The Palace Tiger

And if he’d supposed wrongly – and he rather thought he had – what did that imply for Bahadur’s security? ‘Bahadur, old chap, are you all right?’ he wondered silently. He also wondered if Colin and Edgar and Ajit were, like him, on watch. ‘Ceaseless vigilance, Sandilands!’ he told himself with a stabbing memory of a similar night on watch in Panikhat. He was still trying to turn it into Latin when he fell asleep.

In the depth of the night he woke, listening intently. The sound that had woken him – where had it come from? He feared for a moment that Madeleine might be crazy enough to pay him a visit but no one pulled aside the flap of his tent. In a moment Joe was on his feet and into his dressing gown and standing in front of Bahadur’s tent. He listened carefully and could have sworn that the odd noise he heard was Bahadur giggling.

‘Bahadur! Sir! It’s Joe Sandilands. Is all well?’ he called in a low voice through the flap.

‘Joe? Of course. Go back to bed! Much to tell you in the morning! When my trap has been sprung you will call me Bahadur the great hunter!’ More stifled laughter followed the puzzling remark and Joe crept back to his tent.

Emerging late the next morning, Bahadur looked subdued and avoided Joe’s eye. He avoided everyone’s eye. He joined them at the table with polite greetings all round but seemed unwilling to pursue a conversation. Joe would have put the bilious appearance down to a surfeit of chocolate had not Bahadur tucked into his breakfast with some eagerness. The boy brightened up a bit when Colin began his briefing, the last before the hunt began.

It was mostly standard advice about the necessity to constantly check one’s rifle and take care not to point it at other hunters but contained more useful pieces of information on the most vulnerable points of a tiger’s body and the preference of sideways or head-on presentation of target. Ever mindful of the safety of the group, Colin unsmilingly handed to each a railwayman’s whistle on a string and ordered that it should be hung around the neck. It was only to be sounded in dire emergency. ‘It’s not a toy. It’s not to be used for entertainment or pranks,’ he said stiffly. Joe noticed that he was handing out Bahadur’s whistle as he said this.

They were to approach downwind of the nullah, ceremonially making the last part of the journey on elephant back. Cameras appeared and a file of elephants duly paraded, looking majestic, their hides painted with swirling patterns in bright colours, rich velvet cloths draped about their backs and golden ornaments hanging from their foreheads.

‘Joe, Edgar! You take this one,’ Colin called and they stood on the mounting block and scrambled, one at a time, into the cane-sided howdah. Joe looked about him with delight to see the lavish equipment packed into the small space: gun racks, cartridge pockets, bottles filled with lime juice, bottles filled with tea, a sun umbrella, a spare shirt, a pair of gloves, a ski

Catching Joe’s look of surprise, ‘Bees,’ Edgar said. ‘In case of attack by. Just roll yourself up in it.’

The mahout turned to them with a grin and a

Standing on the fire-step counting the seconds before going over the top produced the same sort of tension. Joe licked his dried lips. He wiped his sweating hands on the seat of his trousers, one at a time. Nine o’clock and already the heat was unbearable even up here amongst the foliage. He thought of Sir George high in the Simla hills, probably sipping tea on the lawn in the shade of the deodars with a refreshing breeze knifing in from the Himalayas. He checked his rifle. He’d checked it three times in as many minutes. A section of the steel barrel which had been in full sun burned his hand. Even the rifle was overheating. He’d need gloves to handle it soon. So that was what they were for! He wondered nervously if the heat would affect its performance. Had Colin mentioned that? He looked down from his perch fifteen feet up in a tree to the south of the stream bed and tried to catch a glimpse of Edgar opposite. There was no movement from the tree cover which hid Edgar’s machan. Nor from Claude’s to his right. Colin had chosen his hide-outs well.

He refocused on the hundred or more yards separating the edges of the nullah. He saw a tapestry of golden grasses, some shifting in a breeze he could not feel, some standing spikily to attention and taller than a man’s head. With her striped coat she could be anywhere in that underbrush and they wouldn’t catch a glimpse of her until she decided to break cover. Here and there, where the grass grew less plentifully, were patches of earth, reddish sand, stretching for yards along the dried stream bed. Joe decided he only had a chance of getting the tigress in his sights – assuming she had successfully run the gauntlet of the five other guns – if she appeared in one of these gaps in the vegetation. He narrowed his eyes and looked carefully at the nearest gap, assessing its size and judging how large his target would look in the setting. Would she come creeping stealthily along like a domestic cat or would she be bounding angrily through her territory like the Queen of the Jungle that she was? He knew so little in spite of Colin’s constant coaching.

The forest was surprisingly silent. In the far distance an elephant trumpeted, even the gang of langur monkeys overhead who had at first registered a chattering protest at his presence in their tree had settled down to groom each other quietly. Joe’s ears were straining for the sounds of the beaters. Was Colin having a problem with the squad of villagers, over-eager volunteers, all anxious to settle old scores with the tigress?

He checked his wristwatch, surprised to find that he’d only been in his tree for half an hour.

A small herd of sambur wandered into sight, then seeing something it was uneasy with, one of them belled and flicked its tail, startling the others into a nervous run down the nullah. To Joe’s right a short warning call rang out – a monkey? – alerting the troupe above his head. They peered, chattering, about them, then, deciding there was no cause for alarm, settled back to their preening.

Joe knew that on many days Colin had sat up in the branches of a tree without the comfort of a machan on tiger-watch for hours on end, once overnight in the Himalayas in a downpour, a situation from which he had to be extricated, all limbs locked rigid, by his men in the morning. Joe had only been aloft for an hour and he had the benefit of a stout platform and a ladder if he needed it. Suddenly the temptation to climb down for a pee and a cigarette was almost overwhelming.

A single blast on a silver bugle released all his tension. The hunt was under way. Colin’s choreography was begi