The Last Tiger: A Novel

by Tony Black

  “Yes, yes, Mama. I’m home again.”

  I felt like an excited young child, as young perhaps as when my brother and I first collected bumble bees in jam jars.

  I could not chase out these thoughts of my brother. I longed to have him back. I wanted to see his smiling face and share with him the joys I felt at meeting my tiger again in the wild.

  He was still my brother, we had shared so much and thoughts of him jabbed at my heart like an iron pike.

  As I looked on at my mother, retreated in the shadows, I knew she too still felt deeply for Jurgis. My brother was once as much a part of us as a left hand is to the right. His memory fell upon us both as hard as a glass bottle upon a cold stone floor.

  “You must be hungry, Myko,” said Mother, “sit down and rest, I will prepare some food.”

  Mother made tea in a billycan and fired the stove for our dinner pot. Before the fire I watched her skin take on the colour of salmon flesh. Her lips twisted and her brows creased. Her shoulders rounded over where she stood. I could not believe this was my mother, who once stood as straight as a plumb-line.

  “Are you all right, Mother?”

  She kept her attention on the stove, “I am fine, Myko.”

  “You look tired. Have you been thinking of the Sakiai?”

  Mother gently placed her spoon on the stove’s edge. “A little, perhaps.” There was a sadness in her voice. It was as if she felt trapped here, bound up as surely as an insect in a spider’s web.

  “I often think of our old home,” I told her.

  “It is natural.”

  “The Sakiai is a very different place to the island.”

  My mother was still, and then she began to speak once more. “The island is a beautiful place.”

  “But …” I was too eager to answer her; my mother turned to look at me. “Nothing,” I said.

  “You find many things to blind you to the island’s beauty, Myko, I know. There are things you should not be blind to, though.”

  “What do you mean, Mama?”

  My mother turned towards the window and looked out over the pastures and then, up towards the sky. “The wild colonials have rooted over the land like a pig’s snout, seeking out the best selections for themselves. But just because they give no more thought to the island than a river does to its banks during times of flood, does not mean we must live this way, Myko.”

  I felt my chest rising and falling. I knew I was not yet blind to all the island’s beauty. Tigers still roamed here and though they were as unwelcome as burrowing rodents in the settlers’ veins, they still held my heart.

  Suddenly I was shaken out of my thoughts by a loud rapping on the door of our hut. My mother hurriedly turned from the stove. “What is the matter? Your father, Myko, is it your father?”

  “It could be anything, Mama,” I said, “it does not need to be bad news.”

  I watched my mother take the dinner pot from the stove and quickly run to open the door. Before her, in the dark night, stood one of the station’s boys. It was the carter’s help, a thin and slope-shouldered youth of no more than thirteen. His pale and waxy skin caught the light of the fire’s glow, turning his broad forehead to a shining yellow flatstone.

  “What is it?” my mother asked him.

  The boy paused for a moment as if to weigh my mother’s words and then he spoke with the Tasmanian drawl I had become so familiar with. “Please, mam, I have turned up to collect the tiger man’s rifle.” His words came out quick and clear. As he spoke he turned and waved to the carter who waited for him outside, resting a nosebag over the carthorse and stamping out the cramps in his legs.

  My mother stood motionless for a full minute. It seemed like she misunderstood the request and hoped for it to be repeated once more, but then she turned to face me.

  Her narrow eyes lit up like two ripe blackberries, shining unnaturally in our dim hut. She searched me for a reaction, but as my face flushed hot with blood I froze where I stood.

  I did not know what to think. Time stilled to a trickle.

  Through the open door the air came sharp with the horse’s odour. I heard the creek crying over the rocks and watched as the carter removed his hat to fill with water for quenching the beast’s thirst.

  How could it be amidst such a prosaic sight that I saw my mother reach above her to the shelf, then take down a rough sack to unfurl before the boy? I did not believe what I was seeing. I raised myself and ran to my mother, snatching the sack from her hands.

  “Tell me now what he wants with this,” I said.

  My mother and the boy stopped still where they stood. My mother’s raised hands lay open in the air like weighing scales.

  I gripped the sack and twisted it tightly in my hands – my father’s repeater rifle was tucked inside.

  My mother’s eyes shone deep with intent as she snatched the rifle back from me and quickly handed it over to the boy.

  “Here,” she said, “now go.”

  I turned to face the boy. I grabbed hold of his thin shoulders and raked him in. “Tell me what he wants it for!”

  I watched his face grow careworn, I was close enough to see the liquorice stains around his mouth.

  “I’m on an errand,” he said, his voice quivering, “for the tiger man.”

  My mother intervened: “Myko, leave him be,” she said, as she took my hands from the boy and walked him indoors. Mother handed the boy an apple from her market basket as she began to fill a burlap sack with provisions for my father.

  I watched as she quietly moved about our home, collecting Father’s items and making forlorn glances towards me.

  “What does he want with the rifle?” I said once more through my gritted teeth; the words came out louder than I intended and startled the boy.

  My mother answered for him: “It is for your father, Myko, not the boy. What business is it of his!”

  I felt a burst of heat deep inside my chest, my mind turned like a cartwheel; I raged, “Why? Why does he need it?”

  Neither my mother nor the boy answered me.

  I felt my brows drop low on my forehead and my eyes twist into thin creases as I viewed the pair before me. Anger coiled in me like a black snake ready to strike.

  “I asked why?” I roared.

  I did not get an answer and I reached for the rifle again; it was tight within the boy’s grasp and I fought hard to wrest it from him.

  “Why does he need it?” I bellowed, “Why?”

  The boy stood dumb and silent. He seemed to be willing words to come to his mouth but they remained corked within the bottle of his mind.

  A long silence fell on the hut and then a low humming sound began to build – I traced it to my mother.

  Before me she stood with her hands raised up to her ears, her fingers poking in the air like jagged reed spikes, and then she screamed out: “Stop! Stop! Stop this now!”

  My mother’s voice drawled slowly over her careful words as she stared on at me. “Myko, what is wrong?” Her voice seared into me. But I cared nothing for what she had to say.

  I pushed the boy beyond my reach and lashed out at the wall, bringing down a row of shelving. Pothooks and plates crashed on the floor.

  I lost all control of my actions as an evil threatening whispered reminders of the tiger skins I had seen my father peg on the trees around our home. I would not allow him to lay a hand on my tiger’s coat.

  “Get him out my sight,” I roared.

  I sensed my tiger’s time was close to running out.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I watched my mother, stooped before me in our crude split-paling hut, collecting up the tin plates and pothooks I had scattered on the floor. Her shoulders tensed, her face seemed as if it were smeared with a thick white oil. “I dreamt of the takmakas again last night,” she said quietly.

  Mother watched me beneath hooded eyes; she looked tired. “Dreams often come to me of the Sakiai.”

  Nightmares had assailed my mother for weeks. She
spoke of them on many occasions. I knew she still gave great store to the old ways, to the superstitions and the wives’ tales. To my mother, every action bore a hidden meaning, a second consequence to be understood. The way the goats gave milk or how quickly wood burned on the fire foretold some action yet to come; especially misfortunes that may yet befall us.

  In the silence between us I listened to the hearth’s hiss. As I turned my head to look upon my mother, my breath came light and regular and I chose my words with caution. “Was it the same dream?” I asked.

  My mother’s voice was stiff. “Yes. I am forever dreaming of it now.”

  I felt myself sink back where I sat. I locked my fingers over my chest. “I have lots of dreams which come time and again,” I told my mother, “it does not mean anything.” I wanted to distract her but seemed only to draw her derision.

  “Myko,” she said curtly, her words cutting me down, “I do not believe you have learned much of our old ways!”

  It grew warm in our hut now. The logs burned high within the fire’s grate and the flames played on the walls like dancing gypsies. My mother looked so forlorn, so tired. She curled a knitted shawl around her thin shoulders; her bones poked beneath the heavy woollen folds like poles under canvas. Her facial muscles twitched nervously. Her strange code of morals weighed her down.

  “We have failed to show you the right and proper ways, Myko, have we not?”

  I tried to gain her attention once again; I wanted to shift the talk away from this subject. “I will fix up the shelves now,” I said.

  My mother did not listen to my words. Her voice changed, took on a low, almost faint tone. I believe it carried defeat. “Your father was in the dream again, Myko.”

  I knew at once why she seemed so agitated.

  As my mother lowered herself slowly into the chair by the fireside, I moved over to sit before her. I sensed her presence slipping farther and farther away. Her thin body tensed and her eyes burned like candle wicks before me.

  I knew there was only one subject that would engage her now. I faced it like a high granite ledge, a mountain between us, which I knew my mother called me to climb.

  I felt the sweat beading on my brow as I spoke. “And the wolves?” The words scratched at my throat as they came.

  Mother shifted uncomfortably where she sat, she glowered up at me and her face became a mask of torture; “They were tigers … and he carried no takmakas!”

  I looked at my mother’s ashen face; where she sat she seemed to repel all the fire’s warmth. I did not try to engage her again, I believed I was naïve to try at all. I felt the breath in my lungs seeping slowly out, taking with it any words I might have said, had I any inside me to make better such a matter.

  I watched my mother bunch up her expression. Heavy lines crossed her face, she gritted her teeth and they became as hard as picket pins driven down into the ground. “Do you know, Myko, in the olden days, there was the cholera,” she indicated with her thumb over her shoulder, in the direction of the past, “how precious our sleep was then.”

  My mother leaned away from me and tried to warm her bony hands by the fire. I could feel her deep sadness creep within me; I wished I could see a better life for her. My poor mother, I wished for nothing more than to see her return to the brief happiness we shared in the Sakiai – when Jurgis was with us – when my father worked the farm and we were all a family, together.

  Mother crouched closer to the fire and drew her shawl tighter. She swayed gently to and fro as if taken by a trance. She began to talk in a voice that did not seem to be hers. “My Myko,” she called out to me, “when the cholera was with us they said a lady in black rode a carriage pulled by four black horses in the night.”

  My eyes grew wider. I felt alert as a cat, listening to my mother.

  “I want to know about the lady,” I said.

  Mother smiled, her lips widened for an instant, and then as fast as rain splashes down from the heavens her smile was gone again, replaced by the dark vault that returned echoes of our past. “The lady carried a tarred whip above her head,” she said, “and when she came upon a village or a farmhouse she cracked the whip upon a windowpane and cried out, ‘Are you sleeping?’”

  I watched my mother’s words form on her cold mouth. I heard the wind moving in the treetops outside, but the view that seized my gaze sat before me. At once I felt myself drawn again to my mother’s tales.

  “Inside,” said Mother, “beyond the window’s pane, if there was a reply of ‘No’, then all would be well. The household survived the cholera. But if the people were sleeping and nobody replied, then … the next morning they were all found dead!”

  Mother paused, she took a deep breath and steadied her voice. “As she withdrew from the window, Cholera said, ‘If it is asleep you are – then go on sleeping’!”

  I looked again upon my mother where she sat, swaying gently before the fire. I saw a look of reverie in her eye, a sparkle which slowly changed. It turned into a tear, slipped over her cheek and then it ran down the length of her face.

  “My Myko, when I was a girl, to protect us from Cholera I stayed awake in the night. In each and every house in the Sakiai, one person did this, so that when Cholera came riding we called out, ‘We are not asleep! We are not asleep!’ at the top of our lungs.”

  She became agitated again. I watched my mother wipe away tears with the back of her hand. Her whole arm trembled as though she hammered at an anvil. I reached out and held fast to her. “But, Mother,” I said, “we have no cholera here.”

  My mother turned her face from me and I saw more tears following the others that appeared on her pale face. “No, my Myko,” she said, “and we have none of the old ways to protect us.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I left my mother rocking by the fire. I tried to rest, but sleep evaded me. I feared Mother would lose sleep also, and that the deprivation would harm her. I knew she longed for my father’s return to cosset and protect him like she always had done, but I knew there must be conflict when Father showed.

  My mind moved again and again to thoughts of Father pursing my tiger. Like a river washing over the same bed of rocks I felt unable to halt this course, or even influence how it might unfold.

  I imagined, in detail, what might befall my tiger. The images seemed so real that I smelled the burning of my tiger’s wounds, where Father’s bullets would enter, scorching the fur and flesh.

  I rose and stalked the hut in rage.

  Sinful thoughts blazed inside me. It shamed me to think I might take against my own father. I longed to kick out, to tear down the walls, but I could not.

  I sank to the floor and lay clutching at my stomach. My pains felt real, they rose like angry waves in my gut. Then I grew unsure; is it my sin? Will I not be doing God’s work? I wondered. The thought woke me like the morning’s goat-bells and I stood to pace the floor once more.

  To think of challenging my father, of attacking his duty, made my blood run cold as the water in the rocky brook. Father’s duty maintained his last stores of pride, it was the badge of his manhood, and it kept us from hunger. As my thoughts turned over, I was surprised to find myself breathing as calmly as ever I had.

  In the heavy moving blackness of the night I felt ready to cast out my father’s grim trade. I would hurl all he stood for from the clifftops to the jagged rock crops below, and hang the consequences.

  My only shame was that my mother might suffer. For myself I was prepared to be left with nothing, but I could see my mother suffered already. I knew she was wracked with fear. She succumbed to her own superstitions; her nightmares have brought her near to ruin, I thought.

  As I returned to my crib, I saw how little attention I had paid to Mother’s traditions. I no longer called myself a child of the old county. The island seeped within me, its ragged shores and button grass plains were now my inner boundary, as surely as my mother’s was the lush winding valleys of the Sakiai.

  I believed I had no plac
e for the old world now. I felt somewhere far from such things. I felt no fear of Giltine.

  I watched the morning’s light begin to break outside the window of our crude split-paling hut. The green of the paddocks rose up as the hard silver of the gumposts reflected the early beams of light.

  The air outside was still and pure without the hum of insects. Even the rippling stream’s down-curved path moved silently towards the headwaters of the river. I felt at peace until, suddenly, dark thoughts crowded my mind.

  I had a sudden sense of another presence within our small settler’s shack. The smell of the tar which sealed the roof beams disappeared and was replaced by a muskier, stronger scent. I felt my pulse quicken where I lay, but I could not move. My mind seemed somehow trapped within my body, fixed on thoughts which surely were not real.

  I felt the wind blowing from the coast. It came beneath the door, then suddenly I was pulled upright, as if a string attached to my chest was quickly jerked tight. As I stared at the door I felt the wind pressed from outside.

  We kept only a weak hasp on the hut’s door. In high gales its pin blew out. As I gazed on, the pin began to twitch; it shivered like an icicle preparing to fall and then it rocked violently for a moment, before snapping like a dry twig.

  I could not move as the door slowly opened into the hut. I felt my mouth shut so tightly that I feared words would never again pass my lips. I watched in disbelief as a flat, snub nose sniffed beyond the door’s jamb. It traced the scent of something but appeared wary in unknown territory.

  I kept my gaze on the snout until the beast’s form grew before me and, finally, it revealed itself in the morning light.

  The animal stood in full view.

  Its back was straight and true; each black stripe of its coat shone as dark as ravens’ wings.

  It stood before me like the island’s king.

  I did not believe what I saw, as I watched my tiger walking on the boards of our hut.

  As I gazed upon my tiger, where he stood before me, his dark eyes contained little joy. I saw the fawn patches on his coat twitching, he looked anxious. He lifted his great snout to the air and I feared he might howl before me like a wolf.