3 True Grit Adventures : Stalking the Sumatran Tiger

In the foggy consciousness that follows an abrupt awakening, I tried to understand what I’d just heard. “Tigger praying round.”

“Tiger playing around?” I asked, looking up at my guide as I wriggled out of my sleeping bag and into my sweat-soaked clothes.

“Yah, big tigger. Man says it on trail,” he said breathlessly.

I’d been stalking tigers in the Sumatran jungle for 26 days, wearing Nikons like six-shooters and gunning for a photograph of one. I’d given myself 28 days to get the photo; I now had less than 30 hours to take it or fly 8,100 miles home empty-handed.

My guide led me outside my room to an ancient man with a grin so big it almost split his face. In the gaze of a dozen villagers unaccustomed to seeing a white person, I followed the old man 200 yards up the road that bisects this flyspeck of a village.

The sun was a crimson smear in a gray sky when we reached the mouth of a muddy trail bounded by razor grass twice my height.

“ Harimau ,” the man whispered, jabbing the point of his machete toward the narrow trail.

Harimau , tiger in Bahasa Indonesia, was somewhere in there and without a second thought I entered the jungle alone and unarmed.

I had come to Sumatra because the island is home to the last of the three subspecies of Indonesian tiger. The final Bali tiger was shot by a hunter in 1923, and the Java tiger slipped into extinction 10 years ago. Fewer than 200 Sumatran tigers exist in the wild today.

My search began at the Jakarta Zoo, on the neighboring island of Java. I figured I’d find someone there who spoke English and Bahasa Indonesia and would be willing to work for me as a guide. I was right, and the next day I was airborne with Yan, a young man who drives trucks for the zoo.

We arrived in Bengkulu, a tranquil community in West Sumatra, bordered by steamy jungle and vast Indian Ocean beaches. A 12-hour bus ride through the forest brought us to bustling Sungaipenuh, a town in the middle of a lush valley ringed by green rugged mountains.

After a night at a $3 hotel and a meal of water buffalo and Tiger Lager beer, Yan and I walked five blocks to the ranger station that issues permits to visit Ladeh Panjang, a lake in a national park about an hour’s drive away.

“Many, many tigers there,” said Ir Syahgiman, a nervous little man with perfectly parted hair, pointing to the outline of a lake on a simple map of the park. “And,” he shuddered, “ so many leeches.”

After Yan and I signed a form releasing the Indonesian government from responsibility for our welfare, the official added with an air of great import: “Villagers say you have good purpose, tiger OK. Bad purpose, and tiger attack.”

A bus took Yan and me to the mountain village of Kebun Baru, home of an experienced tiger stalker named Tukiman.

He received us at the door of his home wearing a U.S. Army field jacket adorned with drawings of skulls. His teeth looked like wreckage and his coarse black hair streamed over his shoulders. His eyes were dull chestnuts and most of his fingers--stained from home-rolled cigarettes--were bent and scarred. When asked his age, Tukiman needed to ask what year it was and then do some calculating before announcing that he was 33.

Inside, Yan and Tukiman haggled over what I’d be paying for his services. “He wants 3,600 rupiahs (about $2 U.S.) and two packs of Marlboros each day,” Yan said. Tukiman was hired. Then we all had tea, and Yan and I went off to sleep in a room vacated by Tukiman’s children. We would head to Ladeh Panjang--land of “many, many tigers”--the next day. Or so I thought.

We weren’t an hour’s trek from Tukiman’s home when we entered the jungle and, minutes later, arrived at a shack or losmen made from the trunks of young trees. The place belonged to Tukiman, and to my surprise Yan said that we would be staying there.

He explained that Tukiman had had success in luring tigers to this losmen . Just last year, I was told, a policeman firing a rifle from within the losmen killed a man-eater.

Now, while we watched, Tukiman built a wooden cage and cut a hole in the losmen’s side through which I was to photograph a tiger, lured to the cage by the bait of several live, tasty dogs. The dogs’ sounds, Tukiman said, would attract a tiger in the wee hours of the night.

About an hour after sunset, Kukiman’s own dogs were whining in the cage. Fireflies flitted in lime-green streaks in the blackness outside the losmen and fruit bats the size of eagles crossed the charcoal sky. Monkeys screamed into deafening crescendos, then stopped--leaving an unnerving silence. And then it rained, the dogs were brought in and I put my cameras away.

The next five nights were similarly disappointing. The dogs had grown used to the cage and no longer whined. And during two of the nights it rained; unless a tiger is famished it will remain in its den during showers.

At last we abandoned plan A and set out again to Ladeh Panjang, arriving minutes before nightfall and rushing to make camp. We picked an area near an abandoned losmen and used what wood remained from it to support sheets of plastic that would serve as our roof. I had brought two one-man tents with me, but the guides opted not to share the other one. I pitched one and crawled into it for the night.

Or rather, for part of the night.

It was 11:20 p.m. when the dogs, seated beside us, began growling. They growled off and on for the next several hours, but whatever it was they sensed in the brush around us we could not see.

Then, shortly before 4 a.m., a tiger let loose an “arrrooom, arrrooom” so loud, so near, that it came at us not so much as a noise but rather a tremendous, terrifying vibration.

Unarmed, Yan, Tukiman and I immediately took to fueling a campfire we’d built to dry our sopping shoes. In no time we had a blaze, and soon we began burning the branches that propped up our roof--so anxious were we to keep the fire, and ourselves, alive. We talked loudly about our good purpose, sounding, I suppose, like frightened fools, until sunrise when Tukiman entered the tall brush nearby to look around.

Returning, the look on his face conveyed the thought: The tiger had been very close.

With cautious movements, Tukiman showed Yan and me where the tiger’s paws had hammered out a path. The most unsettling thing about this path was how well-trodden it was. The tiger had been pacing back and forth. A lot.

Back at the losmen, it was clear tents and plastic sheets were no protection against tigers, and I’d decided I’d had enough of the cat-and-dog game anyway. I gave Tukiman double what I’d agreed to pay him and a handful of American dollars. When last I saw him, he was rolling a cigarette of tobacco, bark and roots in a $1 bill, the likes of which he’d never seen before.

Acting on a tip from a policeman, Yan and I took a bus to Tapan, a dirty crossroads town. There, villagers told us that while tigers roamed nearby hills, many more could be found in the marshy jungle near Silaut, an hour’s drive south. But the villagers issued a warning: Men who kill tigers are reincarnated as man-eating tigers, and the area around Silaut is full of dead tiger hunters. Be careful, they said most seriously.

With the right encouragement--2,500 rupiahs (about $1.40)--a truck driver hauled Yan and me down to Silaut. At 3 a.m., we came to a stop in front of a restaurant. In no time, Yan arranged for us to inhabit its back room. From then on it was tiger search by night, sleep by day.

As we did in Kebun Baru, we hired a local guide. His name was Dilell, he spoke in chilling tones, if at all, and he refused to enter the jungle at night after a rainy day when the mosquitoes come out in force. Dilell believed that if a mosquito bites you after it has bitten a tiger, the tiger will attack you regardless of your purpose.

Dilell, Yan and I were a team our first four nights in Silaut, with Dilell walking out front as we wound through dense vegetation, our flashlight beams out ahead. The tigers around Silaut live semi-aquatically in swampy jungle, and to find one you must enter the rain forest in the middle of the night and surprise one.

During our first night, my flashlight beam illuminated a black spider the size of my palm, a cobra crossing my path and a rare clouded leopard. We saw lemurs, wild pigs and other creatures on the second and third nights.

On the fourth night we spotted our first tiger. He was sitting on our trail at the end of my flashlight beam--about 200 feet ahead. His amber eyes glowed like burning cigars. The air clung to us like gauze as we crept toward him. The big cat disappeared and we quickened our pace. We came to where he had been and saw that he’d cut a path away from our trail and had entered foliage that was a deeper black within a black. In spite of my better judgment I went in after him, and Dilell followed.

I advanced ever so slowly, poking my flashlight around trees as I went. The tiger had to be close. There was a swollen river about 150 feet ahead, so he couldn’t go far. And he had to feel cornered.

I’d walked about 75 feet before I looked behind me. I’d forgotten that tigers often attack from behind. Now that I’d remembered, I looked behind again . . . and again. Then I realized that Dilell was gone--that I was cornering a member of the largest-feline-in-the-world-club alone .

I made my retreat with nothing resembling the slothlike speed with which I’d made my approach. Back at the main trail I found Yan and Dilell conversing in whispers. It had begun to rain and Yan, who had a knack for stating the obvious, told me so. My clothes were soaked with sweat. Sweat was dripping off the camera I clutched. Sweat funnelled into my ears.

“OK, Yan, we’ll go. We don’t want to get wet ,” I sneered.

I paid Dilell back at the restaurant and fired him for abandoning me in the forest. He was relieved, and left after several handshakes and thank-yous. It was the friendliest I’d seen him.

In the days that followed, Yan lost interest in the tiger hunt, but I only grew more anxious and took to stalking tigers by myself. Several times I saw one, but always it was outside the range of my flash.

The days and nights slipped past. Too frequently it rained. Where once the forest seemed bursting with expectation, I now looked out on nothing but disappointment. With three days to go, it rained for two days straight. The more it rained, the more beer I drank and the bluer I got.

So it was that I was lying on my back after a lengthy liquid supper when Yan burst into my room and awakened me with “Tigger praying round.”

This was it. On my last night in the jungle, this would be my final chance to photograph one of the world’s rarest felines.

The man with the broad grin, who had brought me to the elusive creature’s trail, waited at roadside as I headed into the razor grass as quietly as I could.

I recalled the war photographer’s axiom: “Too far and you haven’t got a picture, too close and you won’t be alive to take it.”

As I followed the trail that cut sharply to the left, then to the right, I remember thinking that my film might be too slow at this near-sunset hour, when suddenly I locked eyes with a full-grown Sumatran tiger not 20 yards away.

My gut reaction was gratitude for the distance between us, spiked with a burning desire to hug the big cat. Although he could have had dinner with three leaps and a swipe, the tiger turned his huge head away from me and ambled off.

The awesomeness of the animal, separated from me only by his lack of interest, idled my brain. All I could do was stare. Then I remembered by camera. Film speed? 100 ASA. Too slow, I thought, pushing the speed to 400 ASA. Lens? 105 millimeters, OK. But I’ll have to stay close.

Ready as I’ll ever be, I lied to myself, as I followed the tiger.

He was 30 yards ahead of me and entering a clearing. Now, I thought, now! I fired off several frames. “Face me, gorgeous,” I whispered, but he never looked back. I tripped the shutter a couple more times, capturing, I hoped, the steely beauty of his back and shoulders and possibly part of his face. And then he was gone.