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AN EAST WIND BLOWING
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THE LORDS OF HARBENDANE
THE SWORDSMAN
DANGEROUS MOONLIGHT
TIGER, TIGER
WINDRAGE
WHITE ROSE OF NIGHT (2005 reissue)
FORTUNES OF WAR (2005 reissue)
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HELLGATE: Deep Sky
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DEATH’S HEAD (Complete & Unabridged)
EQUINOX (2003 reissue)
SCORPIO
STOPOVER
APHELION
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Callisto Switch
Breakheart
Crimes of Passion
TIGER, TIGER
Mel Keegan
DreamCraft Multimedia, Australia
TIGER, TIGER
© 2006 by Mel Keegan
All rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity between real persons or other characters, alive or dead, is strictly coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever, including but not limited to lending, uploading and copying, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
DreamCraft Multimedia
Box 270, Brighton 5048, South Australia
See MEL KEEGAN ONLINE for everything Keegan:
http://www.melkeegan.com
1
Sonny Moran did not have to glance at the GPS to know where he was, down to the last ten meters. He had stepped out of the old-growth five minutes before and jogged up the east slope of an old plantation. On the shoulder of the hill, nothing grew. Century-old erosion had eaten the land down to bare rock and chalk, and from the open space there, Sonny could see the derelict pipeline, headed north from the lakes at Savage River which had once been open-pit iron mines, to the ghost town of Port Lattie on the coast, where the iron-ore slurry had once been processed before it was hauled out to Japan.
Two ridge lines west was Mount Frankland, more than four hundred meters tall and covered with military-rank plantation timber punctuated by a few small pockets of old-growth. Two ridge lines east was the Murchison Highway, headed like an arrow up to Bass Strait. And in between, stretching north and south in a shape like a crescent moon, was Cass Vandermeer’s domain. The three thousand hectares of not-quite-virgin rainforest were Sonny Moran’s territory — and the hunting grounds of the last wild tigers.
Not that the new Tasmanian tigers were genuinely wild, Sonny admitted as he slid green glasses onto his nose. He uncapped a water bottle and half-drained it as he surveyed the forest canopy. The last remnants of the Tarkine region — from the Arthur River on its northern boundary to Waratah Road in the south, from the Frankland River in the west to the Murchison Highway in the east — were enclosed. Five meters of cyclone fencing and razor wire held out the rest of the world, with notices in five languages: ‘Private property, Trespassers prosecuted.’ In English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and French the notices carried a subtext: ‘Beware: large carnivores.’
Carnivores? Sonny surveyed the forest with deep satisfaction. Twelve mature female tigers were at large in the Tarkine, with more than twenty cubs at various ages. Every tiger in the park was female; every animal was conceived in the lab. The greatest danger to a growing cub was a male tiger, and when the territory was the size of a handkerchief, and surrounded by fences, if males were loose in the Tarkine, the cubs would not last long.
So Cass Vandermeer’s six male tigers were on the property down at Cradle Mountain. They roamed through forty hectares of paddocks, separated by cyclone fences to keep them from skirmishing; they were well fed, semi-wild, and their only duty was to contribute to the gene bank.
For the first time in fifteen minutes, Sonny looked down at the GPS. He knew exactly where he was, but he had spent the last four hours tracking Indhira, and the GPS knew where she was, down to the last meter. At two in the afternoon it was hot. He had been on foot since the copter deposited him on the west side of the Lyons River, and Indhira’s range took him into forest which was still virtually inaccessible. A century ago, these valleys were the Savage River National Park; fifty years ago, they were the property of the Tasman Hardwoods Corporation.
And then leases expired and title passed back to Vandermeer. The logging trucks moved out, tigers moved in, and the war of words began. On one side were the supporters of the timber industry, who swore that the country’s hardwood forests were ‘sustainable.’ On the other side were the wilderness ecologists, who had never been able to explain the difference between ‘old-growth’ virgin rainforest and a timber plantation in words the timber industry’s dependent workers could understand. And caught between the two factions, oblivious to a war which was fought out in arbitration courts across the world, were the new Tasmanian tigers. Forty animals, genetically sound, completely healthy, and living wild, so long as Cass Vandermeer could hold onto the last remnants of the Tarkine.
The radio crackled, and Sonny reached around to the curve of his back, where it was hooked to his pack. He was hot, tired, hungry. His shirt was off, tied around his hips, his hair lay in a single thick braid on his right shoulder, and his palms sweated in their leather gloves.
“Sonny, you there? Sonny, this is Overhead, where the hell are you?”
He gave the radio a glare. “I’m on the shoulder of E-24, and the GPS tells me Indhira’s about three hundred meters away, in the valley. What’s your hurry?”
“What’s my hurry?” Alec Fisk demanded. “We were supposed to be going out tonight. You and me, brushed and polished, dinner in Launceston and then a club. We were going to go dancing at Blue Heaven, unless my memory’s playing tricks on me.”
“So, it’s two o’clock,” Sonny said reasonably. “There’s plenty of time.”
“Not if you don’t shift your ass,” Fisk retorted. “You know where the cat is? Get moving!”
The three hundred meters’ distance was not the problem. The difficulty was that most of them took Sonny down a slope which was little less sheer than a cliff. At the bottom was a runoff creek, and then the fringe of the old-growth forest on the other side. For some time he had been scouting for a safe way down. This whole area was still scarred with the last vestiges of the haul roads, where the THC trucks and dozers cut their way through the rainforest until the stroke of midnight on the day their lease expired. By dawn, the access roads were blocked by labor protesters carrying placards: ‘Jobs not woods,’ ‘Kids before cats,’ ‘What about our families?’ Wilderness ecologists and tiger biologists alike answered, as they had a thousand times before: Go back to school, qualify in something else, take work that does not depend on destroying the last rainforest on the planet to make woodchips. But it was easier to picket the old THC access roads, and the Tarkine was in the news for months.
Cass Vandermeer did not fight the protesters. The tigers came in by jetcopter, a few weeks after the wild boar and deer had been released into the timber plantation areas. These were the prey animals, and few ecologists argued against releasing them. They were free to roam only in the vast tracts of the plantations, where the native environment had already been destroyed. Little more damage could be done there, though the deer and pigs would thrive.
The haul roads had not been dozed or graded in thirty years now, and they were overgrown. The wilderness was recovering what had been stolen. It would be many centuries before the rainforest returned, if it ever did; but diversity was slowly coming to the plantation. In the eight years Sonny had worked for Vandermeer, he had seen it happening.
“Can’t find a road,” he told Fisk. “I’m going to head on down ... and I’ll be skating most of the way. You got a fix on me?”
“Kid, I’ve got you nailed,” Fisk chuckled. “Not for the first time.”
Nor even the first time today. Sonny’s whole body recalled the morning, in the dawn light, when Fisk had woken early and hard. “Standby,” he told his partner. “I’ll call when I get to the bottom in one piece ... and if I don’t —”
“I’ll come rescue you,” Fisk finished. “For the sixth time.”
“Fifth,” Sonny argued. “The time that big tennis player was hitting on me doesn’t count. I was talking my way out before you showed up.”
“Silver-tongued Sonny,” Fisk said, and smacked his lips. “Don’t I know it? Seriously, make it quick, Son. I’ve got those bloody lunatics ragging on me. I’m supposed to get them into the middle of the Keith River wilderness, and for them, the time matters. They lose the light, they can’t shoot today. And they start losing the light when the gorges fill up with shadow. Damnit, why did Cass have to bring these bastards in?”
“Good publicity for the park,” Sonny said philosophically. “Five minutes, Alec, and I’ll be down one way or the other. Hold on.”
“Hold onto what?” Fisk demanded with mock innocence. “I’ll, uh, think of something.”
“You do that.” Sonny returned the radio to his pack.
He put on the shirt, buttoned it, tightened the gloves, and seated the glasses firmly. He was in hiking boots and denims, with a light fannypack, and he had set down his rifle to drink and check the GPS. The water bottle slid back into the fannypack’s webbing and the pack slid around to the front. He slung the rifle over both shoulders and stooped to tuck the cuffs of his jeans into his socks to keep out gravel. A pair of velcro straps held them down tight. After a few hikes into this wilderness, a man learned to be prepared.
He was at the top of the decline. Behind him, the hillside was bare, showing chalk spots. Clear cutting and mining had reduced too much of the Tarkine to rock and vast lakes, where open pits had filled with rain. Before and below him, the slope was loose, unstable, treacherous. But Indhira was down there, and according to the GPS, she had not moved in thirty minutes.
She might be asleep, but Sonny doubted it. She had been hunting at noon in the old plantation areas, where Tasmanian Oak marched like soldiers in orderly ranks, and where the local razorbacks and imported sambar deer were thriving. After she made her kill, she would eat enough to take the edge off her appetite and then drag the carcass undercover and bring her cubs. But according to the GPS, the tigress had simply stopped, and Sonny was worried.
Had the prey turned on her? Razorbacks were damned dangerous. The wild pigs would stand and fight men or dogs, and their tusks were lethal. The tigress could be wounded. She could be dead, he thought grimly as he poised at the lip of the decline. She was radio tagged, but the chips sent back only locational data. Many times, Sonny had said to Cass that the chips should send basic telemetry. Respiration, temperature, heartbeat.
A hot wind skipped over the bald hillside. He sucked in a breath, flexed his knees, and let the loose slope carry him down. It was a lot like skating, and muscles he had not used in years began to respond. A ridiculous amount of his youth had been spent on a skateboard; his parents had called those hours wasted, but Sonny was grateful for them now.
A pall of beige dust rose about him as he went down, hopping from one stable patch to another and trying to control his speed. He was too fast, and he knew it. He angled his feet, taking the gravel on the thick soles of the boots, using them to brake while he still had balance and command. Gravity and the loose surface were his enemies, but after so many years of experience they were familiar demons.
Halfway down, he was still on his feet. Black cockatoos harangued him from the tops of myrtle in the old-growth forest, which was racing toward him, and crows laughed hoarsely as they wafted out of the creek bed, right below. Sweat trickled between his shoulders as he skipped from a boulder here to a patch of button grass there, controlling the descent until the last ten meters.
Then the surface fell out from beneath his boots, loose sand avalanched away into the creek, and he was down. Sheer luck turned a headlong roll into a skid, and he would not feel the bruises for hours. He gave a whoop as he slithered into the shallows of the runoff creek, and picked himself up before the radio, GPS and rifle were inundated.
“Overhead, this is Sonny. You still there, Alec?”
Fisk had left the channel open. “I heard you yell. You broke your neck?”
“Piece of cake,” Sonny told him. “That was fun — why was I looking for a haul road?” He was studying the GPS again, and his tone sobered. “She still isn’t moving. I’m liking this less and less. Is Liz there yet?”
“She’s somewhere in the lab. I called her.” Fisk paused. “Let me call her again ... you think you’ve got trouble?”
“I don’t know. It could be nothing.” Sonny was already moving, heading northwest, through the ankle-deep creek water and into the old-growth on the other bank. “Find Liz, tell her to grab her gear,” he added tersely. “I’ll call it in when I find the cat.”
“Will do,” Fisk responded.
The transition from the timber plantation to the old-growth always raised a prickle along Sonny’s arms. The temperature dropped as the canopy thickened; forty kinds of trees and plants surrounded him rather than the monoculture of the plantation, and the forest was quiet with an almost cathedral hush. The rainbow hues of fungi and lichens were dazzling in any patch of filtered sunlight, and green parrots dove like missiles over his head.
The eucalypts and deep red myrtle were ancient and massive. The forest seemed to be as old as time. Following the radio tag signal, Sonny made his way soundlessly across carpets of lichens, under Sassafras and Pandani Palms. Fifty meters into the old-growth, the Tarkine seemed so primordial, he would hardly have been surprised to see a dinosaur lift its head from the wide rainwater pools.
The radio signal was strong, and from the frequency he knew which tiger it was. He walked south for fifty meters to skirt a vast pool and came up on a glade where the arch of the trees showed an open way back to the plantation. Between the vast trunks of seventy meter giants which were three and four centuries old, he saw the serried ranks of the ‘timber farm,’ where no tree was older then seventy or eighty years.
And tire tracks cut a double line directly into the abandoned plantation. A 4x4 had been through here in the last day — someone knew exactly where the old THC haul road was, and that a clearing was maintained for jetcopters, not two kilometers away.
“Damn,” Sonny murmured. It would not be the first time shooters had got into the park, but they were rare since Vandermeer had beefed up the surveillance system with a remote camera mounted on a blimp.
According to the radio tag, he was on top of the tiger, and now he used his eyes. She was Bengal, Panthera tigris tigris, purebred, designed by evolution to flourish in jungles which no longer existed. Fifty thoroughbreds of every subspecies, from the Siberian to the Sumatran, were still found in zoos and animal parks around the world, but by no contortion of the imagination could they be called wild.
If one stretched the point just a little, Vandermeer’s Tasmanian tigers were wild. They lived within fences, but the cyclone wire was kilometers apart; they were radio tagged, tracked at every moment, but they were at liberty to roam at will through some of the last virgin rainforest in the world. They were cared for by veterinarians who had invested decades in the study of tigers, but they hunted for themselves; their cubs were conceived in the lab, but born in the wild. They were precious beyond measure.
And Indhira was down. Sonny’s gut clenched as he saw her at last. She was so well camouflaged, he had not made her out for minutes. At once he saw that she was still breathing, but she was ominously still. At five years old she was a fully-mature female; she was close to three meters long from nose to tail and weighed 150 kilos. She had hidden two cubs somewhere not far away, and Sonny worried for them, too.
“Alec, you still with me?” he said to the radio as he made his way through the tall grass.
“Right here.” Fisk was no longer bantering.
“Did you find Liz? The tiger’s down.”
“Christ. Hang on.” Fisk paused, and then was back: “Liz! Get in here, will you, right bloody now. She’s down. That’s all I know.”
Sonny was a ranger, not a veterinarian. His skills extended as far as those of the paramedic, and he approached the tiger cautiously as he waited for Liz Taggart. He saw no blood. She was lying on her side, and the ribs heaved in a slow, steady cadence, but not even a whisker twitched. He crept closer and laid a hand on her, ready to jump back if he had startled her. Indhira knew him well enough to be friendly; she would not let him — or anyone else — approach her cubs, but she had no reason to maul him. She had been born in the Tarkine, the fourth generation of tigers to be born in this wilderness. She had no fear of humans.
She did not respond to his hand on her shoulder. He leaned closer and sniffed her breath, but it was fresh. If she were sick, he would have smelt something acid, sour or rank. He lifted an eyelid and saw the eye rolled up. The eerily human pupil was vastly dilated, and he swore. He was reaching for the radio when Liz Taggart came on the air, flustered and breathless.
“Sorry about that, Sonny, I was in the lab.” She spoke with the telltale Sydney twang. “What’s this about Indhira? Not more bloody hunters —?”
“Of a kind,” Sonny said grimly. “She’s been tranked. I can’t find the dart in her, but she’s down, out cold, pupils are dilated. And I saw 4x4 tracks when I made it in here. And whoever they are, they know tigers. There’s plenty of undergrowth, tall grass, good graze for deer ... and I hear water nearby. Damnit, where the hell are the cubs?”
He heard the anger in his own voice and was not surprised when Liz said loudly, “Chill, Sonny. Stay with her. We’ll be there in fifteen minutes. The cubs’ll be all right till then.”
“If the cubs are still here,” Sonny said bleakly. “I’m looking at 4x4 tracks, Liz, and you have to know what I’m thinking.”
She skipped a beat. “If they’re taking the cubs out, we’ll find them faster, easier, from the air. Fifteen minutes. Just stay put.”
“Ten,” Fisk corrected. “The copter’s already powered up, Son, and we know where you are. Liz, grab your gear. We’re moving. And for godsakes, somebody let Cass know!” he added into the open radio channel.
At least six others would be listening in. Stewart Franco, the mechanic, monitored the radio constantly. Joel, the assistant vet, was in the field, but he would certainly be listening. Chloe Brandtner, the PR officer should be picking up a cell even now, to inform the boss, and Sonny would not be surprised to know Caspar Vandermeer himself was already listening in. The day-hire guys would be working — fences, firebreaks surveillance systems, cameras, running supplies — but each of them carried radio, plus the big shortwaves on the vehicles, and the radios should be open.
As he waited through the ten interminable minutes, Sonny listened to his own. Franco had come in from the copter hangar and was retasking the remote camera, but the blimp was on the other side of the park, down toward the southeast boundary. It would be half an hour before it could be over the old dirt road which headed up to the clearing where jetcopters often landed, and by then the intruders could be gone.
“Get your damned priorities in order,” Sonny muttered to himself as he examined the tiger to the limits of the paramedic’s knowledge. He had been working with tigers for nine years. He had done two years in the field with animal rescue in Myanmar, where the last wild tigers were recovered when the Hukawng Valley was reassigned to agriculture.
The tragedy still stung him, but he saw the truth as clearly as did anyone. With almost ten billion mouths to be fed on the planet, there was no space left in Asia for wilderness, and as the government of Myanmar rightly said, the tiger was no longer an endangered species. More than a quarter million of them were living pampered lives from Mumbai to Montreal.
But not in the wild, Sonny thought bitterly. A quarter million tigers had been genetically redesigned, bred as exotic pets, but not one remained wild in Asia. Only in Tasmania did a few dozen live in the primordial forest for which they had evolved. In Los Angeles and London they were commonplace, engineered to the size of a medium-large dog, subject to the leash laws, with breeding discouraged except in the lab — which had not stopped private ‘backyard’ breeders. Somewhere beyond the Maine Coon and the Ocecat, with the dimensions and tenacity of a Rottweiler, was the domestic tiger. Longhair, shorthair, white, altaica; designed by computer, bred and born to domesticity.