Tracks of the Tiger (16 page)

‘Hey, Beck!' Peter called. ‘Why did the tide go out?'

They weren't talking much. Walking was hot and thirsty work.

The sea breeze gave the illusion of fresh air, until you realized that your sweat wasn't actually evaporating. They had their sleeves rolled down and shirts done up to protect their skin against the sun. If it weren't for their hats, then their brains would have been frying long ago. Beck was glad they hadn't reached the beach until after midday, when the sun would have been at its highest and hottest.

‘I don't know,' Beck answered. ‘Why did the tide go out?'

‘Because the sea weed!' Peter sniggered and Beck rolled his eyes.

‘How old are you? Four?'

‘Yeah. Will you carry me, then?'

They kept walking in silence for a while. They stuck as much as possible to the sand that lay below the high-water mark. It was moist and firmer than the dry, loose stuff above. Better for walking on. The line was marked out with dead wood and weed and the occasional piece of manmade rubbish. It was all baked dry by the sun, so they would have no difficulty finding fuel for a fire that night.

Beck carefully studied every bit of flotsam that they came to in case there was something useful. A grimy length of rope, embedded with bits of weed. An old crate, which he could break up for firewood. An empty two-litre plastic bottle that had once held a fizzy drink.

‘Might come in handy,' he said, and put it in his pack.

When the afternoon rain came, they stood out in the open under the heaving sky. It was good to be able to wash, and to fill their bottles with fresh rainwater.

But the rain didn't last long. Then it was back to more walking.

‘OK, why does the sea roar?' Beck asked eventually.

‘Don't know . . .'

‘So would you if you had crabs on your bottom!'

Peter snorted. ‘How long were you thinking that one up?'

‘About an hour.'

‘My legs really ache. And this is me talking, not a four-year-old.'

‘I know.'

Beck felt it too. The slight slope of the beach meant that their right legs were taking shorter steps than their left, and that made their hips ache. There wasn't much that could be done about it.

A good excuse to rest soon came along. Beck's eyes lit up at what he saw ahead on the beach.

‘Fancy a break?' he asked.

The sand between the sea and the high-water mark was dotted with green specks. They were whelk shells – spirals like ice-cream cones the size of a clenched fist. Some of them moved, scuttling along on some journey that only made sense to the inhabitant.

Beck stood over the nearest one and quickly picked it up. Six spindly legs stuck out from beneath the shell, but their owner pulled them in the moment it realized someone had got it.

‘Shellfish?' Peter asked.

Beck passed it to Peter, who turned it in his hands as he studied it. It was just possible to make out a brownish-purple crustacean lurking in the depths. ‘Hermit crabs. They don't own these shells, they just borrow them. And tonight we're going to eat them.'

Peter's stomach rumbled at the thought. It seemed a very long time since they'd eaten the fish from the pool in the jungle.

He helped Beck gather up every crab they could find. They put them in their packs, zipped them shut and carried on walking.

The end of the day came as quickly as it had in the jungle. Out in the open, they could actually appreciate it. They were on the east coast of Sumatra and the sun sank down in the west, on the other side of the island. Red light scattered across the jungle and the beach, and their shadows stretched down to the sea like those of giants. The sky to the west was streaked with bands of orange and purple. To the east the dark came rushing in at them off the sea.

It only took a few minutes. The colour leached out of their vision and left only black and white and shades of grey. Night time scarcely made a difference to visibility because the moon was up – almost full in a cloudless sky. The boys could still see each other quite clearly and they kept on walking without a break.

And then, very faintly, the wind carried the whisper of a roar. It came from across the swamp, out of the jungle. They had no difficulty recognizing it.

‘Um,' Peter said, ‘you know you said tigers are nocturnal . . .'

‘He's got no reason to cross the swamp,' Beck told him as they trudged on. ‘Not when he's got the jungle to himself again. He's just saying goodbye.'

But even though his tone was flippant, they both glanced with respect in the direction of the roar. Beck knew that it might well be the same tiger they had seen. They were solitary animals and patrolled a wide territory.

‘It could have killed us,' Peter murmured, ‘just like that, but it didn't. We're only alive now because it let us be.'

‘So we use that gift,' Beck said.

‘To do what?'

‘To make sure the authorities hear about those loggers.'

They kept going for another couple of hours, finally calling a halt when the tide came in, forcing them off the firm sand. There was a cluster of coconut trees on the highest point of the beach, between sea and swamp, which Beck thought would make a good campsite.

He wasn't wrong. For a start, there was a slight hollow between the trees that would shelter them from the sea breeze during the night.

‘Welcome to Hotel Peter and Beck!' He clambered quickly up the nearest trunk. Long leaves exploded out in all directions at the top of the tree. Beck started to hack away clumps of them, as well as a cluster of coconuts sheltering in their midst. The coconuts hit the sand below with a satisfying
thud
that told him they were full of milk and flesh.

Peter, without even being asked, was building a fire out of the remains of the crate Beck had found earlier. Handfuls of crumbling dry seaweed provided the kindling. Beck jumped down and handed him the fire steel. Peter struck the fire's first sparks and blew gently on the smouldering palm fibres to encourage the flame while Beck arranged the coconut leaves into two mats.

‘We're just sleeping on the sand?' Peter asked. He sounded faintly surprised.

‘No, we're sleeping on the leaves on the sand. Why?'

‘I'd just read about this disease . . . um, leishmaniasis? You get it from sand flies and it gives you
really
nasty sores, so you're supposed to sleep off the sand . . .'

Beck grinned. ‘But you don't get it in Southeast Asia. You get it in America, north and south, and Asia, and the Middle East . . . but not here.'

‘Wow. You mean, someone somewhere is actually cutting us some kind of break?' The fire had caught nicely with the bone-dry wood. Peter sat down next to his friend and held his hands out to the warmth. ‘That's the nicest thing that's ever happened to me.'

‘Well, there was not being eaten by the tiger. That was quite cool.'

‘OK. Second nicest thing . . .'

They cracked open the crab shells with a rock and killed the crabs with a single blow. Each one of them had a single large claw and Beck showed Peter how to twist it off.

‘All the flesh is on the inside, and the claw is the bit with the most of it,' he said. ‘And cooking is easy . . .'

Cooking was just throwing the shells into some embers at the side of the fire to cook slowly. That bit really was easy. What was much harder was waiting while the smell of cooked crab tickled their noses and twisted their empty stomachs into knots. But when they finally ate, the taste of cooked food in their mouths was like an explosion of flavour and texture and juices. The wait was so worthwhile.

They used the crowbar to open up a couple of coconuts too. The lukewarm, oily coconut water inside was the perfect dessert.

‘It's like being back in the desert again,' Peter commented afterwards. Beck looked up from his work. He was sharpening a pair of sticks into points; the next morning they would use them for fishing. Peter was lying on his back next to the fire and looking up at the stars. He yawned and stretched; Beck gave him about five minutes before he fell fast asleep. ‘Except we're next to the sea, it's not freezing cold at night and no one's had to pee on anyone.'

Beck chuckled. Back in the Sahara, they'd had to wrap damp T-shirts around their heads to protect them from the desert heat – and the way to make the T-shirts damp without wasting water was, yes, to pee on them. He remembered Peter's horrified reaction to that news, and smiled.

‘Though the journey's not over yet . . .' Beck pointed out.

But Peter was already asleep.

Beck was standing up to his waist in the sea and staring intently into half an empty plastic bottle. The water surged lazily up and down his body.

It was early in the day but already warm. He had woken with the dawn and left Peter sleeping. He wanted to do this while the sun was still low, because the higher it was the stronger it would get. He had left his clothes on the beach and was only wearing his shorts. He could feel his shoulders already growing warm. Much longer and he would get burned.

He could have just kept his shirt on, but it would only get in the way while he was swimming. The wet fabric would be heavy and slow him down. If he found what he was looking for, he wouldn't need to worry about sunburn while he was in the water. And no one liked wearing wet clothes if they could help it.

Beck always smiled at those movies where the hero dives into water and can see perfectly beneath the surface. He can also stay down for minutes at a time on one breath. Beck knew from experience that if you didn't prepare and train, your lungs felt like they would burst after just a few seconds. And as for seeing perfectly, the best you could do was make out blurred shapes.

And so he had taken the plastic bottle they'd found the day before and cut the top off. This left him with a clear plastic tube, sealed at one end. By pushing this below the surface he got a clear view of life underwater. It was already clear enough for him to make out basic shapes, but this was like having a face mask, except that it wasn't fastened to his face. Now he could see everything.

The sea bed where he stood was sandy and striped with rippling light. Fronds of seaweed grew out of the sand and waved back and forth with the motion of the waves. There was a thin coating of small dark pebbles that had been worn smooth and round by the waves. Further out, Beck had already seen that the floor was rockier and coated with seaweed of red and blue and green.

A couple of fish flickered past him. They were about thirty centimetres long and they completely ignored him.

‘What are you doing?' a voice called.

Peter had woken up and was standing by the water's edge. He had his head on one side, watching Beck quizzically.

Beck held up the bottle. ‘Just testing . . .'

His foot had knocked against something solid, and it moved. He quickly pushed the bottle back into the water and gazed through it. A delighted smile spread across his face. ‘Perfect!'

From the shore, Peter saw Beck suddenly disappear below the surface. Then he stood up straight again, with water sluicing down his head and shoulders, and waded back to the beach with the bottle in one hand and what looked like a large rock in the other. It was the size of a squashed football, but it was light enough for him to carry easily.

‘Coral,' Peter said correctly when Beck got back to shore.

‘It's called mushroom coral,' Beck corrected him, ‘and it's very cool.'

On one side the lump of coral was rough and knobbly, like a cauliflower. The other side was ribbed with dark lines that did look like the gills of a giant mushroom.

Beck crouched down and held the coral on its side. Sea water trickled out of its nooks and crevices onto the sand. ‘Coral isn't rock,' he commented idly as they waited. ‘It's an organism. Millions of tiny organisms growing together. The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is hundreds of miles long and it's all one living creature. People think that cutting off chunks of coral isn't a problem. But it
is
a problem. You kill it, bit by bit. Reefs are dying all over the world and they're taking whole marine habitats with them.'

‘Yet here you are, with a lump of coral . . .' Peter pointed out.

The trickle of water was dwindling. Beck looked up briefly and grinned before concentrating on the lump again.

‘Mushroom coral grows in lumps like this. It never gets much bigger. This is the whole thing. It rolls around, loose, in the surf. And when the tide goes out, it gets stranded in the sunlight.'

‘Must need some powerful sunblock, then,' Peter commented, smiling. He squinted up at the sky without enthusiasm. When they were in the Sahara, sunstroke had almost killed him as his body overheated.