“What’s he saying?”
“He said not to worry. The footprint belongs to a tiger, but this one is a grandfather so it won’t harm us.”
“Inche’, ah! How you know, ah?” Tuck Heng tried his fragmented Malay on Ibrahim. “How? Speak up!”
Ibrahim scowled. The Malay warriors advanced menacingly. Confused, Tuck Heng backed away. Tai-kor Wong seized him by the shoulders and felled him with a blow.
“Why is he so rude to our young chief?”
“He doesn’t mean to be rude. He’s new here and his Malay is bad. He’s stupid and doesn’t know anything.”
Then he turned to Tuck Heng, “Fool! You’ve offended a young chief! He could’ve killed you! Kneel and bow very low to that young man, potato head!”
Tuck Heng did as he was told. Tai-kor Wong turned to Ibrahim. “Begging a thousand pardons, my young lord! Compassion and mercy are yours! I thank my young lord for not killing my slave.”
“Che’ Wong, my father welcomes you like his brother so you’re like an uncle to me. But tell your people that I know a tiger’s print when I see one.”
Ibrahim turned away abruptly and sprinted into the bushes, heading towards the jungle like an animal streaking home. He swung his razor-sharp kris to the left and to the right, lopping off leaves, stems, branches and vines to cut a path through the thick undergrowth. Dark, tense and unseeing, he strode into the greenness which swallowed him. Strange snakelike vines twisted above him like the hangman’s rope. He stood still as a rock, his eyes growing accustomed to the dull green light filtering through the canopy of leaves above him. Gradually his calm forbearance returned. As his anger ebbed away, his sense of the jungle’s strange ethereal beauty heightened. A purple bloom peeped from under an umbrella of brown ferns. A dark blue moth fluttered on a leaf. His eyes began to make out the different types of bush, fern and vine in the formless green that enveloped him like a mother’s womb.
High-pitched cicadas at noon and the faint cries of the jungle fowl and gibbons soothed his troubled spirit. These were familiar sounds heard since his childhood. The rush of falling water in the distance lured him further and further into the greenness, till he reached the banks of the Bandong River flowing swiftly seawards to the wider world beyond. Away from the jungle and valley he loved and into a vast and unfamiliar terrain, which lay under the sun, beckoning yet threatening, a world his father had ordered him to explore. He crouched beside the river and fixed his troubled eyes on the far shore. O the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe in the green world of his forefathers in which he was king. He found another paw print in the soft riverine mud.
Tuck Heng picked his way through the dank wilderness. Lallang and weeds covered the former settlement of the White Cranes. The remains of the charred huts on the riverbank were choked with mud and filth. Beneath the layers of moss, lichens and creepers lay the bones and half-eaten bodies of miners. Choked with the stench and foul air of rotting flesh, he plunged his hoe into the stubborn earth, ripping off the unyielding weeds. He dived into the waist-high grass and tore his way up to where the ambush had taken place.
“Old Stick! Old Stick!”
Silence answered him.
“Uncle Old Stick!” he shouted louder.
From far off, like an answer from another world, came the eerie echoes of his own voice ricocheting off the rocks, then fading away into the silence again.
He looked about him as he stood among the grass and bush, feeling a presence other than himself. A presence that had been there long before the Chinese came. And it had reclaimed the land when they left. Its silence hung like a thick veil over the valley in the noonday heat. Nothing stirred in the hot humid air. He moved forward, treading with great care through the shoulder-high weeds and lallang which cut his skin.
“Forgive my trespass, forgive my trespass,” he murmured as he searched through the thick undergrowth, stopping now and then to clasp his hands instinctively and bow to the invisible guardians. Then he heard it. Like the distant rumbling of thunder.
“Tiger!” he yelled and fled.