Expedition JournalsIt was close to midnight when our boatman stopped paddling and raised his hand. Nobody had said anything for twenty minutes; there had been nothing to say. Then the sound came again, and it was not a sound the forest makes on its own.
A tiger swimming a creek is almost silent. What you hear is the water changing its mind — a long, deliberate displacement moving from one bank towards the other. We sat with the engine off and let it pass. It never surfaced anywhere we could see it.
In the morning the pugmarks were on the mudbank forty metres from where we had tied up, already softening at the edges where the tide had started to take them back.