: Kadjaman by Stacpoole H De Vere Henry De Vere - Short stories; Fathers and sons Fiction; Human-animal relationships Fiction; Borneo Fiction; Bornean orangutan Fiction

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Produced by: Roger Frank and Sue Clark. This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.

Kadjaman

Tuan Marop, down there in Borneo, was capable of cutting out more than his right eye if it offended him. Perhaps Kray was right in guessing that Tuan was akin to those who have saved us in the past from backsliding into beasts.

Kray's little son was playing with the big Siberian pup in the doorway. From where I sat I could see the child and the dog, and beyond them and framed by the door opening the pine-clad mountains cutting the blue sky of summer, and beyond these Omstjall, the snow peak and grandfather of the glacier that takes its name.

Kray has given up hunting these five years and is now manager of the Sellagman Salmon Canning Company, at least he looks after the fishing and the canning and gets two thousand dollars a year for the job, while I expect the real manager, the man who looks after the New York office and the prospectuses and so forth, gets ten--maybe more. I don't know, neither does Kray, neither does he care. He says he has hunted everything in his time but the dollar, and that a free life in the open air is all he wants now that he has done with hunting and got married. He was sixty-seven years old when he married and didn't look more than fifty, so he says; he doesn't look more than fifty to-day, at a little distance.

He has hunted everywhere and shot everything and he started his business at twenty so that when he married he had been at the job nearly fifty years. That is a long time, for a year in the wilds is longer than a year in a city and the risks are greater.

"The big Siberian dog I saw here last?"

"Yes, the mother of that pup. I've sent her off till the autumn. Olaff will be bigger then."

"But why did you send her off--because she was treating Olaff as if he were her pup?"

"Well, not exactly," said Kray, "and yet maybe that was a bit of the reason. But mainly I expect it was something that happened years ago that rattled me; thirty years ago it was when I was with Becconi in Borneo on the exploring job. He was after minerals and if he'd stuck to them in his drinks as well as his prospectin' he'd have pulled through; but the whisky did him. I'd been out East with a chap called Milner hunting, and we struck Sarawak coast. Milner was going home from there, and I was paid off with a bonus. I could have gone back with him to England, and maybe would only for this chap Becconi who happened along while we were waiting at Bintulu for a boat.

"Taking him altogether he was near five feet in height and his chest looked as thick as a tree as he sat there scratching the fur on it, his hands were as big as hams; and I reckon he could have taken two ordinary men and knocked their heads together same as if they'd been two rag dolls.

"Becconi took a lot of interest in the chap, too, and we'd sit under the double awning they'd rigged aft of the funnel and have our drinks and watch Kadjaman, for that was his name, given him because he was caught at Kadjaman, which is north of Fort Bellaja near the Tubao River. Becconi, when he had the whisky in him, would stand up for Kadjaman having a soul of his own, same as a man; but if the whisky was out, and maybe a touch of liver on him, he'd be the other way about. I used to use the monkey on him for fun, or to see the state of his health, and then Kadjaman would sit watching us and pretending not to.

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