The Classic Morpurgo Collection (six novels) by Michael Morpurgo
“I like very much this poem you spoke,” he whispered. “I know it also. I learn it in my mission school long time ago, when I was a boy like you. Fine poem. It stay in my head for ever, I think.” He looked about him nervously, then leaned forward. “Listen, I have bad news for you. I serve the food in the house for Mister Anthony and the hunters. They have big party in there. They celebrate killing of the tiger. I hear them talking. They are telling him you must be killed, because you have seen their faces. You know who they are. You could tell the police. It is against the law to kill tiger, to take orang-utan. If they are caught they go to prison for long long time. They know this. So they tell Mister Anthony, “Do not sell him to the circus. You must kill this monkey boy.” I am very much afraid Mister Anthony will do this. You know his face too. You know too much. You must leave this place. You must escape.”
“But how?” I asked him. “Look at that padlock. There’s no way of getting it open without a key. Have you got the key?”
Kaya shook his head. “No,” he said. “But I have been thinking, and maybe we do not need a key after all. What is it you say in English? There is more than one way to skin a rabbit. Listen to them. They are busy with their drinking. If we are lucky, if we are careful, they will see nothing, they will hear nothing. I will bring knives from the kitchen. I have knives like saws, very sharp. It is easy to do I think. I will saw, you will saw. It will not take long to cut through the wooden bars, and then you will be free, the orang-utans too. And the jungle is very near. You go to the top of this track, cross over the other side, and you are there. You are wild boy. I think you know very well how to hide in the jungle. But when you go you must go fast, and you must not stop. Mister Anthony’s dogs. When he finds you have escaped, he will send them after you.”
“Won’t they know it was you that helped me?”
“I do not think so. This Mister Anthony, I have been cook for him in his house since he was a little boy. When he was young he was not so bad, you know; maybe a little greedy, like many of us I think. But the greed in him, it grew, and became the devil inside him. And now he is a bad man, a wicked man. He does not trust me, he does not trust anyone, but he will think I am too frightened to do this thing. And before I hear you speak your poem today, he was right to believe this. All my life, until now, I was frightened, like everyone here. Then I listen to the tiger poem. I remember it. I see the skin of tiger lying on the veranda. I see you and the orang-utans shut in this cage. I see men and women and little children working like slaves all around me, and I am not frightened any more.”
He got up to go. “I come back very soon. I bring you coconut too. I go now.”
Kaya was as good as his word. Within minutes I saw him emerging from the cookhouse. But almost at the same moment the door of Mister Anthony’s house opened suddenly, and a shaft of light spilled out into the darkness. Two men came staggering down the steps, one with a rifle over his shoulder, both of them loud with drink. Kaya froze where he was, and for a moment I thought they might not see him. But they did. One of them called him over, and Kaya turned, walking towards them slowly, reluctantly. When they shouted at him he broke into a limping run. I could see that he had the coconut in his hand, that the other hand he held behind his back, and I wasn’t sure why, until I saw the blades of the kitchen knives glinting darkly. One of the men snatched the coconut out of Kaya’s hand, slashed off the top of it with a machete, drank the milk, burped loudly, and hurled the shell to one side. Then, un-slinging his rifle, the other one came stumbling across towards me. As he came closer I recognised him as a hunter from the forest. He was the hosepipe one, the one with the red bandana, the one I feared most.
“Monkey Boy, Monkey Boy,” he called out in a mocking singsong voice. “This time I shoot you proper, Monkey Boy.” He was aiming the barrel of his rifle right at my head. I hugged the orang-utans close to me, turned my head away, closed my eyes, and waited for it to happen. I filled my whole mind with thoughts of Dad and Mum and Grandpa and Grandma and Oona, and held them there, so that they would be with me right to the very end. For long long moments nothing happened. Then I heard howls of laughter. I opened my eyes, to see the two of them walking away into the darkness, arms round each other’s shoulders, hysterical with drunken giggles. Kaya waited until they were well and truly gone, before he ran over to the cage.
“We must work quickly,” Kaya whispered. “No talk. No noise.”
He handed me a knife. We chose a bar each, and set to work at once. The bars were thick, the wood hard, and each of them seemed to take for ever to saw through. But it wasn’t the time it was taking that worried me so much. It was the noise we were making as we sawed. It sounded loud, loud and rasping, too loud to be a frog, too rasping to be any part of the jungle chorus. I was sure that sooner or later someone must hear it. We couldn’t do anything about the noise, but I could do it quicker. I got up on to my knees, so that I could saw harder, work faster. It wasn’t at all easy, because any movement inside the cage was so restricted, and because the orang-utans would keep clinging to my arms and my shoulders. From time to time I was forced to stop sawing altogether so I could detach them and resettle them elsewhere.
Kaya had told me the knives would be sharp, and they were too, and with serrated blades. After several minutes of frantic sawing there was a wide enough gap in the bars. I handed the orang-utans out to Kaya and then wriggled through myself, tearing my T-shirt. Kaya put his hand on my shoulder as I stood up. He handed me the little orang-utans one by one, and they clung on. “No time to say nothing,” he said softly. “You go now. Quick. Whenever I say the tiger poem I will remember you. When you say it, you remember me. Now go, go fast.”
Doubled up, I ran off up the track, slipping and sliding through the mud as I went. I discovered very soon that it was quite impossible to run with the three orang-utans attached to me. I would have to walk, but walk as fast and as silently as I could. Nothing else mattered now but to reach the safety of the forest before our escape was discovered. I reached the broad forest track, hurried straight across it, and plunged almost at once into the forest beyond.
And as I walked on into the night, Dad’s words kept coming back to me. “You can do it, Will. Keep going. You can do it!” It was this echo in my head, this and the thought that Mister Anthony’s dogs and hunters might already be on my trail that drove me on to greater and greater efforts, when my whole body was screaming at me to stop for a rest. I knew I mustn’t stop. The clinging orang-utans were as much a part of me now as my own arms and legs, a constant reminder that if the dogs caught up with us, it wouldn’t only be me they would tear to bits.
I walked on from darkness into dawn, and through all the next day, stopping only for a few brief minutes to let the orang-utans drink from a river, and to drink myself. But I soon realised that even this short stop had been a mistake. When I tried to go on again afterwards my legs had stiffened, my feet were on fire with pain, and far from being reinvigorated, all my strength seemed to have drained away. I knew I could not go on much longer. I wanted to believe that I must have put enough distance between ourselves and Mister Anthony’s mining camp by now, that any pursuing dogs and hunters could never catch us up.
I had to tell myself this again and again, to reassure myself it was true, before at last I was convinced it was safe to stop. I found the right kind of tree, climbed high into its branches, where we made ourselves a sleeping nest of branches and leaves. The rain came down then, hard and straight, but I was too tired to care. I curled up, clutching the little orang-utans close to me, and slept like the wild boy I was.
Other One
was woken by the orang-utans stirring around me in the nest, then climbing all over me. I pushed them off. I was too sleepy to cope with them. They gave up on me after a while and two of them began to wander off, climbing in among the branches nearby. Still half asleep, I let them go where they wanted. I knew they’d come back if they needed me.
One of them was trying to drink s
I remember I was having one of those strange, deeply disturbing dreams, where you somehow know that you’re only dreaming, but all the same it’s terrifyingly real. All I wanted to do was to wake up, but I couldn’t. I could hear the baying of hunting hounds. Oona was standing there at the edge of the clearing, the fig trees all around. Everywhere the ground was littered with the bodies of dead and dying orang-utans. Then out of the forest came the hunting dogs. Mister Anthony was there with them, with his hunters, and the dogs were baying for blood. Oona was trumpeting, tossing her trunk at them, as the dogs leaped at her. All the trumpeting and baying sounded loud in my head, so loud that it woke me at last.
I sat up, suddenly aware that the little orang-utans were clambering all over me, clinging to me for protection, that the jungle was alive with alarm calls. I realised then that the baying had not only been in my dream, that it was real enough. It was coming from somewhere below me in the forest, not that far away, and closer all the time. I could hear men’s voices now. I saw them then – hunters with dogs yelping and straining on their leashes, some with machetes, some with rifles. They were coming our way. I counted two dogs and half a dozen men with rifles, one with a red bandana. But none of them looked like Mister Anthony.
They were right underneath us now. There was nothing else to do but to lie low in the sleeping nest, hold on tight to the orang-utans, and hope and pray they wouldn’t move or whimper, that the hunters wouldn’t look up and see us. I buried my face in their hair, willing them to be still, not to make a sound. I could hear the dogs yapping and yowling, as they rummaged through the leaves at the bottom of the tree, searching for the scent we must have left there. I was sure they must find it sooner or later, and that it would lead them directly to us. I closed my eyes.
I didn’t breathe.
For several heart-stopping moments I lay there listening to them snuffling about, pinning all my hopes now on the rain that had fallen the night before, that it might have washed away the scent of us. Then I heard them moving away. I could breathe again. I dared to look down, and saw that one of the dogs was still reluctant to go. He was agitated, excited. I was sure he’d found something, that he was on to us. But the hunter in the red bandana yelled at him, jerking him on his lead, dragging him away. They were gone.
For a long time afterwards I could still hear them moving further and further away into the forest, slashing and beating their way through it, shouting at one another as they went. With every moment their voices became more distant. It seemed an age before the chatter and screech of the jungle quietened down around us. Only then could I really be sure they were gone.
Even so, I knew I had to stay where I was with the orang-utans, that the hunters and the dogs might not be gone for good, that they could be back. One thing was for sure: from now on I must at all costs try to avoid moving about on the forest floor. That was how the dogs had found our trail. I couldn’t risk it again. We would have to live as orang-utans live, up in the trees, where we would be out of harm’s way. How I would do it, or whether I could do it, I had no idea. But I knew there was nothing else for it. I had to try.
Once I started looking, I soon discovered that we didn’t need to go down on to the forest floor anyway, that there was enough food up here to live on, all the fruit we would need, if only I could get to it. A few trees away there were orange coconuts and some bananas too. I spotted the same kind of prickly fruit that Kaya had given us back in the cage. I’d seen that growing high up in a nearby tree. I thought there was a good chance I could reach most of the fruit I could see. It would be difficult and dangerous, but it had to be done. I would have to leap from one tree into another.
I knew I was taking my life in my hands, but I had no choice. There was plenty of fruit there, all we needed for days. I had to try. I left two of the orang-utans in the nest – the little one wouldn’t be left – and made my bid for the fruit, climbing and swinging through the branches, never once looking down. I made it, I made it there and back, again and again. We would have all the fruit we needed, for a while at least.
We were all right for drink too. There was milk from the orange coconuts. It took a while to stab through the outer skin with a pointed stick to get at the milk, but it was worth the effort. I had to fight the little orang-utans off to have my share. They loved it as much as I did.
But we had to make do with water mostly. The orang-utans always seemed to find enough, from the giant leaves that were so often filled and refilled with rainwater, and sometimes from the hollows of trees where it always seemed to be plentiful. We might have had to share the water with frogs and beetles and all sorts, and it might not have tasted that wonderful, but it kept us going, kept us alive. Above all we were safe up here. It was all that mattered.
The more I thought about it, the more I felt sure it was best to stay where we were, that there was no point in running anyway. Down on the forest floor we could bump into the hunters and their dogs at any time. I had no idea where they were, and no idea which way to go. So, what would be the point? I was already lost, I knew that. I could be going round and round in circles for ever in this jungle. I could even end up back near Mister Anthony’s mining camp, the last place in the world I ever wanted to see again. No, staying put was best, staying put was safest.
So for many days and nights I tried to live as orang-utans and gibbons did, high in the trees, feeding off them, living off them, hiding in them, sleeping in them. I kept reminding myself of a lesson Oona had once taught me, that I had to set aside all hopes, all expectations, and to live only for today, because it was the only way to survive. But that was a great deal easier said than done.
My constant hope was that Oona might somehow find me. I kept the hope alive in my mind every day, every night. Often I’d find myself lying there in our sleeping nest telling the little orang-utans all about Oona, about how she’d saved me from the tsunami, about how one day she would come and find us in the jungle. But it was a hope that was fast fading with every passing day. I went on telling them about her, promising them she would come, because deep down I needed to keep believing it might be possible, that however unlikely it might be, a reunion with Oona could happen. They seemed to love gazing up into my face as I was telling my stories about her, reaching out to touch my face with their fingers, and sometimes with their lips too. Kissing, I discovered, was not just for human beings. And nor was storytelling.
I remember I was lying there once in the sleeping nest, telling them all about the farm in Devon, about Grandpa and the tractor, when I heard a sudden hooting from high above us in the canopy. It sounded like an owl. At once an image came into my head – of Mum sitting on my bed when I was little, and telling me a story about an owl who was afraid of the dark. And here I was, like an owl up in a tree, telling a story, just as she had. I cried for her that night, and for Dad, for the first time in a long while.
Living so closely together up in the trees, I was getting to know the three little orang-utans as individuals now, and as companions too. In a way it was a bit like being back at school again. These were the guys I hung out with now, my new gang, my best mates. We ‘did stuff’ together, not the same ‘stuff’ of course as with Bart and Tonk and Charlie, but it was ‘stuff’ all the same.
I suppose that was why I decided in the end to call the orang-utans Bart, Tonk and Charlie. They were all very distinctive characters, so I twinned them up with whichever friend back home seemed to suit them best. The biggest of them, the strongest, and certainly the most pushy, and probably the eldest, I call
So the littlest of the three I had to call Charlie. I wasn’t sure, but I’d always thought Charlie had to be the one that had belonged to the mother orang-utan I remembered from the day of the slaughter in the fig trees, the dark-haired one that the other mothers had all looked to as a leader, the one I’d seen falling out of the fig tree, that I watched hitting the ground, still clutching her baby. Charlie was definitely more of a loner, quickly becoming more adventurous than the other two, and increasingly independent of them, though still very attached to me, literally. She was also a girl – there’s a way of telling these things – unlike the Charlie at school. It made me smile every time I thought how furious Charlie would have been if he knew he’d been turned into a girl. But then of course Charlie shouldn’t really have been that upset, because Charlie was a name that could be used both ways, so to speak. So it was fair enough, I reckoned, to call Charlie, Charlie.