Major Rich had sent his shikaris on the night before to collect beaters, so that when we arrived we were welcomed by a small army of Klings, Tamils, and Malays, and the usual sprinkling of pariah dogs. A wild, strange set are these beaters. They toil not, neither do they spin. Their wives do that occasionally, making a few sarongs for home use and an odd one for the market. Cocoanuts, pineapples, a little patch of paddy with a dozen half-wild chickens, and perchance, if they are not Mohammedans, a pig with its litter, afford them sustenance. For their day's beating they were to receive fifteen cents apiece. They were all ranged in line and counted, after which we took up our march through a plantation of tapioca, the brush standing about level with our heads. Chinese coolies were working about its roots keeping down the great pest of Malayan farmers,--lallang grass. The tapioca was broken in places by a few acres of pepper vines and again by neglected coffee shrubs.
Our procession was truly formidable. Fifty or more natives went on ahead making a path. Then we followed, fifteen in number, each with a native to carry his gun. The rear was brought up by twoscore more and half as many dogs. Three-quarters of an hour's walk brought us to our first beat. The head shikaris placed us in an open position, from fifty to one hundred yards apart, facing the jungle. The beaters, in the meantime, had gone by a long detour around the jungle to drive whatever it contained within reach of our guns.
In the second of these beats (I described the first in the opening of this chapter) a deer ran out far in advance of the pigs. We caught but a fleeting glimpse of it above the grass. My gun and that of my neighbor went off simultaneously. The deer disappeared. We rushed to the spot and found the leaves dyed with blood. Then commenced a chase, which, although fruitless, was well worth the exertion. All the panorama of tropical life seemed to lay in our tracks. For an half-hour we traversed the rolling plain with its burden of grass. Some smoker dropped a match in it, and in an instant it was all ablaze, spreading away like a whirlwind, burning only the very tips, toward a distant jungle. Then we dove into a bosky wood by a narrow winding path, and through a stream of water. The path was like a tunnel, the dense foliage shutting it in on both sides and above. The thorns of the rattans reached down and tore our clothes, and long trailing rubber-vines caught up our helmets and held our feet. In a marshy bit of jungle, a small colony of unwieldy sago palms found root, while pitcher-plants and orchids hung from almost every limb. Clumsy gray iguanas and long-tailed lizards of a brilliant green rushed up the trunks of lichen-covered trees. Troops of monkeys went scattering away on all sides, and black squirrels chattered on in the perfect security of the dim obscurity. In a bit of sandy bottom, a silken-haired, zebra-striped tapir scuttled away ere we were half alive to his presence.