Part 5 (1/2)
I believed then, and my opinion has since been strengthened, that it is a partially melanistic phase of the ordinary yellow tiger. Black leopards are common in India and the Malay Peninsula and as only a single individual of the blue tiger has been reported the evidence hardly warrants the a.s.sumption that it represents a distinct species.
We hunted the animal for five weeks. The brute ranged in the vicinity of two or three villages about seven miles apart, but was seen most frequently near Lung-tao. He was as elusive as a will o' the wisp, killing a dog or goat in one village and by the time we had hurried across the mountains appearing in another spot a few miles away, leaving a trail of terrified natives who flocked to our camp to recount his depredations. He was in truth the ”Great Invisible” and it seemed impossible that we should not get him sooner or later, but we never did.
Once we missed him by a hair's breadth through sheer bad luck, and it was only by exercising almost superhuman restraint that we prevented ourselves from doing bodily harm to the three Chinese who ruined our hunt. Every evening for a week we had faithfully taken a goat into the ”Long Ravine,”
for the blue tiger had been seen several times near this lair. On the eighth afternoon we were in the ”blind” at three o'clock as usual. We had tied a goat to a tree nearby and her two kids were but a few feet away.
The gra.s.s-filled lair lay s.h.i.+mmering in the breathless heat, silent save for the echoes of the bleating goats. Crouched behind the screen of branches, for three long hours we sat in the patchwork shade,--motionless, dripping with perspiration, hardly breathing,--and watched the shadows steal slowly down the narrow ravine.
It was a wild place which seemed to have been cut out of the mountain side with two strokes of a mighty ax and was choked with a tangle of th.o.r.n.y vines and sword gra.s.s. Impenetrable as a wall of steel, the only entrance was by the tiger tunnels which drove their twisting way through the murderous growth far in toward its gloomy heart.
The shadows had pa.s.sed over us and just reached a lone palm tree on the opposite hillside. By that I knew it was six o'clock and in half an hour another day of disappointment would be ended. Suddenly at the left and just below us there came the faintest crunching sound as a loose stone s.h.i.+fted under a heavy weight; then a rustling in the gra.s.s. Instantly the captive goat gave a shrill bleat of terror and tugged frantically at the rope which held it to the tree.
At the first sound Harry had breathed in my ear ”Get ready, he's coming.” I was half kneeling with my heavy .405 Winchester pushed forward and the hammer up. The blood drummed in my ears and my neck muscles ached with the strain but I thanked Heaven that my hands were steady.
Caldwell sat like a graven image, the stock of his little 22 caliber high power Savage nestling against his cheek. Our eyes met for an instant and I knew in that glance that the blue tiger would never make another charge, for if I missed him, Harry wouldn't. For ten minutes we waited and my heart lost a beat when twenty feet away the gra.s.s began to move again--but rapidly and _up the ravine_.
I saw Harry watching the lair with a puzzled look which changed to one of disgust as a chorus of yells sounded across the ravine and three Chinese wood cutters appeared on the opposite slope. They were taking a short cut home, shouting to drive away the tigers--and they had succeeded only too well, for the blue tiger had slipped back to the heart of the lair from whence he had come.
He had been nearly ours and again we had lost him! I felt so badly that I could not even swear and it wasn't the fact that Harry was a missionary which kept me from it, either. Caldwell exclaimed just once, for his disappointment was even more bitter than mine; he had been hunting this same tiger off and on for six years.
It was useless for us to wait longer that evening and we pushed our way through the sword gra.s.s to the entrance of the tunnel down which the tiger had come. There in the soft earth were the great footprints where he had crouched at the entrance to take a cautious survey before charging into the open.
As we looked, Harry suddenly turned to me and said: ”Roy, let's go into the lair. There is just one chance in a thousand that we may get a shot.” Now I must admit that I was not very enthusiastic about that little excursion, but in we went, crawling on our hands and knees up the narrow pa.s.sage.
Every few feet we pa.s.sed side branches from the main tunnel in any one of which the tiger might easily have been lying in wait and could have killed us as we pa.s.sed. It was a foolhardy thing to do and I am free to admit that I was scared. It was not long before Harry twisted about and said: ”Roy, I haven't lost any tigers in here; let's get out.” And out we came faster than we went in.
This was only one of the times when the ”Great Invisible” was almost in our hands. A few days later a Chinese found the blue tiger asleep under a rice bank early in the afternoon. Frightened almost to death he ran a mile and a half to our camp only to find that we had left half an hour before for another village where the brute had killed two wild cats early in the morning.
Again, the tiger pushed open the door of a house at daybreak just as the members of the family were getting up, stole a dog from the ”heaven's well,” dragged it to a hillside and partly devoured it. We were in camp only a mile away and our Chinese hunters found the carca.s.s on a narrow ledge in the sword gra.s.s high up on the mountain side. The spot was an impossible one to watch and we set a huge grizzly bear trap which had been carried with us from New York.
It seemed out of the question for any animal to return to the carca.s.s of the dog without getting caught and yet the tiger did it. With his hind quarters on the upper terrace he dropped down, stretched his long neck across the trap, seized the dog which had been wired to a tree and pulled it away. It was evident that he was quite unconscious of the trap for his fore feet had actually been placed upon one of the jaws only two inches from the pan which would have sprung it.
One afternoon we responded to a call from Bui-tao, a village seven miles beyond Lung-tao, where the blue tiger had been seen that day. The natives a.s.sured us that the animal continually crossed a hill, thickly clothed with pines and sword gra.s.s just above the village and even though it was late when we arrived Harry thought it wise to set the trap that night.
It was pitch dark before we reached the ridge carrying the trap, two lanterns, an electric flash-lamp and a wretched little dog for bait. We had been engaged for about fifteen minutes making a pen for the dog, and Caldwell and I were on our knees over the trap when suddenly a low rumbling growl came from the gra.s.s not twenty feet away. We jumped to our feet just as it sounded again, this time ending in a snarl. The tiger had arrived a few moments too early and we were in the rather uncomfortable position of having to return to the village by way of a narrow trail through the jungle. With our rifles ready and the electric lamp cutting a brilliant path in the darkness we walked slowly toward the edge of the sword gra.s.s hoping to see the flash of the tiger's eyes, but the beast backed off beyond the range of the light into an impenetrable tangle where we could not follow. Apparently he was frightened by the lantern, for we did not hear him again.
After nearly a month of disappointments such as these Mr. h.e.l.ler joined us at Bui-tao with Mr. Kellogg. Caldwell thought it advisable to s.h.i.+ft camp to the Ling-suik monastery, about twelve miles away, where he had once spent a summer with his family and had killed several tigers. This was within the blue tiger's range and, moreover, had the advantage of offering a better general collecting ground than Bui-tao; thus with h.e.l.ler to look after the small mammals we could begin to make our time count for something if we did not get the tiger.
Ling-suik is a beautiful temple, or rather series of temples, built into a hillside at the end of a long narrow valley which swells out like a great bowl between bamboo clothed mountains, two thousand feet in height. On his former visit Mr. Caldwell had made friends with the head priest and we were allowed to establish ourselves upon the broad porch of the third and highest building. It was an ideal place for a collecting camp and would have been delightful except for the terrible heat which was rendered doubly disagreeable by the almost continual rain.
The priests who shuffled about the temples were a hard lot. Most of them were fugitives from justice and certainly looked the part, for a more disreputable, diseased and generally undesirable body of men I have never seen.
Our stay at Ling-suik was productive and the temple life interesting. We slept on the porch and each morning, about half an hour before daylight, the measured strokes of a great gong sounded from the temple just below us.
_Boom--boom--boom--boom_ it went, then rapidly _bang, bang, bang_. It was a religious alarm clock to rouse the world.
A little later when the upturned gables and twisted dolphins on the roof had begun to take definite shape in the gray light of the new day, the gong boomed out again, doors creaked, and from their cell-like rooms shuffled the priests to yawn and stretch themselves before the early service. The droning chorus of hoa.r.s.e voices, swelling in a meaningless half-wild chant, harmonized strangely with the romantic surroundings of the temple and become our daily _matin_ and evensong.
At the first gong we slipped from beneath our mosquito nets and dressed to be ready for the bats which fluttered into the building to hide themselves beneath the tiles and rafters. When daylight had fully come we scattered to the four winds of heaven to inspect traps, hunt barking deer, or collect birds, but gathered again at nine o'clock for breakfast and to deposit our spoil. Caldwell and I always spent the afternoon at the blue tiger's lair but the animal had suddenly s.h.i.+fted his operations back to Lung-tao and did not appear at Ling-suik while we were there.