Several of the village men traveled with us this morning, and after six hours walk into the forest, we stayed with them to make camp. It is no small thing to have people waiting. A camp plays the role of a wife, tempting the parts of a hunter that do not desire a return home. It’s too easy to choose to be lost.
I wasn’t always so pragmatic about such things. When I hunted with Henry, we never set up camp. When he slept, if he slept, it was hunched in a tree. I’d be slung up in the machan, imagined man-eaters in my periphery, but Henry slept deeply, and if a tiger came near, he’d shoot. Nearly always, he’d kill his prey without aiming.
Henry’s first hunt was when he was seven years old, a tiger that had killed two young sisters cutting grass. Later, their bodies would be found, naked and licked clean of blood, as peaceful as sleepers. Henry believed the tigress sought to replace lost cubs. I thought he was mad, imagining a tiger’s heart as a though it were a woman’s. Animals, I thought. Beasts. Heartless, I thought.
I wanted, I admit it, to kill every tiger, man-eater or not. I thought of the damage they did to men, and I wanted them to pay.
Henry went to great lengths to avoid targeting cats that had not turned man-eater. The killing of cubs was far astray from Henry’s philosophy. He would have taught them about men by firing his rifle near them. He thought that without tigers the forests would disappear. We disagreed in those days. I saw the tigers as enemies. One killed enemies.
Whatever comes tomorrow, a hunter dies hunting.
Now, in our camp on China Peak, I feel observed, but no kakar call to warn us of creatures on the move. Only the trees watch us, I tell myself. And so, we sleep.
18 September 1950
The forest was dark this morning and fragrant, the scent of needles and undergrowth, strangling orchids in bloom up a tree, a constellation of blossoms against a green sky. K_______ and I marched through it, he heaving with exhaustion and altitude, myself with unaccustomed activity. I’d forced him to change his leather shoes for a pair with thin rubber soles, and he was, at least, stepping quietly.
The temperature dropped as we ascended, and I saw a pugmark outlined in dew, another rimed in the light frost that lingers in the shadows long after sunrise. The marks taunted me, orphaned, one here, one miles onward, never two in proximity, not true tracks. High up a tree, a scratch, too high for a tiger, fifty feet, but I looked at it regardless, roped myself up into the branches to examine it more closely. I’ve never seen a mark like it before. Tiger, but impossible.
On a twig near the scratch, I found a scrap of blue cotton from the shirt of the man the tigress had taken from the village. I lowered myself, painfully stiff from the climb.
It is confirmed. This tiger is not a tiger. We are hunting a ghost.
The tigress walked a dotted line, dancing her way up into the heights, leaving her tracks and signs like breadcrumbs for me. And thus the shikari succumbs to fairy tales, imagining a tiger’s ghost leading him not to heaven but to some airy hell.
K_______ knew so little about the habits of our prey he didn’t think to ask what was wrong. Beside me, he struggled up the mountainside, heaving his bags miserably. He paused suddenly, paralyzed, his mouth a rictus of uncertainty.
“Hear that?” he managed.
I did not.
“That way. Roaring.” I listened, and heard nothing, though K_______ heard it twice more. I wondered if I was losing my hearing, along with all else. My fingers ached, and my eyes, and my spine and my heart. Exhausted and too old for this.
He pointed waveringly to the west, and on his certainty, we shifted direction, the forest darker this way, no sun having yet reached this side of the mountain. I led, insisting on lightening K_______’s load by taking his weapon from him, though in truth I was keeping myself safe from any chance of his inadvertently firing.
I’d seen no sign of the tigress in hours. I, who’d tracked the progress of man-eaters by counting single broken blades of grass, by touching bent leaves. I couldn’t smell her, couldn’t hear her. Wherever she’d slept, there was no sign of it. But ghosts don’t sleep.
K_______ stumbled behind me and I heard him retch, a despairing, scavenged sound. I spun, my rifle already cocked, but there was no tigress. No, something piteous instead. The taxidermist had tripped over the remains of the man she’d killed. Shards of rib cage hung with meat, spine crumpled, half his jaw, a few strands of black hair.
I knelt, unfolding the thin sheet I’d brought. We’d wrap him in it and return him to his family, that they might burn him. As I began to wind the sheet about the bones, though, I glimpsed something. I stood and aimed, squinting into the trees, as still as I could manage. Trembling fingers.
“We should go,” K_______ said, his voice pinched.
I hissed him quiet. Red. No motion. Tigress, waiting. Tigress watching. My only hope would be to fire as she leapt.
My vision focused at last, revealing that the red was no tiger, no blood, but a small building, peeling paint. I let out my breath and stood. No smells of humans. No cookfire smoke. Abandoned. High in these mountains for a hunting cabin, but that, I thought, was certainly what it was. In the trees above us, I could see old bones hanging, their meat long gone. A stake pounded far into the earth, a chain, for what creature I did not know. A dog, perhaps, though a very large one. There was a circle worn in the dirt below the stake, a deep, claw-scarred track, which I chose not to examine. Some brave or mad man had lived here in tiger territory, and someone with a wish for oblivion, too.
I instructed K_______ to follow me to the hut. Door closed. Some part of my mind was certain the tiger would fling open the door and stand upright before me, her belly still stained with undrunk milk, the toothmarks of the cubs she’d lost. I kicked the door open.
And stopped. K_______ gasped and then pushed his way past me.
The exterior of the cabin was wooden, but the interior walls shone. Flattened cans and springs, pendulums and gears, glimmering rocks and iridescent feathers. Rough tools, and some better, nail-hung on racks. Papers nailed up, drawings, writing, but too dark and stained to read. Claws were strung from the ceiling, garlands of teeth decorating the beams.
Against the far wall, a shape, bulky, striped. I shoved K_______ back, aiming my rifle.
“It’s stuffed,” he said authoritatively, and I realized, to my shame, that he was correct. The tiger was moth-eaten, its eyes replaced with chips of glass, its pelt dull and its pose stiff. “Someone who didn’t know the modern techniques. Hadn’t studied.”
There was a bucket filled with rusting wires at my feet, another of white dust, another of black soil. Another filled with red, old red, dried to nothing now, but I knew what it was.
“A scientist working here,” I said, remembering something of the kind. “Long gone, whomever he was.”
K_______ was elbow deep in bones, piecing together a skeletal structure. Weapons and traps all over the room. Rifles soldered to other rifles. Triple-barreled here, and here, something rusted and still lethal looking, a bayonet-barreled pistol attached to a chain. A hunting cabin, yes, but a strange one, inhabited by both science and old craft. I opened a jar and sniffed at the contents. Local alcohol of some kind, doubtless poisonous.
What fool had brought this stuffed tiger? I imagined the thing packed up the mountain by reluctant porters years before, the tiger standing on their shoulders, eyes staring at nothing, limbs leaking sawdust. The waste disgusted me, and the light was fading. I saw K_______ thoughtfully measuring the poor beast’s ear between his fingers, tugging at the ancient leather.
“We will not be stopping here,” I’d just informed him, when something glittered in a beam of sunset shining through the roof.
A metal bird. Perched on the stuffed tiger’s back. I did not—
I still do not. Impossible. A plummeting certainty.
Thirty-two years spent in darkness, and now a blinding and horrible light shines on me.
Henry. Alive, Henry, and perhaps stricken somewhere o
n the forest floor, mere feet from me as I stalked his killer?
If you hear screaming, it is already too late. All one can do is track the man-eater. Henry’s the one who taught me that. Was he in the cave where I’d found the cubs? Did he, bleeding, mute, watch as I killed them?
No. Surely not. My mind can only have lost control, ancient guilt mingling with memory. In my book, I was the one who’d killed all twenty-six of the man-eaters of Naini Tal. In my book, I killed the tigress that killed him, and I said nothing of how he’d saved me. I couldn’t bear to write his name, and so I took his glory. No one knows. Not my wife, unless I’ve confessed it in my sleep. Not the world. Not the villagers.
But here I am, writing these words, and Henry. Oh, Henry.
I held my head in my hands, feeling my skull spreading in my fingers. In a pouch at my waist, I carry my lucky pieces, my own superstitious version of the lockets worn by natives. Tiger bones, one from each tiger I’ve killed. I’ve carried them to Kenya, and to America, and everywhere I’ve gone, they’ve kept me safe.
In Henry’s house, I opened the pouch and spilled my luck out on the dirt floor. K_______ glanced at me, uninterested.
We found Henry under a coverlet on the metal cot in the corner. Skeleton undamaged, no bones taken, though one shoulder had been shattered and knit badly, the wound of the tigress. His long silver beard still clung to the last scraps of skin. Twenty years dead, longer.
And there, closed in the jaw of Henry’s skeleton, a coal, burned almost away. Ash on the ivory. My mentor did his own last rites here, no river, no hymn, no strength.
“Did you know him?” K_______ asked, and I didn’t answer. Why did he never return to Naini Tal? What was Henry doing here?
We sleep here, in this strange place, and we keep vigil over my friend’s bones, though his soul is long departed.
I twisted the wing of the little metal bird tonight, hoping that it might fly. It opened its beak and sang a single rusting note. Then all was silent.
18 September 1950
The tigress was waiting for us, as I knew she would be. We slept for three hours and rose in darkness this morning, K_______ protesting bitterly.
I didn’t want to stalk her any longer. I’d dreamed of Kenya, and of my wife sitting at the kitchen table, her tea in hand. I thought about how I would likely not see her again.
I didn’t expect to survive a tigress this large, to whom I’d already lost my courage once, to whom I’d lost my pride. A ghost made of hunger and air.
She was out there. The forest wailed her presence. I felt her intentions, her bulk in the trees. I took a small bone from Henry’s hand, and placed it in my pouch. I’d burn it, and give him his true funeral, if I made it out from these trees again.
We walked, watched at every step. I felt her in the woods, moving parallel to us, but it was pointless to aim at nothing. One never heard a tiger if the tiger was planning an attack. One might hear a soft sound, as a tiger departed, having decided not to leap. K_______ looked around, uneasy, pale. He felt her too.
The forest felt brittle, each leaf frozen now, each twig K_______ tread on cracking like a shot, and we ascended still higher. At last, something I recognized, a tiger’s call, but not that of a tiger.
Henry’s version, a human voice, perfectly mimicking a tiger’s roar. I heard him do it hundreds of times. It’s nothing one forgets. I shook my head, trying to dispel the hallucination.
It was, of course, a tiger calling. A night spent in Henry’s company. It was no wonder. Another roar, and this voice was Henry’s as well, calling in the tones of a tigress, and a moment later, calling in the voice of a male tiger, and now another, an elderly cat, and a cub.
“Do you hear that?” I asked K_______ and his only response was quick breathing.
“How many are there?” he asked.
“Do you hear Henry?” The depth of my uncertainty had overcome me. I was queasy with it.
“I hear tigers,” he said.
A flurry of calls, the startling bells of a sambur, like automobiles in traffic, squeezing horns. Tiger here, tiger passing. All in the voice of Henry. It was as though Henry had become the entire forest, and all its occupants.
I stood still, fighting that old urge, run, curl to protect stomach, meticulously checking my rifle instead. Tiger running, shrieked a peafowl, in Henry’s voice.
Through the trees, I saw red. And more red. More than one tiger. How many? They were not leaping at us, but running for some other reason. A mass of tigers, in step, all moving at the same pace, flowing through the shadows faster than I could watch. This was nothing tigers, who do not hunt in packs, would do.
At last, I saw her, my old enemy, stepping out of the forest in front of us.
My rifle was already aimed as she leapt. I fired, but did not come close to hitting her. Her spring took her over our heads, and she landed, softly behind us. K_______ shook beside me, and I felt him considering a run.
“Don’t move,” I hissed. “If you move, she’ll have you.”
I scanned the trees for the other tigers, but they were invisible. She opened her jaws and roared to me in Henry’s voice and I felt the tears of a madman running down my face.
Perhaps this was his last gift to me, I thought, this aural hallucination that reminded me what to do when a tiger had gotten this close. Call her closer. He’d taught me the call, and now I made it back to her. I roared at her, at Henry’s killer, at this killer who hadn’t killed him.
She stepped toward me, her pelt shining, her eyes golden and glowing, her muscles gathering, and as she launched herself, I fired into her throat, the rifle kicking my shoulder.
The tigress screamed in Henry’s voice again, and threw herself into the trees as though they, and not I, were her murderer. I could see no blood on her pelt, but her madness was that of the wounded. The tree trunk cracked as she bellowed and threw herself at its branches, and slowly it toppled, tigress atop it, her growls quietening now, her motions slower.
I shot her once more, this time in the skull, just over her left eye, and she made a sound, a raw hissing, something beyond anything animal. I expected her to disappear, for there to be a cloud of smoke left behind, a ghost gone, but she did not. I edged closer, K_______ on my heels.
The tigress looked up suddenly, pupils fully dilated, and I knew that she was dying. How could a ghost die?
I could smell my own sweat, and a deep, metallic odor too, tiger’s blood, I thought, though I’d long since forgotten the smell of it.
Above, the stars blinked on, one by one, and the bats began to hunt. Insects rattled their shells like shields.
The tigress’ head dropped slowly onto her paws, and the light went out in her, as a headlamp on a train might go to black when pulled into its end station. There was a sound, a strange sound, which I attributed to bullets against stone, and then she was still.
“Shaitan,” I said, quietly, a prayer to the devil I’d killed for the second time.
K_______ vibrated behind me. “Is it dead?”
“A man-eater for your museum,” I told him, overcome by the sadness I always feel when I kill something large as her, and with this sadness, something more, something darker. Confusion.
“You must know she’s not for a museum, old man,” K_______ told me, his voice returning, more confident than it had been before. “A museum wouldn’t pay for something like this.”
I looked at him.
“Everyone wants a tiger,” he said. “Everyone wants a man-eater certified by someone like you.”
“Who’s this tiger for?” I knew the answer already.
“A collector. Already has a table made of elephant legs.”
K_______’s wry laugh sounded to me like something from a moving picture, overheard from far down the street, through walls and bodies. Hollow and cluttered, the laughter of something made of less than nothing. My own laughter had, on occasion, sounded the same.
He took his flask from his pocket, sipped, and offered
it to me. I refused.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” he said, kneeling to unpack his case. “I read your book. That’s why I do this. I show the world the things they want to see, but don’t want to travel to. It’s conservation, isn’t it? People like that, here, they’d ruin things. You, though, you’ve killed what? Two hundred tigers? You know what you’re doing.”
With effort, he rolled the man-eater onto her back, and removed a scalpel from his pack.
“If I don’t gut her soon, the skin’ll spoil,” he said, and then bent over the tigress, parting the fur on her chest.
“An old bullet wound.” He jabbed her left shoulder, but I didn’t look. I knew the wound. “There’s another scar here,” he said. “As old as the other.”
He ran his finger down the man-eater’s pelt, from chest to abdomen. I could scarcely keep myself from tearing the scalpel from his hand. I felt as though she was the only one on earth who’d known my past. I didn’t dare think of how she could be here at all, thirty-two years later, did not dare imagine what this all might mean, for it was her. I knew her face, her tracks. It was her. A dead, mortal tigress.
“Peculiar,” K_______ muttered, cutting into the scar. An echoing scratch. Scalpel on bullet, I thought.
“What in Christ is this?” K_______ whispered.
I wasn’t looking at him, nor at the tigress. I was focused into the distance, imagining Kenya, when he shook my shoulder. I turned my head, reluctant to see what he’d done.
A gleam, straight down the center of the tigress’ body. K_______ peeled back the flesh on either side of the incision.
There was no blood. No. Only skin, and beneath the skin, metal.
K_______ began tearing at the pelt, pulling it away from the structure beneath, breathing through his mouth.
“What is it?” he asked, looking suddenly, frantically up at me. “Is it a prank?”
I couldn’t speak.
Henry, kneeling with a tin can and a watch spring. Henry, wounded, climbing down into that ravine to retrieve her body. Skinning her, hauling her back up the mountain, and bringing her back to life. He’d made a new kind of tiger, one that could resist hunters and poachers. One that could resist me.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition Page 55
