they would always be strangers here. Maybe the tiger was the jungle's defence mechanism, the same way Beck's body would produce antibodies if he caught a cold. Maybe this was how the jungle fought back.

Never turn and run
 . . . Beck remembered now. His father had often told him how tigers are chase animals. They pursue you if you try to outrun them.
Hold your ground. Hold your nerve
. Beck's father's voice was loud and calm in his ear, as it had always been at critical moments in his life.
Hold your nerve.
Somehow Beck felt calm now; he just knew that whatever was about to happen was
right
and they couldn't fight it.

Then the tiger pounced and the spell was broken. A deadly predator was flying straight at them. Beck instinctively dived and pushed Peter away with all his strength, then scrambled away in the other direction. Give it two targets: one of them might survive.

But the tiger reached where they had been standing in one bound, then kept going. It sprang right past them and disappeared into the undergrowth, towards the approaching logger.

Peter and Beck stared at each other.

‘It . . . it could have taken us!' Peter gasped.

He was right. It could have. Beck didn't say anything out loud, but he looked back in the direction the tiger had gone for a moment. Did the creature really understand they weren't the ones who were a danger to the jungle?

‘Let's not wait for it to change its mind . . .'

They ran in the other direction. Beck wasn't even sure what direction it was, except that it was away from the tiger.

The jungle didn't get any easier to run through. Its hands reached out and grabbed at them. It snagged their clothes and caught their feet.
And where do you think you're going?
it seemed to be saying.
Just hold on a moment . . .

But fear made them press on. For all they knew, the tiger might change its mind and come after them. It could be gliding effortlessly through the tangled masses of vegetation while they lumbered their way through.

But then they heard another noise in the distance – a human scream. Then it was cut off, as if someone had thrown a switch.

The boys looked at each other and shuddered.

‘Will it come back for us?' Peter asked. His chest was heaving.

‘Not if it has its kill.'

Beck slowed down and tried to get a grip. They needed some plan or they would just end up walking in circles. He had to get an idea of their direction again – and find a source of drinking water and food. They would need shelter for that night. None of the basic survival requirements had changed. Protection. Rescue. Water. Food.
Just remember the basics, Beck
.

And they had to keep moving. The tiger was unlikely to be alone.

‘We need to find the river,' Beck said, ‘and keep going.'

They did find the river again. The sound of running water led them to it. The banks were shallower here. The land was flattening out and the river was widening. Beck knew that this meant they must be getting nearer to the sea. He was still counting on the river bringing them either to the coast or to civilization. It looked like at least one of those might be near.

The boys pressed on through the jungle with a new urgency. It had fed them and sheltered them, but it had also made it quite clear that it did not belong to humans. It had a life-force of its own and it certainly wasn't cutting them any slack. So they followed the water, they kept an eye out for crocodiles and they kept moving.

The river began to widen more now, and its flow grew slower. This was definitely a river nearing the end of its course. The water was getting darker and, Beck noticed, the going underfoot was becoming harder.

They had been climbing over fallen trees, or ducking under low-hanging branches. Now there were times when that was all they seemed to do.

‘Is it just me,' Peter said eventually as they helped each other clamber over a tangled mat of dead branches, ‘or are all these trees growing horizontally?'

‘It's the tsunami,' Beck told him grimly. He helped Peter climb back down to the ground. ‘Remember? Boxing Day two thousand and four. This giant wave washed over coastlines all around this part of the world. In some places it went inland a mile and it killed over three hundred thousand people. This place would have been under three metres of water.'

But nature bounced back, Beck reflected. Animals, insects and plants carried on regardless. Nature's relentless march. Apart from the fallen trees, there was nothing to tell this had once been a place of death. The thousands of corpses had long since rotted away, or been consumed by crocs.

Peter was quiet for a moment. Then his face brightened. ‘But that must mean we're close to the sea!'

‘We can't be far,' Beck agreed, and after that there was a spring in their step.

They still couldn't see any further than the nearest river bend. It was fun to fantasize that after the next corner the trees would suddenly clear and they would be looking out at a golden beach and blue sea. Then they could collapse onto the soft sand and let their exhausted bodies recharge.

After a while, though, a distinct smell began to tickle at Beck's nostrils and he guessed that they wouldn't be seeing the sea soon after all. The sea would be clean and fresh. This was pungent and rotting.

Sure enough, the view did clear as they came round a bend. The trees thinned out and disappeared. The river widened into a pool of dark water that vanished into a tangle of tall green reeds. Beck's heart sank as he looked out over what lay ahead. He had been forewarned by the smell, but the intimidating vista made the spirit drain out of him. He walked forward to the bank, where dark water lapped at his toes.

‘It's a swamp,' Peter groaned, ‘isn't it?'

‘Yup. It's a swamp.'

At least the jungle had given them firm ground to stand on. What lay ahead was a vast expanse of stagnant, stinking black mud and water. Beck knew it could be waist high, or deeper. It loomed in front of them for a width of about twenty metres, the length of a swimming pool. Then, beyond it, a thick mass of two-metre-high reeds grew straight out of the water. They were so closely packed together that they almost looked like blades of grass in a land of giants.

Beck peered in either direction, along the swamp's edge. Maybe they could go round? But, no, he knew the band of swamp could stretch for miles and miles and miles. Meanwhile the sea could only be a few hundred metres away, dead ahead. And they certainly couldn't go back – not into that realm of tigers and illegal loggers.

Rotting vegetation and putrid water. That had been the giveaway smell. Every dead thing in the jungle that got washed away by the river sooner or later ended up here. This was the sewer of the jungle, more decaying matter and disease per square centimetre than anywhere they had been so far. The home of snakes and death. And they were going to have to wade through it.

‘Can we swim it?' Peter asked. He was trying to look and sound optimistic. But from the way his face twisted when he looked at the water, Beck knew his friend was hoping for a miracle.

‘No,' he said. ‘We're going to have to wade through carefully – and I've got to keep it away from my wound. We definitely couldn't swim through the reeds. The only way to get through them is to push. Backwards.'

‘Backwards?'

‘The edges of those reeds can shred your face and hands. They are razor-sharp. It's easier to push through backwards.'

‘Easy to keep going round in circles too, I imagine.' Peter looked thoughtfully at the bed of towering reeds. His mind seemed to be running through the implications of being waist-deep in reeds that were taller than a man. ‘We won't be able to see a thing. No landmarks; we'll barely be able to see the sun to navigate by. We could lose all sense of direction.'

‘We need a plan,' Beck agreed. ‘If we had some other kit I'd make a compass, but we don't.' He sighed. ‘We'll just have to keep an eye—'

‘What would you need to make a compass?' Peter interrupted him.

‘Something that's metal, and very small. And it would have to be iron or steel. Magnetic. Your camera's all plastic and aluminium, so that wouldn't work and—'

‘This is steel.' Peter held up his left hand and his watch flashed in the sun.

Beck smiled and shook his head. ‘Sorry, Pete. It's still too heavy—'

‘Not the watch. This bit.'

Peter unbuckled the watch from his wrist and held it up. It was an old-fashioned leather strap with a buckle at each end. The central part of the buckle was a thin metal pin.

‘That's definitely steel?' Beck felt his hopes rising.

‘Definitely. It said on the box.'

‘Then it's perfect . . .'

Beck pried the pin of the watchstrap free. It was thin, just over a centimetre long. ‘This is going to sound weird . . .'

‘A lot of what you say sounds weird,' Peter said dolefully, looking at the remains of his watchstrap. He slid it into a pocket of his daysack and zipped it up.

Beck passed him the pin. ‘You need to hold it like this, between thumb and forefinger, and just stroke it through your hair. Slowly and gently, over and over again. At least a hundred times.'

Peter's only further comment was to raise his eyebrows. Then he took the pin and started to do as he was told. ‘And this magnetizes it?' Stroke, stroke, stroke . . .

‘Eventually.'

Anything with iron in it, like steel, could be magnetized. It was a case of making all the atoms line up in the same direction. That could be done by hitting it repeatedly. Or it could be done with an electric current. Or just a field of static electricity.

After three days in the jungle, Beck reflected, their hair was filthy. But even unwashed, matted hair generated a slight static charge when something was rubbed through it. By stroking it through his hair, Peter was gently magnetizing the metal pin. And something that was long, thin and magnetized would always point in one direction, like a compass needle – towards the magnetic north pole.

But Beck still needed something to support it. The field would be so weak that almost any resistance would overcome it and stop the needle from pointing. With a stronger magnet he could have dangled it from a string, or a piece of vine. But this tiny little thing would just be blown around by the slightest puff of wind or movement. Some kind of container was needed, and Beck could only think of one.

He looked unhappily at his water bottle. He could cut the end off it, fill it with water and float the needle on that. He would be plus one compass but minus a water bottle, and he really needed that too.

‘If we had wire,' Peter said conversationally (stroke, stroke, stroke), ‘we could probably connect the pin to my camera's batteries. It wouldn't be much of an electrical current but it would have the same effect—'

‘Yes!' Beck exclaimed. ‘Brilliant!'

Though it wasn't the camera he was after. While Peter kept stroking, Beck tugged the camera out of its case and removed the lens cap. It was just a piece of plastic that protected the glass of the lens, about five centimetres across and one deep. And it could hold water.

‘Um – may I?' Beck remembered to ask, knowing it was Peter's pride and joy.

‘Oh, please, be my guest . . .'