by Lavie Tidhar
The Captain loved to hunt, so when Burroughs had come to him that morning, claiming that his tenant’s sheep were being taken by a beast, he saddled up and took out the dogs without being asked twice. He didn’t ask me along; he didn’t have to. I was the one doing the saddling.
I wondered if Mr Burroughs remembered that I was present. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. He only seemed to ever ascribe to me a very select quality of presence, whether or not I was actually there at the time, and it didn’t involve considering his words by how I might take them. Mr Burroughs doesn’t mean ill, the Captain had explained to me once with a clap on the shoulder and a flash of toothy white. He’s a bit of a berk, though, and you should know that. Good to know which of one’s friends are berks. The Captain regarded many of his friends with a certain fond contempt; I came to understand that this was a matter of course when it came to having friends from public school.
Today the Captain was indulging Burroughs less than usual. The dogs had promptly set to howling, so he was distracted. “I suppose it comes from the Orient, yes,” he said with a shrug that indicated he wasn’t paying attention, “in that limestone doesn’t pop out of the ground here either, so you could call it quintessentially Kentish if you liked.”
I hid my amusement at the conversation by leaning down to pat my favourite wolfhound on the head. The Captain had stern words on the matter of giving the hunting dogs attention when they were failing—spoiling a lesser creature just confuses it, he said—but he wasn’t looking.
Burroughs wasn’t finished, though: “So much beauty—yet really just a big brute, a big dumb brute. And beautiful and wild and incomprehensible. But deadly, if you forge in without knowing what you’re after. Very Oriental, I find. I saw a man-eater in a cage in Ceylon, but all I wanted to do was reach out and touch it.”
“It’s a cat,” said the Captain, glancing up at both of us. He’d dismounted to see if anything had startled the dogs, to terrify them so. He was perfectly without motion when he stood still, possessed of not a single nervous habit. His thumb was hooked into his belt and his jodhpurs were still pressed. “Beautiful, perhaps, but it’s a bloody great cat. And I am nearly one hundred percent certain that no travelling circuses have come through Yorkshire of late, and that none of our neighbours are madmen with penchants for zoo-keeping, so I don’t honestly know what you’re on about, Burroughs. We’re looking for a hungry wolf. Maybe rabid, so I think we should keep the dogs at home. Perhaps that’s what they’re smelling, do you think, Jack?”
“They’ve a nose for sickness, sir,” I answered neutrally and straightened up in the saddle.
“Perhaps. I saw a paw-print,” said Burroughs with the airy stubbornness of an aristocrat.
The Captain smiled without sincerity, as if to say, there’s Burroughs being daft again. But he was a gentleman, as he was teaching me to be, so he nodded. “I’m sure you did. I’ll keep looking,” he said, mounting again and bringing his horse about. “Jack, let’s take the dogs home.”
I nodded my assent and clapped my hands for their attention, but I was uneasy. Burroughs was a berk, you’d get no argument from me there. There was, however, at least one thing in the world upon which Mr Burroughs and I agreed: in the blood and wool and loamy heath we’d seen the impression of a great cat’s paw. But the Captain was a man of Reason, and reasonable men did not see what plainly couldn’t be there.
Leave off, Burroughs, I could’ve told him. You won’t convince him that way. But Burroughs never would have listened to me anyway.
We rode home.
* * *
My mother let me go right away when the Captain came back for me in Kuala Lumpur, which I can’t help but resent slightly. It wasn’t as though I hated the idea of going with him, either. She may not know it, but I understand her there. No one met Captain Lyons and didn’t want to go with him.
When I met him the first time I was struck by how quiet he could be, how self-assured. I knew British men as red-faced braggarts, often with wandering hands, and had never formed a favourable impression. Jonathan Lyons, by contrast, was tall and copper-haired and aquiline, with touches of silver at his temples. My mother and he regarded one another for some time at the door, and then he doffed his hat and she invited him in.
Still, I might have appreciated some weeping and wailing. But my mother hadn’t been raised to weep or wail and neither had I. “This is the boy?” was the Captain’s question.
“Yes,” she said with her hand on my back. “Named after his father.”
I certainly wasn’t, but I was now, I supposed. I stood up straight and prepared for hawkish scrutiny, but instead I was regarded by those steady copper eyes without tension. It was strangely discomforting. I had the impression he blinked as a courtesy. “I’ll call him Jack,” he said. “Does he have his letters? And some schooling?”
“Of course,” she said coolly. “We do have schools here.”
He walked a half-circle around me for more inspection, then stepped back, visibly relieved. Perhaps he hoped to ascertain that I was really his son. He had nothing to worry about there. From the moment he stepped through the door I knew that he was my missing piece, the stranger I didn’t recognize in my face when I looked in the mirror. “I can’t acknowledge him,” he said. “He’ll have to call me Captain Lyons.”
She bristled. “Then why—”
“I will send him to university,” he said, crossing his arms. “He’ll want for nothing that a common English boy with sponsorship would have. But he will have to be my valet until then. There is no other option.”
When we parted he kissed my mother on the cheek. “Selamat tinggal,” he said in very precise Malay.
The irony was that I’d far more preparation to go to university than to be a valet, and maybe he knew that, too. I should have been angry. I was sort of angry later, once I thought about it. It didn’t matter. I was too taken with him and his bearing, the way he spoke and the copper in his hair. He was so poised, so indifferent, that little glimpses of his approval were like flashes of gold. Already I wanted him to like me.
* * *
One disembowelled sheep was a waste of wool, but not really the Captain’s concern. Two were gruesome, but still a favour he was doing for an old mate. A horse, however—
“You see it! You see! Its neck is broken,” Burroughs nearly howled in the late morning when the Captain answered the summons with me in tow again, “and teeth wouldn’t snap it so clean, something smacked it, Lyons, with its paw. A wolf doesn’t hunt like that, it goes for the jugular. This is a cat. Do you really think a lone wolf could kill a horse? One of my thoroughbreds?”
I was groggy and wanted to leave. I didn’t care about Burroughs’ livestock or his madcap theories on what was killing them. His talk of the Orient had driven me to uncomfortable dreams, where I loped around the Captain’s Yorkshire estate on four massive feet and thought idly about getting something to eat. It was Hell on my sleep and made me nervous of how useful I was being at any given moment. I really hated Burroughs then, I didn’t want him to utter another word about the Orient and remind the Captain about me, not when things were going so well between us.
“I know what your theory is, Burroughs,” said the Captain with a weary brush of his fingers across his forehead.
“You’ve come recently from the Orient—” Burroughs glanced at me; I shrank. “Do you think perhaps—”
“Burroughs,” the Captain said sharply. “I’ll tell you if I find anything.”
The dogs were still inconsolable. They were useless for proper hunting, too: the Captain and I had taken them for a boar hunt at another school friend’s well-stocked estate, but when I brought them in they barked at each other and the air and then bolted in the thick of it, spooking the Captain’s horse. He was thrown, but he landed on his feet with his lance in his hand and he waited for the pig to charge him.
I didn’t even have time to be afraid for him. He was like how I imagined Lord Wellington from the Wa
terloo histories; he just pulled the lance out of the pig when it stopped thrashing and said, “My handkerchief, Jack.”
His friends were crowing about “Lord!” and “now that is a hunter!” but I worried for the dogs. This was the sort of uselessness that couldn’t be sanctioned in hounds.
“I will have to think about putting them down,” muttered the Captain, much more ruffled by the dogs’ behaviour than by his close scrape with the boar’s tusks. That didn’t seem to concern him at all. And why would it? There was a Cape buffalo’s skin in his game room, elephants’ tusks too. “No, I’ll speak to the veterinarian first. Perhaps they are sick.”
* * *
My marksmanship didn’t exist before the Captain took it upon himself to create it on his shooting range behind the rosebushes. He had no interest in grooming me for military service—either I’d feel the call to it or I wouldn’t, was what he said—but found it a crucial skill for any young man to possess.
Was it so wrong to be happy?
“Cradle the stock against your shoulder like so,” he told me, “and be sure it’s solidly placed, or when it punches back it will hurt you. Rifles are loud. Don’t let the noise startle you into losing your grip on the gun.”
Even so, it was louder than I expected. I punched holes through two targets and the blast punched holes in my ears, or so I felt for minutes afterwards. The Captain was delighted, though, and clapped his hands.
Later, he introduced me to moving targets: “Aim just in front of the bird. It’s not going to stay in place.” And: “Never rush your shot. It doesn’t matter if a wild boar’s charging you directly or if George’s dragon is—it’ll gore you all the faster if you miss.”
He smiled after the lessons. He was pleased: largely with himself, like he’d just taught me a new trick. “A quick lad,” he said. “We’ll make a hunter of you yet.”
* * *
I lived downstairs, one storey below the grand ballroom, though as far as I knew the Captain didn’t dance. There I slept on a feather mattress and dreamed a memory from not so long ago.
I was practising with the rifle after the Captain’s lessons, loading, aiming, and firing at the targets behind the rosebushes. I could see the frustration on my own face when the barrel jammed, the vindictive triumph in my eyes when I shot a squirrel that’d been irritating me with its chatter. I smiled at my own impatience.
I watched myself through the eyes of an observer who circled me lazily from a distance, but not a vast one.
I woke up and went to check the lock on my bedroom door. In the morning I was woken again by a long, twisting, miserable sound that I couldn’t quite place.
Once I saw a Chinese funeral march in Kuala Lumpur, all in white. The family hadn’t been wealthy and couldn’t pay for a large well-ordered procession. So they dragged together all their white and they made up for it with their wretched howls: howls which frightened my mother’s cat, which my cousins took to calling “ghoul noises,” which even my mother deemed an unconscionable nuisance after a certain point. The hounds were making this noise.
The door to the kennel was torn off its hinges. The bitch must have put up the greater fight. Her hide had been torn up in great rents but she hadn’t been devoured. The stud’s abdomen was all but gone, one of his legs too. Another dog was missing his forepaws and sprawled with his head at an odd angle. The others were flecked with red to greater or lesser degree and howling, but alive.
I found myself stepping over their remains, nearly slipping on the blood. I scratched one of the other dogs absently and was disturbed by the tranquil pace of my heart.
The Captain wasn’t faring so well. He’d wrapped himself in what looked like two dressing-gowns over his clothing. The sound had rendered him wan and ill. The Yorkshireman groundskeeper was worse, though: he’d blanched bone white and had already been sick on the kennel floor, by the look of it.
Captain Lyons said, simply, “I’ll put together a hunt.”
The room smelled like the dogs’ blood. I knelt next to the bitch. “Sir,” I called. “Look.”
He looked. So did the groundskeeper, still mottled and silent in the corner.
I motioned to the deep, dark scores in her side, made with an impossibly long sweep.
* * *
The Captain recovered his spirits in time for the next day’s hunt. He was shaven tidy again and his copper moustache twitched over his mouth like a curry-brush. I imagined him intrepid with a machete, plumbing King Solomon’s mines.
I didn’t want to go with him. My dream was too much with me, loping around me in a lazy circle, watching me shoot even now. I remembered the scores on the dogs’ bodies. But after breakfast I encountered the Captain on the grounds and he hailed me, distracted: “Ah, there you are, lad. Come along and saddle Cleto, all the men are going to need their guns.”
It was a kindness, I reminded myself. I knew how much I stuck out in the hunting party, like a sallow little thumb. The hounds whined in disharmony, always one too high or too low to ignore. On a normal hunt it would’ve been irritating, but the noise was just about the only thing keeping me from falling off my horse. I hadn’t slept well at all. Every time I’d woken in the night, I found my dreams slinking away from me on soft-padded feet.
I put a hand on the stock of one of the Captain’s rifles. The mist penetrated my shabby jacket and clammied up my skin as we rode onward over the moor, mindful of our footing on the heather.
“Oi, Lyons!” Our neighbour Mr Gaffney pulled up his horse short in front of the Captain impudently, forcing him to do the same. “What’s the matter with your hounds? The cat got in the kennel, didn’t it? Where’s their trail?”
“There isn’t one,” I answered, preoccupied with Cleto. “The tiger lost them in the rain and it hasn’t come back. It should be wounded.”
Gaffney raised his eyebrows at my speaking up. The groundskeeper was more concerned with the content. “Tiger?” he repeated and the Captain settled his butterscotch eyes on me too.
I was aware again of sticking out. A rich gentleman, a working fellow, and an Army Captain were still three Yorkshiremen when it came down to it. Contrast me, the boy here on a kindness.
I swallowed. “There’s no cat so large,” I said: truthfully, too, though that was not how I knew. “I mean, it couldn’t be anything else, sir, however ridiculous it sounds. And I’m sure it does.”
“A tiger,” Gaffney repeated, more amused than bemused. He was a sportsman and to him this was sport. The Captain looked at him through half-lidded eyes, but Gaffney was too blooded himself to mind an Army Captain’s opinion, so went on, “What a bedevilled idea. It’d be a stranger to these parts, to be certain.”
Like me, I thought.
* * *
The cat followed me every night now. His stripes rippled like a hypnotic illusion when I closed my eyes, sometimes to find myself wearing them. I don’t know when I started thinking of it as a “he,” but it might have been when I found myself sitting up in bed and the tiger sitting up in the doorway watching me. Its eyes were dilated black in the near-darkness. Its tail flicked back and forth behind it like an angry snake.
“You killed the dogs,” I said.
He smiled. How can a tiger smile? But he did, and I knew that he was, too.
“You couldn’t have been hungry,” I said, angry. “There are sheep here for miles. But you killed the dogs.”
“I was tired of their noise,” he purred, curling his tail around his great brutish feet. “I don’t lie. Men lie to make themselves feel better about the things they do. Tigers destroy what ails them. And they feast.”
I understood him so well and saw him so clearly outlined in the doorway that I was sure I was not dreaming. But he didn’t kill me; he turned and padded off into the hall and I woke up in the morning with the door as closed and latched as I’d left it.
* * *
The next week I was awoken by a furious knocking and the butler’s voice. I knew what he was after before I ope
ned my eyes, because I’d seen it happen.
“The master’s putting together a hunt, boy,” he said. “Go, go—quickly now!”
My tiger was no longer merely wild, but a man-eater. Mr Burroughs had been found dead on the stones of the open gallery in his manor house where he liked to smoke. I knew because I’d been there and seen him surprised, then running briefly because cats like to play, then bleeding. He was fairly wretched to the last of it. I watched him die with disappointment and contempt.
I washed up in the basin. I looked in the mirror and wondered why my eyes weren’t slitted in the light.
Mr Burroughs, pitiful irritating Mr Burroughs with his endless talk of the Orient. Had he really touched a man-eater? He had now. I hated the Orient, hated Malaya, hated myself and everything I brought here; I wished desperately to turn myself in, but for what? They’d put me in a sanitarium and then nothing could help me.
I answered the Captain’s summons instead. I felt like I was walking to the gallows. He, by contrast, was taut and alive; he’d recovered his spirits since the deaths of his dogs, and far from destroyed, he was flushed and lively and glowing with anticipation. He wasn’t fond of Burroughs, I knew, so I supposed he planned to save his condolences for the widow. His anger about the man’s death seemed to be fixed to a very sharp point, aimed directly at the cat. A tiger’s skin was one of those missing from his game room wall.
It occurred to me that he finally believed in the beast. Of course it was immature of me to resent that he hadn’t just taken my word. But I did, so really, neither of us was thinking about poor old Burroughs at all.
I didn’t hate Burroughs. Neither did the Captain. But I had to admit that I didn’t miss him.
It was strange to feel like the murderer of a man you literally could not have murdered. It was even stranger to cease caring about it for the time being. I found myself saddling up all the men, who were all ignoring me, including the Captain—valets became invisible at times like this—and our cocksure neighbour Sebastian Gaffney nearly cuffed me at one point, but I avoided his ire and we were off with the dogs. Riding with them was exhilarating; I wondered what I would do if I encountered the tiger. Would it recognize me? Was I mad?
