WHEN I first came, a visitor, to the Malay Peninsula, I was struck by the fact that wherever I went I heard stories of tigers. If, in the course of a day’s ride, I stopped at a village to eat my luncheon, the people who pressed round to watch me and have a chat would always tell me a tiger story of local and comparatively recent occurrence. Wherever I encamped for the night, I should be sure of at least one tale of successful attack or successful resistance, where a tiger had filled the principal rÔle. When once I understood the little peculiarity, I took it as a matter of course, and at talking time I used to say, “Now tell me about the tiger: what was it he did?” It may have been accident, but it is no exaggeration to say that my question nearly always drew forth a more or less ghastly story.

Now that my visit is nearly over, it occurs to me that, though I have accumulated an almost endless series of more or less interesting tales of the “low, crouching horror with the cruel fangs,” I have not retailed any of them to you. In a certain number of cases I was myself near enough to be able to verify details, and in others I had means of proving main facts. One is almost bound to say that, because tiger-stories, which are worth repeating, are almost always listened to with incredulity, or, what is worse, with that banter which often means, in plain words, “What I have not seen myself I decline to believe.” That is the attitude of England to the Orient in the presence of a tiger-story with which the auditors can claim no connection. I said that the prevalence of these tales struck me on my first arrival. I soon became blasÉ, and for a long time I have had no curiosity on the subject; but I will tell you of two tiger incidents that I personally verified, as far as I was able, and I will make no attempt to paint in the background with local colour, in order to supply you with finished pictures.

There is an island by the western shore of the Straits of Malacca. You would never guess it to be an island, for it is simply a block of mangrove-covered mud, with one side towards the sea, and the other three sides separated from the mainland by deep but narrow lagoons of tidal water. The only inhabitants are a few wood-cutters, Malays and Chinese, who live in huts of mat or bark with palm-leaf roofs, while they are employed cutting mangroves and a hard-wood palm called NÎbong. The huts of the Chinese are on the ground, but the Malay dwellings are invariably raised a few feet above the damp soil, and to them entry is obtained by means of a ladder. These hovels are very carelessly built; they are of flimsy materials, only intended to last for a few months, when they are abandoned and rapidly fall to pieces. They serve their purpose. The occupants are out from dawn till afternoon, when they return to cook, eat, and sleep; and so, from day to day, till the job on which they are engaged is completed, and they can return, in the case of the Malays, to their families, while the Chinese are probably moved to another scene of similar labour.

I was obliged to tell you this; you would not understand the story otherwise.

The island covers an area of several thousand acres, but except for the few wood-cutters it was, at the time I write of, uninhabited. At one spot there was a hut containing two Chinese, near it a Malay house with eight or ten men in it, and at no great distance a large shed with nearly a score of Chinese. One dark night, about 11 P.M., the two Chinese who lived together were awakened by a noise in that part of the hut where they kept their food. One of the two got up, struck a light, and went into the back room. Immediately there was a dull thud, as of a man knocked heavily down, and the poor wretch screamed, “Help me, it is a tiger!” His comrade at once got out of his mosquito-curtain, and sprang to his friend’s assistance. Seizing him by the arm, he tried to free him from the clutches of the tiger, who already had a firm hold of the doomed man’s leg. The tug of life and death did not last long, for the tiger pulled the would-be rescuer down on his face, and, the light having been extinguished in the struggle, the man’s courage went out with it, and, in a paroxysm of fear, he climbed on to the roof. There he remained till daylight, while, close beneath him, within the narrow limits of the hut, the tiger dragged his victim hither and thither, snarling and growling, tearing the flesh and crunching the bones of the man, whose agonies were mercifully hidden. In the grey light which heralds dawn, the watcher, clinging to the roof-ridge, saw the tiger drag out of the house and into the forest the shapeless remains of his late companion. When once the sun was fairly up, the survivor slid down, and without daring to look inside the hut, made his way to the nearest Police Station, and reported what had occurred. An examination of the premises fully bore out his statement.

A week passed. The Malays, whose hut was nearest to that visited by the tiger, were careful to bar their door after hearing what had happened; but in this case the precaution proved useless. Easterns, especially those engaged in severe manual labour, sleep exceedingly heavily, and the men of this household were aroused by a smothered cry from one of their number; the noise of a heavy body falling through the thatch having passed practically unnoticed. One of the party got up, lighted a torch, and was at once knocked down by a tiger springing upon him. In a moment every man had seized his heavy chopping-knife, and the whole party fell upon the man-eater, and, by the light of the fallen torch, hit so hard and straight that the beast suddenly sprang through the roof and disappeared. It was then, for the first time, discovered that this was the means by which the tiger had effected its entrance, and it left by the hole which it had made on entering the hut. The first man attacked was dead; the second was taken to hospital, and there died of his wounds.

There was a fourth victim. I am not certain of the facts in that case, but he was severely injured and was sent to hospital, where, I believe, he recovered with the entire loss of his scalp. That filled up the cup of crime. Almost directly afterwards the murderer killed a bullock; the carcass was poisoned, and the next day the body of a tigress was found close by that of her victim. She was not very large, eight feet from nose to the tip of the tail; she was in splendid condition—teeth perfect and coat glossy—but her legs and feet were disproportionately large to the size of her body. On her head there was a deep clean cut, and one of her fore-legs was gashed, evidently by a Malay chopper. The most curious feature was that in certainly two out of the three cases the tigress, who always attacked by night, the only time when the huts were occupied, effected her entrance by springing on the roof and forcing her way through the thin palm thatching.

There is another tiger story that I can tell you in two words. It is curious, it sounds highly improbable; but, after hearing it on the spot from the two men concerned, I believe it.

Quite recently it was the fruit season here, and, as is customary, two men were watching an orchard situated on the side of a main cart-road. The orchard was not enclosed in any way, and the fruit trees on one side actually overhung the road. The road was divided from the orchard by a rather wide but quite shallow ditch, that was always dry except during rain. Fifteen or twenty feet on the inside of this ditch was a tiny lean-to under the trees. The shelter consisted of a raised floor of split bamboos, covered by a palm-thatch roof, and a narrow sort of bench, also under the roof, but level with the floor. The bench was next to the high road.

On the night of which I write, one man was sleeping on the bench, the other on the floor of the shelter. It was fine, with a young, early-setting moon; the scattered houses of a considerable village were all round, and there was nothing to fear.

I said before that natives sleep soundly, and you must believe it, or you will never credit my story. About 1 A.M. the man sleeping on the floor of the shelter heard his friend shouting for help. The voice came from the ditch by the road, and thither the man ran, shouting “What is the matter?” “Thieves!” promptly replied the other, but a moment’s conversation dispelled the idea born of his partially-awakened intelligence, and led them to the true interpretation of the riddle. The man in the ditch said then, and says now, that he was asleep, and knew nothing till he suddenly found himself thrown in the ditch, when he awoke and shouted, “Help, thieves!” But, all the same, when he tried to get up, and his friend helped him to the shelter and got a light, it was seen that he had a deep gash in the shoulder, which kept him in hospital for nearly three weeks. The light also showed the track of a tiger up to the bench, thence to the spot in the ditch where the man was lying, and straight across the high road into another orchard. One other thing it showed, and that was a patch of earth on the top of the wounded man’s head.

The friend’s theory, shared by all the neighbours, is this. He points to the exact position in which the sleeper was lying, and how a post, from ground to roof, completely protected the back of his neck, so that the tiger could not seize him as he must have wished to do. Owing to the man’s position, and the way the post of the house and the rails of the bench (for it had a sort of back) ran, the tiger had to take a very awkward grip of his prey, catching him by the shoulder, and therefore carrying him with his head almost on the ground. Three or four steps, a second or two in time, would bring him to the shallow, dry ditch. It was so shallow that he would not jump it, but the in-and-out of a tiger with a kill would be the equivalent of a jump. In he would go easily enough, but the cut slope of the ditch and the slight rise into the road on the other side just saved the man’s life, for the top of his head hit against the edge of the ditch, and, awkwardly held as he was, knocked him out of the tiger’s mouth.

Once dropped, the beast would not return to pick his prey up again, especially with one man shouting and the noise of the other coming to his assistance.

The tiger is the scourge of the land, the crocodile of the water. They seem to be complement and supplement—each of the other: the “golden terror with the ebon bars,” the very embodiment of vitality, sinew, and muscle—of life that is savage and instant to strike—and the stony-eyed, spiky-tailed monster, outwardly a lifeless, motionless log; but, once those pitiless jaws open, it is only a question of what tooth closes on the victim, whether it be “The last chance,” “Tear the shroud,” or “God save your soul.”

I was starting for some hot springs in a remote spot, far in the interior, where I was certain of finding both elephant and rhinoceros, and the second night of my journey I spent at the junction of two large streams. Strolling back from a swim in the river, the local chief told me this pathetic story of fruitless heroism.

The country hereabout is very sparsely peopled, only a few scattered huts breaking the monotony of the virgin forest, Malays and wild tribes the sole inhabitants. Every house is on the bank of a river, and beyond the produce of their rice-fields and orchards the people rely mainly on the water to supply them with food. The Malay is exceedingly cunning in devising various means for catching fish, but what he likes best is to go out in the evening, just at sundown, with a casting-net. Either he wades about by himself, or, with a boy to steer for him, he creeps along in a tiny dug-out, throws his net in the deep pools, and usually dives in after it, to free the meshes from the numerous snags on which they are sure to become entangled.

One evening, a few days before my arrival, a Malay peasant was netting in the river accompanied by his son, a boy of twelve years old. They were wading, and, while the father moved along the edge of the deeper water under the bank, the boy walked in the shallows out in the stream. The short twilight passed, and the darkness of night was gathering over the waters of the wide river, when suddenly the father was startled by a cry from the boy, and, as he turned, he shuddered to hear the one word, “crocodile,” come in an agonised scream from the poor child. Dropping his net, the man swam and stumbled through the shallowing stream to the boy’s rescue. The child was down, but making frantic, though hopelessly ineffectual struggles to free himself from the grip of a crocodile which had him by the knee and thigh. The man was naked, except for a pair of short trousers; he had no weapon whatever, yet he threw himself, without hesitation, on the saurian, and with his hands alone began a struggle with the hideous reptile for the possession of the boy. The man was on the deep-water side of his foe, determined at all costs to prevent him from drowning the child; he had seized the creature from behind, so as to save himself from its claws, and he tried to find, through darkness and water, the eye-sockets, by which alone he could hope to reach a vulnerable joint in its impenetrable harness. The father’s fury and despair guided his hands to the reptile’s eyes, and pressing his thumbs with all his might on these points of less resistance, he inflicted such pain that the creature gave a convulsive spring which threw the man backwards into the water. But the boy was released, and the saurian retired from the fight to sulk and blink over his defeat in some dark pool beneath the overhanging grasses of the river bank.

The man carried the boy on shore, and thence to his home; but the poor child was so severely injured that, with no skilled surgeon to attend him, he died after three days of suffering.