Justice Of Jungle

The trees held their breath.  

A darkness thicker than leopard-spots clung to the upper canopy, but Tarzan felt the dawn coming long before the sky showed it. He lay along a limb wide as a man’s thigh, cheek pressed to smooth bark still warm from yesterday’s sun. Every breath he took tasted of wet moss, elephant dung, and the faint iron trace of distant rain. His own heart knocked slow and steady—bump… bump—like a drum sunk in deep mud.  

He listened.  

Below, the forest floor rustled with night beetles counting the hours. Farther off, a colobus monkey coughed once, a sound like dry seedpods snapping. Tarzan’s fingers curled, toes flexed; the wood under him was alive with tiny vibrations, the sap racing awake. He could almost hear the green fuse in every leaf.  

Then came the crack.  

Not lightning—too flat. Not branch-snap—too sharp. Gun.  

The single shot punched through the insect chorus, left a hole nothing hurried to fill. Tarzan’s skin jerked tight over his bones. He rose to a crouch, head cocked toward the echo. Southeast, maybe three ridges away, where the old elephant trail skirted the limestone cliffs. The air there felt suddenly wrong, like water clouded by blood.  

He moved before thought.  

Vines became ropes, branches rungs. He flowed downward, bare soles kissing bark, weight shifting without sound. Halfway to earth he caught a liana, swung out, dropped the last body-length into ferns that barely sighed. The forest smelled of fresh dung and fear. Ahead, elephants thundered through underbrush—big feet, cracking sticks, babies squealing. They were running uphill, away from the gun.  

Tarzan loped alongside their wake, low to the ground, knuckles brushing loam. The bulls’ panic tasted sour in his mouth; he wanted to shout that he was coming, but words would only scare them more. Instead he clicked his tongue, a soft tok-tok the herd knew. The rearmost cow answered with a rumbled question: Trouble? Yes, trouble.  

He passed a heap of warm dung still steaming. In its center lay a perfect round slug, copper glint. He picked it out, rolled it between finger and thumb. Man-metal. The smell on it made his stomach twist—grease, smoke, something like the mission boilers he had once licked as a curious child. He pocketed the slug without knowing why.  

The trail broke into a clearing punched full of torn grass. Moonlight showed two sets of elephant prints: one huge, one small. The small ones staggered, front feet crossing back. A calf. He crouched, touched a print. The mud’s rim had not yet collapsed; minutes old. Blood dotted the earth, black as river stones.  

He found her at the clearing edge.  

The cow had wedged herself between two mahogany trunks, trunk curled under her chin like a broken rope. One ear flapped weakly; the other hung shredded. Dark syrup pumped from a hole behind her shoulder, painting the bark each time she breathed. Her small one, a male barely chest-high, pressed against her good side, legs trembling.  

Tarzan’s throat made a sound—half growl, half moan. The cow’s eye rolled, found him, recognized no enemy. She knew death; she waited for it. The calf squealed, a baby’s cry squeezed through a trumpet.  

He went to them slow, palms open. The cow’s breath steamed over his face: sour milk, crushed leaves, the sweet rot of coming end. He laid a hand on her cheek, felt the rumble deep in her skull. Not fear now—just weariness. The calf butted his knee, begging the impossible.  

Tarwan knelt, pressed forehead to the cow’s trunk. “I come too late,” he whispered, the words tasting clumsy on his tongue. He spoke rarely; speech felt like trying to bend iron bars grown cold. Yet the sound seemed to steady her. The eye closed, opened, closed.  

He could track the men, break their necks, but the calf would starve while he hunted. Choice arrived like a branch across the face: stay and ease her passing, or chase vengeance. He chose the living.  

With the flat of his knife—iron traded years ago from a wandering smith—he cut vines, braided them into a sling. The calf fought, squealing, but hunger made it weak. Tarzan roped its middle, looped the other end over a low branch, leveraged until the little body hung just off the ground. Not elegant, but it kept the baby from collapsing while he worked on the mother.  

He packed the bullet hole with chewed leaves—bitter sage and wild garlic to slow poison. The cow shuddered, trunk tip brushing his hair in thanks. Around them the forest held its breath again, waiting for permission to grieve.  

When the sky paled he heard the second sound: a man’s ragged cough, closer than expected. The calf’s ears flicked. Tarzan’s nostrils flared—human blood, fresh, mixed with black powder. The shooter was hurt.  

He touched the cow’s brow one last time, then rose. “I will return,” he promised, though he did not know if she understood the words or only the tone. To the calf he gave no farewell; the young healed or they did not.  

He followed the blood-scent west, away from the herd. Branches grew thorny here; vines snagged like snares. A trail of broken fern showed where the man had blundered, crashing rather than walking. The cough came again, wetter.  

He found the man wedged in a hollow log half full of rainwater. A youth, skin the color of dry river sand, shirt plastered to thin ribs. His own bullet had found him—ricochet, maybe—tearing through the thigh and into the gut. The pool around him stank of iron and shit. He looked up, eyes wide whites, saw bare chest, matted hair, knife.  

“Please,” the boy croaked in coastal trade tongue. “Finish.”  

Tarzan crouched just outside reach. The face before him was smoother than any he remembered from childhood, yet unmistakably his own kind. Ears, lips, the way fear pulled skin tight over cheekbones. A strange ache opened inside his chest, like a fist unclenching after years of clench.  

The boy tried to lift a small pistol, but the gun trembled, useless. “Devil… eat me quick.”  

Tarzan studied the wound. Death would take its time; hyenas would find the boy before night. He thought of the elephant calf, of the mother’s slow blink. He thought of the copper slug in his pocket.  

He spoke, voice rough as bark stripping from a dead tree. “Why shoot the cow?”  

The boy’s head jerked. Maybe he had not expected words. “Tusks… big. Money… mission… sister…” Each breath bubbled.  

Tarzan reached, not for the gun but for the boy’s free hand. Fingers met—hot, slick. He pressed the copper slug into the palm, folded the fingers over. “You paid,” he said.  

The boy stared, tears cutting clean lines down mud. “Hurts.”  

Tarzan knew pain, knew its loneliness. He slid an arm under the boy’s shoulders, lifted him out of the water as gently as he had once lifted fallen nestlings. The boy screamed once, then went limp, breath shallow.  

Against his own chest Tarzan felt the flutter like a trapped moth. He sat back against a tree, cradled the stranger, and waited for the flutter to stop. Overhead, dawn spilled sudden gold through a hole in the leaves, lighting the boy’s face so the down on his lip glowed like fine ash.  

When the last breath left, Tarzan closed the eyes. He laid the body on moss, crossed the arms over the pistol. Then he rose, throat raw with something that was not hunger, not rage.  

From the boy’s shirt pocket he drew a square of paper folded small. He opened it: a photograph, edges blurred by many touches. A girl, perhaps twelve summers, stood before a whitewashed mission wall, smile wide, eyes bright as colobus fur. On the back, ink smudged: “Remember me—Mala.”  

Tarzan held the image to the light. The girl’s face looked nothing like his memories of his mother, yet something in the set of the eyes—hope cut with worry—felt familiar. A sound escaped him, part sob, part laugh. He pressed the photo to his own heart, then tucked it carefully beside the copper slug in the little pouch he wore at his waist.  

Birds began to declare morning. Somewhere the elephant calf bawled for milk that would not come. Tarzan looked once at the dead boy, once toward the cow, then walked back the way he had come. The forest closed behind him, green water over a stone.  

He would bury no one. Earth and teeth would do that. But he would return to the calf, guide it to a foster cow, stay until the little one could follow the herd. And after—  

He touched the photo through the pouch. After, he would find the mission with the white wall, tell the girl named Mala that her brother had remembered. He did not know the words for that, but he would learn them.  

High above, the sun’s first spear struck the canopy and shattered into a thousand shifting coins of light. Tarzan climbed toward them, hands sure on rough bark, heart knocking new rhythm against his ribs. The jungle breathed in with him, breathed out, and kept its secrets.