The tiger and the monkeys

At a Glance

• Central figures: U Kla (the tiger), a troop of monkeys, and the monkey chief who devised the trick that saved them all.
• Setting: The forested hills of the Khasi country in Meghalaya, in the oral tradition of the Khasi people; the story is told as an animal fable explaining why tigers hunt alone and monkeys move in bands.
• The turn: The tiger corners the monkeys on a cliff with no way down, and the monkey chief offers a bargain - his own back as a bridge - that hides a deeper plan.
• The outcome: The monkeys escape across the monkey chief’s body to the far tree, and the tiger, leaping after them, falls into the gorge below.
• The legacy: Among the Khasi, the story is recalled as a teaching about cunning over strength, and as an explanation for the tiger’s solitary nature - it trusts no one because it was once outwitted by those it thought were weak.

The cliff dropped into nothing. Below it, the Umiam gorge went down and down into mist, and below the mist there were rocks, and below the rocks there was the river. The monkeys knew this because they had been born in these hills. The tiger knew it too, but the tiger did not care about the drop. The tiger cared about the monkeys.

There were perhaps thirty of them - mothers with infants pressed to their bellies, young males with their teeth bared, old ones who had stopped running and sat panting on the rock ledge. They had been chased up the ridge from the forest below, through the moss-oak and the fern, and now there was nowhere else to go. The branches of a large dieng sning tree reached toward them from across the gorge, but the gap was too wide to jump. Behind them, U Kla sat on his haunches and watched. He was in no hurry. He had all day.

The Tiger on the Ridge

U Kla had been hunting since dawn. He had started a barking deer near the stream and lost it in the bamboo, and the failure had put him in a foul temper. Then he had heard the monkeys - chattering, cracking nuts, dropping husks on the forest floor as if the forest belonged to them. He went after them not because he was hungry for monkey meat, which is stringy and sour, but because he was angry and they were there.

He drove them uphill. That was easy. Monkeys run upward when they panic, and these panicked fast. He pushed them along the ridge, past the rock where the Khasi women sometimes gathered wild pepper, past the split boulder that marked the boundary of the old village grazing land. He pushed them until the ridge ended at the cliff.

Now he sat. The wind came up from the gorge, cold and wet. The monkeys pressed together and screamed at him. He flattened his ears against the noise and waited for one of them to make a mistake.

The Monkey Chief’s Offer

The oldest monkey in the troop was not the largest. He was gray around the muzzle, and one of his hands was missing two fingers - taken by a snare years before. But the others looked at him when they were afraid, and he looked back at them without flinching, and that was enough.

He climbed to the highest point of the ledge and looked across the gorge at the dieng sning tree. Its nearest branch was perhaps the length of three men away. Too far. He looked down. Too deep. He looked back at the tiger.

Then he called out.

U Kla, you are the strongest in these hills. Everyone knows this. But you have chased us to a place where you cannot reach us without going over the edge yourself. You will sit there and we will sit here and we will all grow hungry together. That is not a hunt. That is a waste of your time.

The tiger’s tail twitched.

I have a proposal, the monkey chief said. I will stretch my body across the gap to that tree. I will hold the rock on this side with my feet, and the branch on the far side with my one good hand, and the others will cross over my back. When they are safe, you may have me. I am old. I am not worth much. But the others will live, and you will have your kill, and everyone gets something.

The tiger considered this. He was not stupid, but he was proud, and the offer appealed to his sense of order. One kill was better than none. And the old monkey was right - sitting here all day was beneath him.

Do it, he said.

The Bridge

The monkey chief took a breath and leaped. He caught the dieng sning branch with his good hand and locked his fingers around it, and he braced his feet against the lip of the cliff, and he hung there - a living rope across the gorge, his body stretched taut, his spine bowed with the effort of it.

The first young monkey went across. Then a mother with her infant. Then another, and another. They were light and quick, and they gripped his fur with their hands and feet and scurried over him in seconds. The monkey chief did not make a sound, though his shoulders shook and his breath came in short gasps through his teeth.

The tiger watched each one cross. He counted. He was patient. He would wait for the last one and then take the old monkey, who would have no strength left to pull himself to safety.

Twenty-eight monkeys crossed. Twenty-nine. The last young male scrambled over the chief’s back and swung onto the branch and was gone into the canopy.

The monkey chief hung alone over the gorge.

The Leap and the Fall

The tiger rose. He padded to the edge of the cliff and looked at the old monkey, whose arms were trembling, whose fingers were white on the branch.

Now you are mine, he said.

The monkey chief looked at him.

Come and get me, he said. And he let go of the cliff with his feet.

His body swung across the gap like a door slamming shut. The branch held. He crashed into the trunk of the dieng sning tree and clung there, gasping, bleeding from the bark scrape, alive.

The tiger had already leaped. He had launched himself at the monkey the instant the monkey moved, because that is what tigers do - they do not wait, they strike at motion. But the monkey was no longer where he had been. The tiger’s claws closed on air. His body sailed past the branch, past the tree, out over the gorge.

He fell a long time. The monkeys watched from the branches. The mist swallowed him. Then the sound came up from below - not a roar, just the crack of something heavy hitting the rocks, and then the river, and then silence.

After the Fall

The monkey chief hung on the trunk for a long while before the others came back for him. They pulled him onto a branch and sat around him and groomed the blood from his fur. He did not speak. His hand - the good one - was locked into a claw shape and would not open properly for days.

The troop moved deeper into the forest that evening. They did not return to the ridge.

In the Khasi hills, people say this is why the tiger hunts alone. It trusted once, and what it trusted was a trick. It does not make the same mistake. And the monkeys, for their part, never stop moving, never settle in one place for long, and never let themselves get pushed to the edge of anything without knowing which tree is close enough to reach.