the grove, its queer attap-thatched houses raised a man’s height from the ground,
and connected with it by rickety ladders. Dozens of nude little children played
under the shadow of the palms, while the comely faces and syrah-stained teeth
of their mothers peeped at us from behind low barred windows. The cocoanut
groves were superseded by tapioca, pepper, and coffee plantations. At regular
distances were neat stations, manned by Malay and Sikh police. The roads over
which we dashed were in perfect repair. In another hour we were nine miles
from Singapore and near our first “beat.”
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