Biggles Read Free Page B

read were books of travel and the only adult who remotely understood him was one of his father’s few real friends, the legendary white hunter, Captain Lovell of the Indian Army.
    Lovell, by all accounts, was an extraordinary character, a short, fat, dumpy little man with a glaring eye and a bristling red moustache. In youth he had been known as a great
shikari,
with countless tigers to his credit and a reputation for extrordinary toughness. (At Kaziranga, in Assam, he was once badly mauled by a tiger, left in a swamp for dead, and reappeared some three days later, dragging the tiger’s skin behind him. ‘I got the brute’ was all he said before collapsing.)
    This was a story that appealed to Biggles, and although the Captain was now past his prime and living on his pension in Mirapore, near Garhwal, he became the first of Biggles’ boyhood heroes. Biggles used to call him ‘Skipper’, and the old hunter, who apparently liked nothing more than talking about himself, seems to have done a lot to teach him his earliest philosophy of life. Biggles once asked him if he had ever known fear.
    â€˜Course I have, boy,’ the old hunter answered. ‘Only a damn fool doesn’t feel afraid when faced with death. But it’s the man who
is
afraid, yet faces up to it, who deserves a royal salute. That’s the true test of courage, James my lad. Such men are gold, pure gold.’
    Biggles remembered that. He was also impressed by Captain Lovell’s admiration for what he termed ‘gameness’ in a man.
    â€˜Doesn’t much matter, James my boy, whether you win or lose as long as you’re really game until the end. Gameness is what distinguishes the men from the boys, when the chips are down.’
    And it was Captain Lovell who instilled in Biggles his own special version of ‘the White Man’s Burden’.
    â€˜Whenever I was really up against it, I would tell myself, “Skipper, old boy, you’re British. And a Britisher is worth two Huns, five Frenchmen and a dozen darkies. So pull yourself together!”’
    With sentiments like these to spur him on, Biggles became increasingly demanding of himself. By the time he was seven he had learned to shoot — potting at crows with a small shotgun of hisfather’s which all but blew his head off when he fired. Now on his expeditions through the local countryside he was rarely without his rifle, and whilst he theoretically believed that hunting for sport was ‘barbarous’ (this was his father’s view), he found enough occasions when wild animals were threatening life and limb to give him an excuse for action.
    On one occasion he despatched a rabid pariah-dog which had been threatening the children in a nearby village. Another time he was on hand to deal with a leopard that had been stealing livestock and was threatening an old villager who had tried fruitlessly to scare it off. And on one memorable occasion the boy’s longing for excitement and adventure nearly finished his career for good.
    This was the time when the district where he lived was suffering the rare attentions of a man-eating tiger. There had been vague reports about the beast — goats had disappeared, a native woman had been killed some miles away at Delapur, and Captain Lovell had been in his element trying to track it down. Typically, Biggles’ father gave scant attention to these stories. Certainly he did nothing to warn his son about the danger and Biggles had continued his carefree wanderings with Sula Dowla.
    Some people naturally attract danger. Biggles did so all his life, and even as a boy the tendency was there. He always said that he had no intention of searching for the tiger — nothing was further from his thoughts. But some mysterious intuition made him take his rifle with him that morning as he strolled to Sula Dowla’s house beyond the tea plantation. And something made him take a short cut home