Wolf in Tiger's Stripes

by Victoria Gordon

  The beast was well over a hundred and fifty meters away, standing in a mottle of light and fog and shadow. It was a ghost figure in the mist that seemed to swirl about it like living sorcery. But even so, it was unmistakably, clearly, and definitely a tiger!

  Except that it couldn’t be. It simply couldn’t. All Judith’s logic, all her knowledge and beliefs about coincidence, all her skepticism screamed that it could not be. Not here, not so conveniently within sight of their camp, in what was no longer the deceptive partial-light of dawn but was closer – the mist notwithstanding – to proper daylight. Not just where everybody could see it, where Jan could capture it with the magic of the video camera. No, Judith thought. No. There’s something fishy about this!

  And she remembered how Bevan had rushed to hold back everyone at the door, and how Ted and Roberta hadn’t joined the rush in the first place. Suspicion grew, and she was almost turning to see where Ted and Roberta were now, when the animal turned its head toward them, opened a cavernous mouth and yawned! Judith felt her heart lurch, knew she was holding her breath, knew they all were, wasn’t sure if she would ever breathe again.

  This was the final, definitive clue – that enormous gape so peculiarly specific to the tiger. Jaws that could stretch far beyond the capacity of any dog, seeming almost to unhinge. Her mind was photographing the image, burning it into memory forever, when the animal turned and strode away, moving only a few steps before it disappeared into the surrounding scrub, flowing into the mist as if already just a memory.

  But it all fit. Memory served to superimpose over the vanishing figure the few bits of film clips she’d seen, film taken of real, living tigers. Even the movement was right.

  Jan was running full-tilt down the track after the animal, and now, somehow, everyone else was outside the tent, some staring after Jan, the rest staring at each other, mouths moving in a cacophony of questions, everyone – or so it seemed – talking at once.

  They were still milling about like a mob of hysterical, clucking chooks when Jan returned, walking now, scuffing her feet and beating one fist against her thigh in some sort of ritual suffering. “Waste of time,” she sighed as she reached the group of suddenly silent onlookers, all looking to her as if for some explanation, some confirmation that they’d actually seen what they thought they’d seen.

  All except Bevan, Roberta, and Ted, Judith noticed, having determined as soon as the animal had gone from sight that whatever she had seen, whatever had happened, these three knew more than they were letting on. The old bushman simply hadn’t shown enough surprise. And Bevan? Bevan hadn’t joined the excitement outside the tent – not really. He’d made a good show of it, but Judith was almost certain it was just a show, although in what cause she couldn’t imagine.

  Derek, too, seemed to be reacting strangely to the situation. Distracted, somehow, she thought. He kept looking toward where the animal had disappeared, then shaking his head as if bewildered. Only it wasn’t quite the same bewilderment everyone else was exhibiting; Derek had something on his mind, something besides what would have to be the most significant, exciting conservation sighting in fifty years.

  Judith kept on watching the two apparent leaders of the expedition, her mind racing with speculation. Both of them, she decided, weren’t acting quite right about it all. She couldn’t put her finger on what wasn’t right, but it was something. She looked around to check on Roberta’s reaction, then had her attention returned when Bevan’s voice, in tones that would have stopped a runaway bullock, snapped out a command, “Hold it right there, you two!”

  She turned to see Ron Peters and Reg Hudson twenty yards up the track and looking at Bevan with undisguised surprise.

  “We’ll just let Ted have a sticky-beak first,” Bevan told them, expanding the remark to include everyone else within hearing. “We all get roaming around out there and whatever tracks there are will be messed up beyond any hope of recovery.”

  He then asked Roberta if perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to make fresh coffee and gently herded everyone back toward the cook tent. It was all done very subtly, but quite deliberately, it seemed to Judith, who was now starting to feel the first real frissons of genuine suspicion. Ted Norton began a slow, ambling walk toward where the animal had been seen, but nobody was paying him any attention as Bevan drew the excited expedition members into an animated discussion aimed at easing them into the tent.

  Judith held back, deliberately putting herself outside the discussion, rock-solid now in her role as unbiased observer. She was intent on listening, watching, gathering information and opinion, but staying sufficiently aloof that she couldn’t be drawn into the center of the situation where she might miss things through simply being too close to them.

  And Bevan – damn him! – seemed instantly aware of this alteration to her attitude. He caught her with his gaze and held her like a butterfly pinned up for display while he moved quickly over to join her.

  “You okay?” But there was no real concern in his voice, and he didn’t give her a chance to even reply before silently mouthing the words, “Trust me!”

  Judith could only glare at him, her entire attitude now defensive and cautious. Trust you? Not on your life, Bevan Keene! But she didn’t say it, nor say that she wanted to trust him, needed to trust him, and couldn’t admit it. How could she?

  Then his gaze shifted beyond her, over her shoulder, and she suddenly realized what he was doing. In moving to join her, he had used their bodies to effectively block the line of sight from the cook tent entrance to where Ted was meandering around where the tiger had been sighted. The gesture wasn’t that obvious to anyone else – they weren’t paying much attention in the first place – but once seen, it cried out like a siren to Judith.

  Spinning on her heel, she followed Bevan’s gaze to where Ted was now shuffling along the track close to where the animal had been seen. Half crouching, shading his eyes with one hand, the bushman was moving with obvious deliberation, quartering back and forth across the narrow track.

  Seeking the animal’s tracks? No! Judith’s eyes widened in shock as she realized the obvious alternative. He could just as easily be wiping them out. She froze in position, rigid against Bevan’s light touch on her shoulder, wishing she could be as rigid as his insidious whisper in her ear.

  “Trust me, Judith Theresa. There’s a helluva lot riding on this.”

  “Is Ted doing what I think he is?” she said, astonished at the calm in her own voice, at how she made the question so casual, at how she could keep herself from turning to meet Bevan’s eyes, at how she could keep herself from screaming out an accusation.

  “Trust him, too,” was the evasive reply.

  And now she felt the warmth of his breath on her neck, and shivered at the way it made her feel inside. Insane! Worse than insane, she thought, to be so conscious of this man and the way he made her feel at a time like this, when her every professional instinct was aroused, alert, cautious. The problem was that her body was equally aroused merely by Bevan’s nearness.

  “You’re asking a lot. Perhaps too much,” she whispered in reply. “I don’t think I can take that much on trust.”

  “Of course you can. Whatever happened to your professional judgment?”

  And now she had to meet his eyes, expecting to see them dancing with amusement, surprised to see them calm, quiet, serious.

  Whatever happened to your professional judgment? Gone! The one-word reply hovered inside her mouth, a mouth suddenly turned desert-dry as shivers of delight scampered up her back from where his fingers now idly stroked her lower spine.

  “Why should I trust you?” she asked, half her mind in the agony of memory – after all, she’d trusted Derek once – and the other half floating in the sweeter agony of Bevan’s caress.

  His reply was half hidden in a chuckle, but the words were clear enough. He might as well have shouted them.

  “Because I love you and because I trust you. And you know it.”

  His fi
ngers on her lower back punctuated the reply, and Judith shivered with the delight of it. Because I love you. Did he really say that? Her mind said she’d heard it, but her heart was less sure.

  “I know that you trust me?” She had to ask it, and did.

  “Of course you do.”

  No uncertainty in that voice. It filled her ear with the ring of calm, total assurance. Which, she thought, could be no more than a trick – a politician’s trick, a trickster’s ruse. Only it wasn’t, and she somehow knew that, even if she still couldn’t be sure she’d heard him say, “I love you,” and even if she didn’t dare admit any of it to herself, much less to him.

  “Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see,” she chanted in a nonsense reply, wishing he would stop doing that with his fingers, and at the same time, wishing he would never stop.

  There was a pause, and Judith realized he was concentrating on the hubbub behind them in the tent. Her own ears had caught the slight lull in the conversation, too, only now the tempo quickened again. Nobody was paying them any attention, it seemed.

  Which was just as well, Judith realized. She was backed in so tightly against him she could feel the warmth of his desire, the strength of it, throbbing against her buttocks. She could feel the warmth of his breath against her neck, the whisper of his voice like an insidious melody in her ear.

  “Backwards, in this case,” he was saying, his voice low and melodious and making no sense at first. “You can believe what you hear because you know it’s true, Judith Theresa. But not what you see. What you’ve seen! Not by half, even. I told you about the Fred factor.”

  And now, she had to see his eyes, had to watch their expression. Judith spun in his grasp, then almost shied away as she realized how it must appear, how it was. To any onlooker, a distinctly compromising position so close against him she could feel his body heat, feel her tummy tingle at the touch of his erection against it, the curious softness that flowed through her loins. Close enough to kiss, to be kissed, with just the merest movement of either head.

  She met Bevan’s eyes, then broke off to peer past his shoulder, sighing visibly when she realized the others were so busy with their discussion that he could have kissed her without anyone bothering to notice.

  Wishing he had!

  And from the look in his eyes when she met them again, he very well might. Against all her instincts she eased herself back to a more conversational, less dangerous distance.

  “Fred?” she asked.

  “Uh huh.” And his eyes were laughing now, the devils dancing in them. Laughing at her, or at the situation?

  Judith glared at him, shrugging her shoulders in a demanding gesture. She wanted to scream at him, to somehow make him tell her about Fred, to make him tell her everything. Now! And she wanted him to get back to holding her.

  “And that’s all you’re going to tell me, isn’t it?” she demanded, knowing the reply before he gave it.

  “I don’t want to totally stuff up your reactions if and when things really get dicey,” he said. “I want all your skepticism turned on, full bore. It’s important.”

  “All my skepticism, but you expect me to trust you.”

  “I’m depending on that, more than you know.” Bevan glanced away, over her shoulder. “Here comes Ted. Let’s grab some coffee and see what sort of hornet’s nest he stirs up.”

  The old bushman’s entrance provoked an immediate, anticipatory silence in the cook tent, but it erupted into bedlam after his typically laconic report.

  “No tracks,” he said. “Not a sausage. The ground’s too hard, too rocky. I could barely make out where Jan had been, but nothing else.”

  The sighs of disappointment were overshadowed by a wail of anguish from the photographer, who closed her eyes and beat her fists on the table in obvious self-disgust. “Damn, damn, damn,” she cried. “I never even thought. I was so concerned with trying to get more pictures that I never thought about the tracks. I’ll bet I walked over everything. Oh, I could just shoot myself.”

  “No need,” Ted growled. “There’s no evidence you messed up anything at all. It’s just damned poor tracking ground. And worse in the scrub around. I couldn’t figure where the beast came into the open or left it, and that’s a fact. Damn it! I reckon it was headed for a drink, and if we’d been a few moments later there might have been proper tracks in the sand along the creek, but there’s nothing. Not a skerrick!”

  From there, the discussion quickly degenerated into a free-for-all, with almost everyone voicing some opinion about the importance of the missing tracks. Everyone, that is, except Ted, Bevan, and Roberta. Judith wasn’t at all surprised when Derek’s contributions positively but subtly steered whatever blame might be involved onto Jan, nor was she surprised when the abrasive Ron Peters – with far less finesse – backed him up.

  The amazing part was how Bevan allowed the scapegoating to continue without interference. Jan was in tears, Judith was ready to explode, and even the implacable Ted Norton seemed near the end of his patience when Bevan finally did put a halt to it, although at least when he did so, he got in a few licks himself.

  “You’re a fine lot of ratbags,” he snarled, the strength of his voice smacking everyone else’s comments into instant silence. “Here’s Jan, the only one who’s done anything bloody well positive at all, and you lot can’t do anything but rubbish and abuse her.” His blistering scorn was sufficient to create at least a semblance of contrition, and when he walked over and put one arm around the slender photographer’s shoulders, muttering, “Ignore them, love; they’re not worth feeding, the lot of them,” Jan’s look of thanks quickly turned to a glare of contempt thrown in Derek’s direction.

  “Right! Enough of this rubbish,” Bevan declared. “If the tiger were here now, he’d be talked to death, which isn’t the point of the exercise. I’m going to go fire up the computer so we can see what Jan did accomplish, and then I suggest it might be time to start talking about what we do next.”

  He paused briefly to ensure he still had their attention, then shot Judith a warm and gentle look before scowling again and saying, “Because it may not have occurred to any of you, but I don’t think there’s one damned thing in the planning for all this that lays down any procedure in the event of success.”

  28

  Disappointment filled the tent, hanging in the air like wood smoke, but somewhat more pungent.

  “I can’t believe there’s only ninety-three seconds of film,” moaned Jan Smythe, shaking her head in anger and frustration at how little video material she had actually gained. She’d warned her audience before she showed them the video that time might have been distorted by the excitement of the moment, but even she was clearly surprised at how little useful film there was.

  “Well, I don’t believe the animal was really that far away,” said Derek. “What did you do, Jan? Put your telephoto lens on backward?”

  The comment was so typical of Derek, Judith thought. He would always try to cast blame on somebody else – anybody but himself. So when Jan responded by flinging a filthy glare in his direction but not bothering to reply, Judith found herself nodding in agreement with the photographer.

  She, too, was disappointed in the video, but only half her mind had been occupied in watching it. The rest was far too involved with trying to sort out the things Bevan had said, trying to put what was happening into some sort of perspective.

  Had Bevan really said that he loved her, that he trusted her? She could replay the words from memory, even see in her mind’s eye the look on his face as he’d spoken, but she found it truly difficult somehow to believe she wasn’t making the whole thing up, wasn’t just imagining it!

  “I paced it out at a hundred and twenty yards,” Ted Norton said, and Judith was gently amused at how he so steadfastly refused to modernize his thinking into metric.

  “And what’s that in real measurement?” somebody else asked.

  “Near as dammit a hundred meters,” s
aid Derek, who still seemed far too upset by the entire incident for Judith’s understanding. Instead of being as excited as everyone else was – with good justification, surely? – he had a sour, distracted air about him that was confusing.

  “Easy shot,” muttered Ted, obviously talking to himself now, and thankfully oblivious to the astonished and angry looks the comment drew from the conservationist element.

  “Let’s see it again, Jan,” said Roberta, which gathered expressions of disapproval from the greenies, especially Derek.

  The jeers as the video began yet again were almost sufficient to drown out the obscene racket of the generator outside, and to make things even worse, the video appeared even more vague on second viewing.

  Jan, unlike her audience, watched the entire ninety-three seconds in silence, but as the tiny, ghostly figure on the video stepped into the fog-shrouded obscurity of the surrounding landscape, she uttered a defeated sigh. “I could shoot myself for not trying to get closer when I had the chance,” she complained. “I might have spooked it, almost certainly would have, but looking at this ...”

  “It might have put some movement into the picture, at least,” said Derek. “The thing might as well have been a statue except for the last few seconds. Nobody would ever believe it was real, I’m afraid.”

  “There was movement,” insisted Reg Hudson, for once right in the thick of the conversation. “I’m positive I saw it flicking its ears, even though that doesn’t show up very well on the film.”

  “Because it’s so damned far away,” snarled Derek. “It’s so far away that I’m not sure the video is worth anything at all.” He pounded one fist into his opposite palm in a gesture of apparent frustration, continuing – as he had all along – his attempts to denigrate the significance of the video and the sighting itself.