Freddie must have been asleep, because the moment he opened an eye (the other one was squashed against something) he saw the most enormous paw just an inch or so away. It had huge, black, extremely sharp-looking claws at the end of it. The end of me, he thought in panic. Freddie was used – as most mice are – to being frightened, but this time there had been no warning – just an awful shock – like waking up to what you thought was a bad dream and it not being one. He could not move from fright.
But then the paw moved – stretched out past his head revealing a long furry limb . . . striped fur . . . He lifted his head and beyond the limb saw the body of a fully grown tiger who was now engaged in a slow, luxuriant stretch, which he found was most extraordinarily enjoyable. It’s me! I really am a tiger! Just what I wanted.
He found he was lying on a ledge of a cliff that overlooked a small river and a few yards downstream he could see there was a pool with some animals drinking from it. He was surrounded by tall dry grass and the sun was very hot on his fur. Watching the creatures drinking made him feel thirsty and he decided to join them. There were large black birds, a number of greyish pigs with tusks . . . Best of all there was a herd of small deer; nervous drinkers – they would take a sip and then look up anxiously as though afraid of something. The sight of them brought a sudden rush of juices to his mouth. He had jumped off the ledge and now began to prowl through the long grass. Every time the deer stopped drinking, he crouched, motionless, until, reassured, they lowered their delicate noses to the water. A few more steps and he would be able to pounce . . .
But, oh dear! Just as he was about to make a grab for the deer he had picked out as being the nearest, a gang of monkeys burst out of the jungle, swinging down from the trees, rushing over the ground, whooping, chattering, even yelping. They saw Freddie at once and uttered such piercing shrieks of warning that all the deer immediately fled from the pool, along with the birds and the pigs. The monkeys crossed the river, leaping from rock to rock, and settled on the far side. Their cries subsided into a taunting gabble as they attacked some bushes that held small yellow fruits, spitting out the stones and watching him. Fruit was no good to him, he thought angrily, as he realised how very hungry he was.
Well, at least he could have a drink. He must have woken up very early in the morning, as it was now getting steadily hotter; the sky was bleached to a thick white – everything was breathlessly still except for the ticking and humming of tiny insects; the monkeys, having stripped the bushes, had gone as suddenly as they had arrived. Freddie’s fur itched intolerably and all he wanted was to lie in the water, where it would be so much cooler than anywhere else. He waded cautiously in (as a mouse he had been afraid of water ever since he fell into a coffee cup that had been left outside No. 16, Skirting Board West; it had been full of thick black liquid and tasted horrible; various relatives had hauled him out by his tail) and soon found that he was out of his depth but it didn’t matter because he was swimming! It was a lovely feeling; he swam across the pool and back several times until he almost began to feel cold. So he waded out and shook himself so that sparks of water shot out of his fur; the air was so hot that it seemed to dry him in minutes. But the swim had made him hungrier than ever, and as he padded off into the jungle the sudden thought of cheese overwhelmed him. You didn’t have to hunt for cheese, it didn’t run away from you when it saw you coming, it just lay there while you munched it up.
On the other hand, he realised wearily, jungles did not seem to have cheese in them. You needed people for cheese, and the jungle seemed pretty short of them. Perhaps I should explain here that if you are thinking of a jungle as a dense dark green place full of ferns and creepers and tall trees, you are thinking of rainforest, which is quite a different thing.
The jungle that Freddie found himself in was dry, because it hadn’t rained for months, and was full of small shrubs and trees of varying sizes, with some open glades and a great deal of dry tall grass and sometimes large grey rocks. The glades, he discovered, were where the deer grazed: he came across two small herds of these, but they fled the moment he got near them. To begin with he chased them, but all that did was make him tired and even more in need of food.
But Freddie was not stupid. In a few hours he had learned to move soundlessly through the grass, to wait much longer before he started the chase, and, most important of all, that even when the deer did not see or hear him, they ran away if they smelled him, but if he got into a position where he could smell them it was much easier (hunters call this ‘getting downwind’, but Freddie didn’t know that, never having met any). He certainly was not stupid, but all the unsuccessful chases had made him much weaker. Next time, he said to himself, I’ve got to catch one. It might be my last chance.
Eventually, in the early evening, he came across some deer who, though grazing, seemed also on the move, and he quickly guessed that they were making their way to the drinking place at the river. So he went ahead of them and chose a really good position beside some rocks only a few yards from where the deer would have to come. His striped fur blended in with the tall yellowy grass, so well that you or I would never have known he was there unless we happened to catch sight of his stern yellow eyes that were fixed upon the single point where, because of the rocks opposite, the deer would have to come in a single file to reach the pool. He could hear them coming now, their feet making small crackling noises in the dry undergrowth. He let three go past him and then he sprang.
He went straight for his victim’s throat, and almost before he brought the deer down, it stopped struggling and the others all fled. He dragged his prey to a shady spot under a tree and settled down to a feast. His sharp claws and his very rough tongue meant that he could get at all the bits he found that as a tiger he liked most. He purred as he ate (he had the most enormous purr that sounded almost like an engine). After an hour of feasting he could eat no more, so he dragged the remains of the carcass to a place between two rocks. He was full to the brim of deer and extremely sleepy. He climbed onto the lowest branch of a tree, draped himself gracefully along it and fell into a deep, contented sleep.
He woke suddenly; it was a starless night, the sky was as dark and dense as black velvet and the moon was veiled in cloud. What woke him was the sounds that seemed to be coming from the rocks where he had hidden the remains of his kill. Someone had found it – it sounded like more than one someone – and was making a series of high-pitched growls, punctuated by little yelps. As Freddie began to lower himself out of the tree he was beset by two conflicting thoughts: the first, how dare anyone try to steal his food; the second, ah! perhaps he would at last have some company – something that had been worrying him ever since he had arrived in the jungle, but that had been ignored because of his more urgent need for water and food. He was used to living with company – not only immediate relations like his brothers and sisters, but quantities of cousins and friends. He remembered a time when a human inhabitant of 3, The Grove had dropped a packet of cornflakes there had been an all-night party and how they had made so much noise that Mrs Whitemouse had given them a lecture the next morning on how there would be traps with cheese in them ‘and you will die like your poor Uncle Herbert’.
Freddie prowled carefully towards the rocks, and when he had nearly reached them the moon suddenly came out. Two quite small animals – he could tell they were not tigers because they had plain black fur instead of stripes – were tearing pieces of meat off his deer – not only stealing from him, but stealing from each other, with growls and slashing of claws. Their faces and paws were streaked with blood, and they were play-fighting in between eating. He was just about to say, ‘That’s enough, you two,’ (they were only cubs, after all – far smaller than he was) when a low, distinctly ominous snarl stopped him. Out of the shadows of the rocks – invisible until she moved – came a full-grown jaguar. Her tail was twitching and her yellow eyes were fixed upon Freddie as she continued to snarl, baring her long, pointed teeth as she edged her way around the carcass until she was between him and her cubs. The message was clear; if he made any move towards them, she would attack: the fact that he was larger than she made no difference to her.
The cubs had stopped their antics and their mother must have said something to them, because they left the carcass and ran away into the long grass. How long he and the jaguar mother stood staring at one another Freddie did not know, but just when he was wondering what he should do, a small cloud raced in front of the moon, and when it had cleared, the mother had vanished. When he was quite sure that she had gone, Freddie inspected what was left of his kill.
Precious little; a rather mangled haunch – bits of hoof and fur and dried blood, much of it smelling strongly of jaguar. Partly because of this, and partly because he was full anyway, Freddie didn’t fancy eating any more. Sadness overwhelmed him. I would have allowed her to have some of my deer if only she had been more friendly, he thought. He was simply longing to have someone to talk to, and so far all the animals he had encountered had either fled in terror, or, in the case of the jaguar, had made it clear that they were quite prepared to hurt him. She didn’t give me a chance to say that I wouldn’t have harmed her cubs, he thought, but then (and this was because Freddie was at heart an unusually honest tiger) he had to admit that if he had been as hungry as he’d been before he caught the deer, he probably would have killed them. If I could only meet another tiger . . . he thought – rather hopelessly – he had an uncomfortable feeling that tigers did not go in for the easy-going social life he had been used to as a mouse.
Freddie’s mother had only to go out for afternoon crumbs and a few weeks later there would be a whole load of new arrivals in the Hat, and another uncle added to the family. He could see now that if tigers behaved like that the whole jungle would be littered with them and there would very soon be a severe shortage of food. Still, he could not help wishing that this bit of jungle was a bit littered – a nice female tigress that could look after him as his mother had . . . But here his imagination failed him. He distracted himself with a thorough clean-up of his claws which still had awkward bits of deer in them.
‘Better start hunting before I actually need another meal,’ he said to himself (there was no one else to say it to). It was early morning, but it was already getting hot.
For the next two days he hunted for deer, stalked them at every possible opportunity and failed to catch anything. He went back to the pool twice for water. The small river had been reduced to a mere trickle, but he followed its course upstream in search of another pool. Then, late in the afternoon on the second day, he found one – larger than the first. It was surrounded by rocks, but it had one corner where it was quite shallow, with a sandy beach that was richly imprinted with the feet of many animals. He was so hot and tired that he decided to have a swim before he worked out a plan of attack. Evening, he knew, was when deer came down to drink.
The moment he was in the water, an idea came to him. If he stayed there, motionless, with just his nose out of the water, the deer would not notice him until it was too late. He waited . . .
But – oh dear! There was at first a vague rumbling sound – a crashing sort of noise, as if branches were being pulled off trees – and then a herd of elephants appeared. It was not a big herd – more like a family, one gigantic, three smaller, and one very perky baby who kept trotting in and out of the others’ way as they trod ponderously towards the water.
Freddie was terrified. With their huge ears flapping, their enormous trunks swaying and their curving pointed tusks, they loomed steadily nearer and nearer until all he could see was elephant. Just as he made up his mind to make a dash for the shore, the father elephant made a very loud shrieking sound, twice: his family all stood still while he walked ahead of them into the pool towards Freddie.
It was now or never. ‘When in doubt, run,’ his mother had repeatedly said to him when he was young and inclined to show off about the horrible cat who lived in The Grove. Well, he wasn’t in doubt now; he had to run for his life. He started to swim away from the huge elephant, who was so close that Freddie could see his small angry eyes. Then, as the elephant paused, Freddie doubled back around the creature and the moment he was back in his depth, he sprang from the water and dashed past the family and away into the long grass. His fur was all bedraggled and he was panting for breath.
When he felt at a safe distance from the elephants he started searching for a quiet place where he could rest until his fur was dry. He found what looked like a good place – a pile of rocks around a small cave with a sandy sunlit patch at its entrance, which was so narrow that he had to squeeze to get his head and shoulders in.
It was not entirely dark inside because there was a cleft in the rocks that formed the roof, but almost before he had noticed this there was a low, most ominous hissing noise, and in the patchy gloom there reared a large and long black snake who seemed to be wearing a hood. Her head was swaying, but her eyes – like very shiny little black berries – were fixed upon him. As she glided nearer he could see a pile of small creamy-coloured eggs that were placed exactly where the sun came through the roof. He did not know that she was a cobra, but he knew at once that the eggs were hers and he knew what mothers were like if they thought that their children were in any sort of danger. He was out of that cave before you could say Freddie Whitemouse.
For a long time he padded through the jungle. He felt sad as well as hungry. He even got to thinking rather longingly of a delicious bacon rind he had discovered near a dustbin once, and how his mother had made him share it with a crowd of brothers and sisters. ‘You must learn to think of others,’ she had scolded. Here there were no others to think of, but on the other hand there wasn’t a bacon rind in sight. Anyway, I’d need about a hundred bacon rinds to fill me up. This made him realise that he wouldn’t like them anyway.
All day he had been following the riverbed, which was mostly dried up, until suddenly it was joined by a stream that trickled in over some rocks. He stopped, because he could hear the sounds of people ahead. All his life he had been aware that people were dangerous – certainly to mice, and most probably, he thought, to tigers. He had reached the top of a grassy slope and craned his neck to get a better view. Part of the jungle had been cleared of shrubs and long grass and there was a cluster of little huts; people were digging earth, and a woman in a bright pink dress was walking from the river carrying a large pot on her head. Freddie was looking so hard at all this that he didn’t notice what was happening behind him until two boys driving some goats towards the village saw him, and shouted and ran down the hill waving sticks at the goats, who scrambled ahead of them. But the youngest goat got left behind. It froze for only a second or two, bleating for its mother, but those seconds were enough for Freddie. He hurled himself through the air and a moment later the kid was dead and he was dragging it away from the village back into thicker jungle.
It was only a baby goat, and he ate everything except the hoofs and the horns, which were tiny. (If you feel that this was cruel of Freddie, you have to remember that tigers kill their prey in seconds by suffocating them; a small goat is for them the equivalent of you having sausages and eggs, and he was – as most tigers are when they kill – terrifically hungry.)
Anyway, when he had finished he felt too full and sleepy to search for a suitable tree, so he settled down on a narrow ledge of rock overlooking the dry riverbed. He licked his paws and face clean of goat and stretched himself out so that he completely filled up the ledge with only his tail hanging down, shut his yellow eyes and slept.
. . . He was back at No. 3, The Grove. How amazed they would all be when they saw him! How they would admire his magnificent stripy coat, his long rich tail, and how he would frighten the terrible cat that was always trying to catch any member of his family who came her way! The back door of the house was ajar and he pushed it open with his mighty paw, but alas! When he reached No. 16, Skirting Board West, with its tiny little entrance, of course he couldn’t possibly get in. He got down on the floor and put his eye to the hole, and there was his mother standing on her hind legs staring at his large yellow eye. ‘It’s me – Freddie,’ he began to say. He thought he was talking quietly, but quiet for a tiger is loud to a mouse, and Mrs Whitemouse gave one squeak of terror and fainted. There was a lot of squeaking and gibbering from the family, but all he could see was a bit of his mother’s pale pinky stomach that had hardly any fur on it trembling with terror. Then she was being helped away from the entrance hole, and then he couldn’t see anything, because the hole was blocked up by what he recognised as a dog biscuit. They did not want him – his own family; he would have to live the rest of his life without any of them . . . Just as black despair rolled over him like a dark and terrifying fog, he woke.
You know that feeling when you wake up after a bad dream? A part of you feels awfully glad to be back in your life, safe and warm in your own bed, but also, to begin with, the dream felt so real that you still feel frightened, until gradually it slips away into the smallest corner of your mind, where it becomes ‘only a dream’. Well, Freddie felt like that, but slowly the heat on his fur, and the tiny ticking noises of the jungle around him, and particularly the flies that kept maddeningly trying to get into his eyes, brought him back to the present – he was one thirsty tiger, and the nearest water was the pool where there were people.
He made himself wait until dusk before he padded quietly down to the pool. All was silent, no sign of deer, but although there was no sign of people either, he could smell a smoky, spicy odour – a smell of cooking, which he knew was what people did with their food before they ate it (No. 3, The Grove was often full of cooking smells). There was also the distant but enticing scent of goats, and he decided that the next meal he would have would be one of them again. He would have to wait until those boys took the goats out to find food for them to eat. After a quick uneasy drink, (he had the uncomfortable feeling that he was being watched) he spent much of the night prowling about trying to find a good place to ambush the goats.
All the following hot, thirsty day he waited and waited, but there was no sign of goats or boys. He was hungry again – the next goat he caught would have to be a larger one.
Two more days and nights went by, and although when Freddie went to the pool in the evenings he could smell goat, he didn’t see one. By now he was famished – starving, he felt – and he could think of nothing but food.
On the third morning, he went – very early – back to the grassy slope where he had seen the village. This time he noticed that there was a track where the boys had herded the goats. It was quite narrow and on each side of it there was the usual long dry grass and a few trees. It was not straight, so when he started to follow it he could not see ahead further than the next bend. He padded cautiously down it, ready to leap aside and take cover if any people appeared. The scent of the goats got stronger and stronger as he descended, and his excitement and hunger were so intense that he was trembling as he became sure that any moment now he would at last find his next meal. Then, suddenly, the path or track divided into two paths, and just as he was trying to choose between them he was struck by a really strong odour of raw meat. It came from the left-hand path, so he started along it.
Then he saw it. A large piece of goat was hanging from a low branch of a tree ahead. Blood was dripping from it. All ideas of caution vanished. The branch was only about five feet from the ground and he sprang towards it. Plonk! Before he could grab the haunch, the ground gave way under him and he fell heavily into a deep hole.
For a moment he lay stunned. His right shoulder was hurting and he saw that it had been pierced by a sharp stick that was still embedded in his fur. The shock and pain made him snarl. He tried to get to his feet – the pit, though deep, was so narrow and small that there was hardly space for him, but in any case his shoulder had become a stabbing pain. If he was to escape, he must pull the stick out. So he gripped it with his front teeth and, growling in agony, he tugged until it suddenly came loose. The wound started to bleed, but gradually he licked it clean.
Escape! He must get out of this awful hole. His eyes were getting accustomed to the gloom and a small amount of light came from the top where he had fallen through. But he could now see that the sides of the pit were studded with sticks like the one that had wounded him. There was no room for him to spring out, and if he tried to claw up the sides the sticks would stab him. It was a trap, he realised. The boys had made a trap and put the piece of goat on the branch to get him to fall into it. If he was to escape, he would have to wait until the people came to get him out. Then a really awful thought came to him. Supposing they did not come? Supposing they just left him to die of hunger and thirst? And how could they get him out anyway? He was so cramped that there was hardly room for him to stand. He tried to be angry and not frightened; when they came he’d go for them – he’d teach them not to mess about with tigers – he’d wrap his mighty paw around one of their necks . . . but then a fresh wave of terror overcame him; he could feel his heart thumping and he was trembling with fear. He let out one despairing roar – a kind of growling groan – the loudest noise he had ever made in his life. It somehow made him feel a little bit better, so he did it again – twice more.
He could hear the people coming; several of them, he did not know how many. They were jabbering away. When he looked up, he could see one of them peering down at him. He kept up a low growl, but there was not even room for him to lash his tail. Eventually one of them climbed a little way down into the pit – staying well out of Freddie’s reach – and then, once the man had stopped climbing, Freddie felt a sudden piercing pain in his shoulder – the one that hadn’t been stabbed by the stick – and he snarled with the shock. The pain wasn’t like the stick had been; in fact, this one didn’t go on hurting. He stood for a moment; he felt very unsteady – tired – so tired he wasn’t even frightened, he just wanted . . . and as he tried to think of what he wanted, he collapsed in a furry heap.