THE TIGER

Of the many adventures that Bonatti described in his articles and books, we have chosen one from 1968 when he travelled to the jungles of Sumatra. This story of an encounter (which in the end never occurs) reveals all his narrative power, but also his ability to blend into his environment and offer a different and enchanted perspective of the world. Bonatti searches for a tiger, but the tiger is the spirit of the forest: invisible until one learns to look.

I was about to pitch camp in the forest, on the edge of an old trail that an American oil company had driven through many years before, and which the jungle was now swallowing up again. I stopped where we found traces of the tiger. Franz Sumopawiro, the Indonesian friend acting as my guide, had spotted the tracks towards evening. Now he barely had time to unload my equipment from the Land Rover and return to Duri before nightfall. As soon as we reached this spot he heard a strange deep sound, like a muffled but mighty sigh. “Harimau, tiger,” commented Franz. “But it can’t be an adult, because it’s making too much noise.” Before returning to Duri, he insisted on leaving me his rifle.

Groping in the half-light, I entered a thicket and cut three poles. Then I crossed them like the frame of a wigwam, spread my canvas over the top and sheltered underneath. I’d be sleeping the night on the bare ground beside my gear. So began my long and uncomfortable encampment, and not so much because of the mosquitoes and red ants that were biting viciously, but because of the troubled thoughts crowding my mind. Nothing is more contagious than other people’s fears. Curled up in the total darkness, I was haunted by the terrible tales I’d heard in recent days about the man-eaters of Sebanga. One of them was said to have claimed twelve victims, while another tiger had killed eight. The most recent, not too long before, allegedly slew three men in a single bound as they huddled close together. (...)

Over the following two days I was busy building a sort of canopy made out of four crossed uprights and a ridge pole to support a tarpaulin. I hung my hammock and various other things beneath it. Then, wielding a parang (machete), I made a small clearing to allow some breathing space in that eternally drenched and suffocating jungle. (...) I kept coming across tiger tracks around the camp, leading in every direction except towards the baits I’d placed. Those huge paw prints on the ground softened by rainfall were like an open book in which I tried to read the character of the elusive predator. Here and there, on the edge of the old trail, there were signs that the tiger had lurked crouching for some time. At one point, it had sprung into the bush with a leap of at least five metres. That pounce was undoubtedly a strike at some prey. The marks made by its claws as it leapt were etched in the ground, clearly visible. I also found the faeces that it usually evacuated before launching an attack. In my heart I was sure the tiger saw me as harmless. In the game of hide and seek I was playing with it, I sometimes felt taunted, as if we were not a man and a tiger pitted against each other, but two mindful and obstinate individuals. If I lay in wait on the edge of the trail north of the camp, I would soon find that the tiger had passed by on the south side. If I ventured into the jungle looking for it, when I emerged I would find its tracks in the centre of the trail, where I’d never seen any sign of it before. The tiger was always close at hand and spying on me. I sensed it, yet every effort to surprise it was frustrated not so much by the impervious jungle as by the animal’s solitary, unapproachable behaviour.

After a while I decided to build a traditional hide in a tree. I erected a platform and carefully camouflaged it amid the vegetation, about four metres off the ground and supported by three strong poles. Below it I placed a dead boar as bait. There it began to decay, oozing its stench into the stagnant air and constantly nauseating my senses. (...) At dusk on the fourth evening, my gaze was suddenly caught by something moving at the end of the trail, as if it had appeared from nowhere. The tiger, at last! Camouflaged among the leaves, Mardi and I were mesmerised as we watched it without daring to breathe. It approached quickly as it crossed

a marshy patch of ground no more than two hundred metres away. Advancing as if in slow motion, it skirted the vegetation and practically blended in with it. Now it was motionless, its gaze fixed on the dead boar. It was impassive, regal as a sphinx. My heartbeat quickened at the sight before my eyes, which was so rich in its associations and latent action.

Slinking forward, its belly brushing the ground, the big cat reached the clearing and was poised to take the dramatic leap: a unique spectacle that I wanted to capture on film. As the seconds ticked by, I was already imagining the scene as those huge claws reached out and sank into the boar’s carcass. There I was, about to press the shutter button... But with a twist, the tiger stopped, stiffened its legs, raised its muzzle and briskly sniffed the air in front of it. Something had made it wary, and suddenly it leapt off in the opposite direction, towards the jungle, and disappeared. With our nerves on edge, we waited for something more to happen in the darkness that had already fallen. But to no avail.

The next day saw me busy building another hide 500 metres further away, in the heart of the jungle. Positioning another bait, I patiently climbed back into the tree, this time on my own. As the days went by, the waiting became exasperatingly tedious. From dawn to dusk I stayed crouching up there, five metres above the ground, waiting for the tiger to take the plunge and come closer. No one was forcing me to do this. I could have left whenever I wanted, but the tiger had become an obsession, like Moby Dick for Captain Ahab. I’ve rarely experienced such a gruelling wait, and as the hope of success fades, staying on in the jungle becomes tougher and tougher.

I switched the order of my stake-out, keeping watch in the tree at night instead of by day. During the day I stayed in the camp, lying in my hammock until the heat became unbearable. At which point, seized by a frenzied urge to find the tiger, I’d start prowling about. One day, finally, I came across its prints. Clear, unmistakable and regular, they came to within 150 metres of the camp, then vanished into the jungle. I rushed to my hide and lay in wait unmoving and alone for over 39 hours straight. It was all in vain. Two Sakai came and told me they had seen clear prints on the trail a few miles from the camp. Naturally, I scrambled down the tree and hastened to the spot. But as I passed through the camp, in a sudden fit of rage, I grabbed the rifle instead of my camera. Of course, mine was just an irritated gesture, largely prompted by the great weariness and tension accumulated in so many days of gruelling anticipation. There was nothing more to it, because deep down I knew that if I really came across the tiger I would never be able to point a gun at it. I reached the spot I’d been told about, but I failed to find any paw prints. They had clearly been washed away in the last downpour. (...) All I could do was go back to my tree and start waiting again. By then it was 11 November and it was the 34th day I’d spent in the forest. I was faced with the prospect of remaining there at least another week, perched day and night in the branches in perfect solitude. But from that moment I felt something new swelling inside me. Climbing to my high observation post, I was almost surprised to find myself in the perfect vantage point to spy on all the secrets – both great and small – of that dense and retentive green universe, which is so hostile to all who don’t belong there. (...) Motionless and camouflaged in the foliage, at times I found myself in the middle of a troop of black monkeys sitting on the branches just above, busily engaged in their laborious grooming rituals. The sudden flick of a tail followed by a hoarse grumbling would signal that one of them had seen or heard me. But

they were nearly always calmed by my absolute immobility. Down below, in the perennially motionless undergrowth stifled in the torrid air, I could see the dark carcass of the wild pig that I’d left to lure in the tiger. The slender head of a monitor lizard occasionally popped up near the carrion, sniffed the air and silently continued on its way. (...) In that stillness, I suddenly caught sight of a long, black-and-yellow body implacably sliding between tussocks and knots of grass, perfectly camouflaged. I shuddered, thinking of the many species of venomous snakes inhabiting the jungle, but at the same time I was fascinated by the reptile’s grace as it sinuously overcame the obstacles in its path.

In that recess of virgin growth and quiet, one learns to see with the mind even more than with the eye. The senses are sharpened; silence refines the hearing and even the sense of smell. But sometimes it also stabs at the heart. I was reconciled with all this largely thanks to my own solitude, which certainly fostered the right sort of rapport with wild nature. I had a clear sense that the planet Earth does not belong to humanity. Rather, it is we who belong to the planet. These forests are truly the expression of the primordial force of nature, places where we are at the mercy of a power that escapes our control, where we feel degraded by something that we possessed long ago, but is no longer part of us today. Nature is tyrannical and so frighteningly filled with enigmatic solitude. It may sound like a contradiction, but the fascinating veil of mystery thickened around me. In that incredible world made of space, time and silence, before the sun pierces and disperses the mists, everything drips with moisture. Like tired animals, the giants of the forest display their primitive, strained and glossy trunks. In the highest canopies, the leafy and equally gleaming branches have twisted lianas dangling from them. You almost feel you could walk over the top of those immense trees with their dense foliage. And at their base, a shapeless tangle of slimy roots emerges from the ground, engaged in a constant tussle not only with each other, but also with the trunks along which they struggle upwards. Almost all of these sprawling roots are entwined, becoming one with the sagging boughs of the trees to form true colonnades of vegetation. Further down, there’s decomposing vegetation that gives off an acrid smell in the heat. (...)

Day after day I lived amid these singular landscapes, absorbing them and feeling them rise in my imagination in a whirl of sensations. Everything in the jungle has reality and presence. Everything attracts and rejects at the same time, so anything can become a great joy or a nightmare. But it’s hard to feel these emotions without experiencing a failing of the spirit, in which solitude and isolation play an important part. It was as if time had frozen. I became increasingly engrossed in the mysteries of the extraordinary world around me. I felt stirred by new impulses. Or were they perhaps the reflexes of ancient instincts that were now awakening? The sounds and scents of the forest attracted me. I sought them and relished them. I now believed I could recognise all the noises in the forest. The bird calls gave me the most intense feelings of intimacy, vitality, joyful exaltation, yet at times also a tinge of melancholy. In the Sumatran forest, hundreds of species of birds live in the dense green canopies. Other species have adapted to the swamps of the jungle. Their glum laments – but also their acute and sudden shrieks magnified by the silence that reigns all around – always end up breaking into a cascade of echoing and disquieting notes. (...)

Ever since the first moment that I became attuned (so to speak) to the forest, I noticed that even the deepest silence was, quite imperceptibly, being scratched away by the muted rasping of insects. Millions of tiny creatures intently living their lives unaware of the intruder, or at least indifferent to him. The forest is above all the realm of insects. Many of them are a scourge. They pestered me and were impossible to escape, even by swathing myself in layers of thick clothing that made me melt in my own sweat. I could feel them moving everywhere, inside and outside my clothes, often raising an itch that even furious scratching failed to assuage. They tormented me: swarms of mosquitoes, clouds of flies and midges, then horseflies and fiercely biting ants. And yet, in my hermit-like retreat, where I waited as time slowly passed, I sometimes found myself taking an indulgent curiosity in these tyrants. Lazy but determined, a cockroach would crawl along a nearby branch. A showy, pearly white flower seemed to blossom magically on a dead twig, but it was actually a predatory insect, a sort of locust that mimics a flower to catch small sap-sucking insects in search of nectar. I would hardly have noticed it if it hadn’t stuck itself right there under my nose. (...)

Through a misty ray of sunshine, I discovered a vortex of millions of infinitely tiny creatures. In comparison, the swarms of midges looked like bands of giants. At the same time, a team of greedy termites was requisitioning the dead parts of a piece of bark, while next to it a bunch of amber-coloured weaver ants were busy sewing two leaves together. A small spider with very long extremities was intently weaving its silky web. Imprudently, it spread its trap just above my head, and I ended up shattering it as soon as I stood up to stretch my legs. Another colourful spider curled up on the edge of a leaf pretending to be a flower bud.

When night falls in the jungle it’s pitch dark. The life of the birds is paused. The monkeys fall silent too, and the cicadas go quiet even earlier. But the void that their silence would have left is promptly filled with the deeper tone of chirping crickets. Finally, the more varied and sharper tones of the tree frogs break out. The call of the ghost owl stands out as well. Another life awakens to take the place of the one before it. This rowdy presence is well camouflaged in the darkness, and its voice is even more intense and reverberating than the sounds by day. But the real wonder that animates the warm nights in the forest are the fireflies. Thousands of these lampyrids fill the air with cheerful disorder, rhythmically launching their bright love signals. At certain moments it can be rather like sitting in the branches of a giant Christmas tree.

The air was still and nothing suggested a change of weather except the recollection of heavy cumulus clouds seen drifting across the sky at sunset. But suddenly there was a bright flash followed by a faraway rumble of thunder, which silenced the whole forest for an instant. It was in that unnatural silence that the latent threat could be sensed.

The leaves started to rustle. A gust of wind rose, then a second and a third, and others still longer and more sustained until they began to shake the foliage without letting up for an instant. Fumbling in the darkness, I wrapped the camera in a protective bag, then hurriedly sheltered from the impending downpour under a canvas sheet. Suddenly the sky lit up and broke open with a powerful and prolonged roar that made the air tremble. The rustling leaves swayed in the wind with the first drops already pattering on them. A moment later, the noise turned into a heavy rattling and the expected downpour suddenly arrived. Complete and deafening, it was a combination of rain, wind, thunder and lightning. The sky seemed to have drawn the ocean into the forest. Flashes of lightning in rapid succession split open the darkness. In that brutal climate, where all the elements are fused into the force of nature, I discovered a new and spectral forest around me between the shifting and destructive walls of water. At times it even seemed incandescent and I saw the branches whipping back and forth wildly. Some snapped and were dragged into the vortex of the cyclone. Although I was tightly gripped to my tree trunk, I was shaken furiously like a castaway clinging to the wreckage of a ship.

Finally the fury abated. The gusts of wind died down, the lightning faded, and the subdued echoes of thunder rolled further into the distance. The storm was over, but the downpour continued, because the heavy drops falling from above were still thudding down on the leaves. The rain in these parts always comes in two bouts: first it precipitates from the sky, then it drips from the trees. I was still holding onto my tree, curled up and sodden. Unable to sleep, I found no better way to pass the time than trying to decipher the rhythm of the water drops drumming around me. (...)

At daybreak, the feeling was wonderful. Once again I was enraptured by the magnificence of the forest, surprised by the utter silence that follows a storm. The jungle had returned to its natural state of stillness and quiet, in which everything lingers in the mild and peaceful restfulness that precedes the new day. Dense scrolls of mist hung amid the foliage of the trees, the ground cloaked in a light vapour, a pleasant stench of sodden leaves rising from the ground. To my eyes, everything appeared calm, remote and dreamlike. I was startled by a single laggard bat darting by. (...)

Despite defeating my intentions and regardless of all the problems it caused me, that nature has managed to win my deep affection. It has also given me a healthy lesson in modesty. I think I have an even clearer understanding of how we humans would lose all comprehension of ourselves if we didn’t have majestic expanses of intact nature as a term of comparison and yardstick, with all the wild creatures that inhabit it. To get closer to nature, to be able to experience it, we have to learn from the animals. Only these creatures still retain a genetic memory and can therefore trust their instincts. They alone still know what they need to know in order to live in nature. And because they know nature, they coexist with it instead of being afraid of it, and they never get into disastrous disagreements with it.

And the tiger? What about “my tiger”? (...) It could even have been below me, not far away. I did unbelievable, sometimes even reprehensible things to try and get close to it. I followed it into the jungle, waited at the entrances to clearings, spied on it from above in the trees, and all this for 40 days. But it was of no use. The tiger proved to be unexpectedly cunning. But it never tried to attack me. It simply tolerated me, almost disdaining direct contact, like a haughty lady. After all, I had expected it to stalk me, but instead I was the one who had laid a trap for it, in the form of an unrelenting siege. (...) When Mardi brings me supplies, I’ll inform him of my decision. Tomorrow we’ll break camp and leave.