At first when he went into the barn through the door which was open, Tamba, the tame tiger, could not see very much. It was the same as when you go into a dark moving-picture theater from the bright sunshine outside.
But, in a little while, Tamba’s eyes could see better, and he noticed some piles of hay and straw in the barn. That made him feel more at home.
“This is just like the circus barn where I used to be before we started out with the tents,” thought Tamba to himself. “That is hay, which Tum Tum and the other elephants used to eat. I don’t like it myself. I like meat and milk. But I don’t see any elephants here.”
And for a very good reason, as you know. Farmers don’t keep elephants and other circus animals in their barns.
So Tamba looked about in the barn, and he sniffed and smelled with his black nose, hoping to smell something good to eat. But though there was an animal smell about the place (because there were cows and horses in the lower part of the barn) still Tamba did not want to eat any of them.
If he had been in the jungle he might have felt like eating a cow, or, what is very much the same thing, a water buffalo. But since he had been in the circus he had been used to eating the same kind of meat that you see in butcher shops. So, though the tiger was quite hungry, and though there were cows and hay in the farmer’s barn, Tamba did not see much chance of getting a meal.
“I’ll starve before I’ll eat hay,” he said. “It’s all right for elephants and horses and ponies, like the Shetland ponies we had in the circus, but hay is not good for tigers.”
So Tamba walked farther into the barn, looking about and sniffing about, and then, all at once, he heard some one whistle. Tamba knew what a whistle was, for often his own trainer or the trainer of Nero would go about the circus tent whistling. So, when Tamba, in the barn, heard some one coming along whistling a merry tune he at once thought to himself:
“Oh, perhaps that is one of the circus men coming to take me back to my cage in the tent! Well, I’m not going! I’m going to go back to my jungle, and not to the circus! I’ll just hide where they can’t find me!”
Now the big pile of hay in the barn seemed the best place in the world for Tamba to hide in, and, as the whistling sounds came nearer and nearer, the tiger crept softly across the barn floor, and soon was snuggling down in the hay.