Behind me, Stephanie caught her breath sharply, and I waited for the cry she suppressed. Ben must have seen the cougar, also; for he stopped dancing and stared as intently as we did, still making no sound at all.
I tried to keep the gun trained on the eyes and pull both triggers together, but the weight made it waver and my hands shook. I don’t know if this was the buck fever hunters talk about or simply the paralysis of mounting terror. I felt my nervousness would pass, but for the moment I was incapable of action.
“Here, Mother—let me,” Stephanie whispered.
She took the firearm out of my hands, which remained rigid as though still holding it. The mountain lion had stopped, one paw upraised, the tip of that ropy tail quivering faintly. He was a perfect target; I waited for the explosion as I felt, rather than saw, Stephanie’s finger strain at the trigger.
“Rrrrrrr!” called Ben, loudly and imperatively. “Rrrrrrr! Rrrrrrr!”
This was no sound I had ever heard before. There was fear in it, and urgency, and command, but more than anything else there was warning, warning of great and immediate peril. The great cat stiffened, turned his head slightly, switched his tail once—like a scythe—and leapt away in great bounds. The gun finally roared, but the glistening yard was empty.
Jack rushed in to find me with my arms around both children, the three of us, as he said, “bellowing loud enough to scare all the animals in the canyon.” He pooh-phooed the notion that Ben had warned the cougar. “Any noise at all would have driven him off; they’re cowards. If you’d barked bow-wow or talked French he would have scampered just the same.”
“Oh, Mama,” cried Stephanie, still half-hysterical. “He says such silly things. Imagine talking French to a mountain lion when we know Ben can speak cat. Oh, Mama!”
I think she was about ten, the last time she called me anything but “Mother.” I patted her gently on the back while Jack went on muttering that a man who put a gun in female hands ought to have his head examined. Ben stopped crying and began imitatively patting us both.
“Ma-ma,” he said.
I knew he would never talk cat again.
The Jaguar Hunter
Lucius Shepard
Lucius Shepard was perhaps the most popular and influential new writer of the ’80s, rivaled for that title only by William Gibson, Connie Willis, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Shepard won the John W. Campbell Award in 1985 as the year’s Best New Writer, and no year since has gone by without him adorning the final ballot for one major award or another, and often for several. In 1987, he won the Nebula Award for his landmark novella “R & R,” and in 1988 he picked up a World Fantasy Award for his monumental short-story collection The Jaguar Hunter. His first novel was the acclaimed Green Eyes, his second the bestselling Life During Wartime; he is at work on several more. His latest books are a new collection, The Ends of the Earth, and a new novel, Kalimantan. Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, he now lives in Nantucket, Massachusetts.
In the riveting tale that follows, he takes us to the steaming jungles of Central America—a favorite Shepard milieu—for a story about the meaning of the hunt and the nature of the hunter—and the hunted.
* * *
It was his wife’s debt to Onofrio Esteves, the appliance dealer, that brought Esteban Caax to town for the first time in almost a year. By nature he was a man who enjoyed the sweetness of the countryside above all else; the placid measures of a farmer’s day invigorated him, and he took great pleasure in nights spent joking and telling stories around a fire, or lying beside his wife, Incarnación. Puerto Morada, with its fruit company imperatives and sullen dogs and cantinas that blared American music, was a place he avoided like the plague: indeed, from his home atop the mountain whose slopes formed the northernmost enclosure of Bahía Onda, the rusted tin roofs ringing the bay resembled a dried crust of blood such as might appear upon the lips of a dying man.
On this particular morning, however, he had no choice but to visit the town. Incarnación had—without his knowledge—purchased a battery-operated television set on credit from Onofrio, and he was threatening to seize Esteban’s three milk cows in lieu of the eight hundred lempiras that was owed; he refused to accept the return of the television, but had sent word that he was willing to discuss an alternate method of payment. Should Esteban lose the cows, his income would drop below a subsistence level, and he would be forced to take up his old occupation, an occupation far more onerous than farming.
As he walked down the mountain, past huts of thatch and brushwood poles identical to his own, following a trail that wound through sun-browned thickets lorded over by banana trees, he was not thinking of Onofrio but of Incarnación. It was in her nature to be frivolous, and he had known this when he had married her; yet the television was emblematic of the differences that had developed between them since their children had reached maturity. She had begun to put on sophisticated airs, to laugh at Esteban’s country ways, and she had become the doyenne of a group of older women, mostly widows, all of whom aspired to sophistication. Each night they would huddle around the television and strive to outdo one another in making sagacious comments about the American detective shows they watched; and each night Esteban would sit outside the hut and gloomily ponder the state of his marriage. He believed Incarnación’s association with the widows was her manner of telling him that she looked forward to adopting the black skirt and shawl, that—having served his purpose as a father—he was now an impediment to her. Though she was only forty-one, younger by three years than Esteban, she was withdrawing from the life of the senses; they rarely made love anymore, and he was certain that this partially embodied her resentment of the fact that the years had been kind to him. He had the look of one of the Old Patuca—tall, with chiseled features and wide-set eyes; his coppery skin was relatively unlined and his hair jet black. Incarnación’s hair was streaked with gray, and the clean beauty of her limbs had dissolved beneath layers of fat. He had not expected her to remain beautiful, and he had tried to assure her that he loved the woman she was and not merely the girl she had been. But that woman was dying, infected by the same disease that had infected Puerto Morada, and perhaps his love for her was dying, too.
The dusty street on which the appliance store was situated ran in back of the movie theater and the Hotel Circo Del Mar, and from the inland side of the street Esteban could see the bell towers of Santa María del Onda rising above the hotel roof like the horns of a great stone snail. As a young man, obeying his mother’s wish that he become a priest, he had spent three years cloistered beneath those towers, preparing for the seminary under the tutelage of old Father Gonsalvo. It was the part of his life he most regretted, because the academic disciplines he had mastered seemed to have stranded him between the world of the Indian and that of contemporary society; in his heart he held to his father’s teachings—the principles of magic, the history of the tribe, the lore of nature—and yet he could never escape the feeling that such wisdom was either superstitious or simply unimportant. The shadows of the towers lay upon his soul as surely as they did upon the cobbled square in front of the church, and the sight of them caused him to pick up his pace and lower his eyes.
Farther along the street was the Cantina Atómica, a gathering place for the well-to-do youth of the town, and across from it was the appliance store, a one-story building of yellow stucco with corrugated metal doors that were lowered at night. Its facade was decorated by a mural that supposedly represented the merchandise within: sparkling refrigerators and televisions and washing machines, all given the impression of enormity by the tiny men and woman painted below them, their hands upflung in awe. The actual merchandise was much less imposing, consisting mainly of radios and used kitchen equipment. Few people in Puerto Morada could afford more, and those who could generally bought elsewhere. The majority of Onofrio’s clientele were poor, hard-pressed to meet his schedule of payments, and to a large degree his wealth derived from selling repossessed appliances over and over.
&n
bsp; Raimundo Esteves, a pale young man with puffy cheeks and heavily lidded eyes and a petulant mouth, was leaning against the counter when Esteban entered; Raimundo smirked and let out a piercing whistle, and a few seconds later his father emerged from the back room: a huge slug of a man, even paler than Raimundo. Filaments of gray hair were slicked down across his mottled scalp, and his belly stretched the front of a starched guayabera. He beamed and extended a hand.
“How good to see you,” he said. “Raimundo! Bring us coffee and two chairs.”
Much as he disliked Onofrio, Esteban was in no position to be uncivil: he accepted the handshake. Raimundo spilled coffee in the saucers and clattered the chairs and glowered, angry at being forced to serve an Indian.
“Why will you not let me return the television?” asked Esteban after taking a seat; and then, unable to bite back the words, he added, “Is it no longer your policy to swindle my people?”
Onofrio sighed, as if it were exhausting to explain things to a fool such as Esteban. “I do not swindle your people. I go beyond the letter of the contracts in allowing them to make returns rather than pursuing matters through the courts. In your case, however, I have devised a way whereby you can keep the television without any further payments and yet settle the account. Is this a swindle?”
It was pointless to argue with a man whose logic was as facile and self-serving as Onofrio’s. “Tell me what you want,” said Esteban.
Onofrio wetted his lips, which were the color of raw sausage. “I want you to kill the jaguar of Barrio Carolina.”
“I no longer hunt,” said Esteban.
“The Indian is afraid,” said Raimundo, moving up behind Onofrio’s shoulder. “I told you.”
Onofrio waved him away and said to Esteban, “That is unreasonable. If I take the cows, you will once again be hunting jaguars. But if you do this, you will have to hunt only one jaguar.”
“One that has killed eight hunters.” Esteban set down his coffee cup and stood. “It is no ordinary jaguar.”
Raimundo laughed disparagingly, and Esteban skewered him with a stare.
“Ah!” said Onofrio, smiling a flatterer’s smile. “But none of the eight used your method.”
“Your pardon, don Onofrio,” said Esteban with mock formality. “I have other business to attend.”
“I will pay you five hundred lempiras in addition to erasing your debt,” said Onofrio.
“Why?” asked Esteban. “Forgive me, but I cannot believe it is due to a concern for the public welfare.”
Onofrio’s fat throat pulsed, his face darkened.
“Never mind,” said Esteban. “It is not enough.”
“Very well. A thousand.” Onofrio’s casual manner could not conceal the anxiety in his voice.
Intrigued, curious to learn the extent of Onofrio’s anxiety, Esteban plucked a figure from the air. “Ten thousand,” he said. “And in advance.”
“Ridiculous! I could hire ten hunters for this much! Twenty!”
Esteban shrugged. “But none with my method.”
For a moment Onofrio sat with his hands enlaced, twisting them, as if struggling with some pious conception. “All right,” he said, the words squeezed out of him. “Ten thousand!”
The reason for Onofrio’s interest in Barrio Carolina suddenly dawned on Esteban, and he understood that the profits involved would make his fee seem pitifully small. But he was possessed by the thought of what ten thousand lempiras could mean: a herd of cows, a small truck to haul produce, or—and as he thought it, he realized this was the happiest possibility—the little stucco house in Barrio Clarín that Incarnación had set her heart on. Perhaps owning it would soften her toward him. He noticed Raimundo staring at him, his expression a knowing smirk; and even Onofrio, though still outraged by the fee, was beginning to show signs of satisfaction, adjusting the fit of his guayabera, slicking down his already-slicked-down hair. Esteban felt debased by their capacity to buy him, and to preserve a last shred of dignity, he turned and walked to the door.
“I will consider it,” he tossed back over his shoulder. “And I will give you my answer in the morning.”
* * *
“Murder Squad of New York,” starring a bald American actor, was the featured attraction on Incarnación’s television that night, and the widows sat cross-legged on the floor, filling the hut so completely that the charcoal stove and the sleeping hammock had been moved outside in order to provide good viewing angles for the latecomers. To Esteban, standing in the doorway, it seemed his home had been invaded by a covey of large black birds with cowled heads, who were receiving evil instruction from the core of a flickering gray jewel. Reluctantly, he pushed between them and made his way to the shelves mounted on the wall behind the set; he reached up to the top shelf and pulled down a long bundle wrapped in oil-stained newspapers. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Incarnación watching him, her lips thinned, curved in a smile, and that cicatrix of a smile branded its mark on Esteban’s heart. She knew what he was about, and she was delighted! Not in the least worried! Perhaps she had known of Onofrio’s plan to kill the jaguar, perhaps she had schemed with Onofrio to entrap him. Infuriated, he barged through the widows, setting them to gabbling, and walked out into his banana grove and sat on a stone amidst it. The night was cloudy, and only a handful of stars showed between the tattered dark shapes of the leaves; the wind sent the leaves slithering together, and he heard one of his cows snorting and smelled the ripe odor of the corral. It was as if the solidity of his life had been reduced to this isolated perspective, and he bitterly felt the isolation. Though he would admit to fault in the marriage, he could think of nothing he had done that could have bred Incarnación’s hateful smile.
After a while, he unwrapped the bundle of newspapers and drew out a thin-bladed machete of the sort used to chop banana stalks, but which he used to kill jaguars. Just holding it renewed his confidence and gave him a feeling of strength. It had been four years since he had hunted, yet he knew he had not lost the skill. Once he had been proclaimed the greatest hunter in the province of Neuva Esperanza, as had his father before him, and he had not retired from hunting because of age or infirmity, but because the jaguars were beautiful, and their beauty had begun to outweigh the reasons he had for killing them. He had no better reason to kill the jaguar of Barrio Carolina. It menaced no one other than those who hunted it, who sought to invade its territory, and its death would profit only a dishonorable man and a shrewish wife, and would spread the contamination of Puerto Morada. And besides, it was a black jaguar.
“Black jaguars,” his father had told him, “are creatures of the moon. They have other forms and magical purposes with which we must not interfere. Never hunt them!”
His father had not said that the black jaguars lived on the moon, simply that they utilized its power; but as a child, Esteban had dreamed about a moon of ivory forests and silver meadows through which the jaguars flowed as swiftly as black water; and when he had told his father of the dreams, his father had said that such dreams were representations of a truth, and that sooner or later he would discover the truth underlying them. Esteban had never stopped believing in the dreams, not even in face of the rocky, airless place depicted by the science programs on Incarnación’s television: that moon, its mystery explained, was merely a less enlightening kind of dream, a statement of fact that reduced reality to the knowable.
But as he thought this, Esteban suddenly realized that killing the jaguar might be the solution to his problems, that by going against his father’s teaching, that by killing his dreams, his Indian conception of the world, he might be able to find accord with his wife’s; he had been standing halfway between the two conceptions for too long, and it was time for him to choose. And there was no real choice. It was this world he inhabited, not that of the jaguars: if it took the death of a magical creature to permit him to embrace as joys the television and trips to the movies and a stucco house in Barrio Clarín, well, he had faith in this method. He swung th
e machete, slicing the dark air, and laughed. Incarnación’s frivolousness, his skill at hunting, Onofrio’s greed, the jaguar, the television . . . all these things were neatly woven together like the elements of a spell, one whose products would be a denial of magic and a furthering of the unmagical doctrines that had corrupted Puerto Morada. He laughed again, but a second later he chided himself: it was exactly this sort of thinking he was preparing to root out.
###
Esteban waked Incarnación early the next morning and forced her to accompany him to the appliance store. His machete swung by his side in a leather sheath, and he carried a burlap sack containing food and the herbs he would need for the hunt. Incarnación trotted along beside him, silent, her face hidden by a shawl. When they reached the store, Esteban had Onofrio stamp the bill paid in full, then he handed the bill and the money to Incarnación.
“If I kill the jaguar or if it kills me,” he said harshly, “this will be yours. Should I fail to return within a week, you may assume that I will never return.”
She retreated a step, her face registering alarm, as if she had seen him in new light and understood the consequences of her actions; but she made no move to stop him as he walked out the door.
Across the street, Raimundo Esteves was leaning against the wall of the Cantina Atómica, talking to two girls wearing jeans and frilly blouses; the girls were fluttering their hands and dancing to the music that issued from the cantina, and to Esteban they seemed more alien than the creature he was to hunt. Raimundo spotted him and whispered to the girls; they peeked over their shoulders and laughed. Already angry at Incarnación, Esteban was washed over by a cold fury. He crossed the street to them, rested his hand on the hilt of the machete, and stared at Raimundo; he had never before noticed how soft he was, how empty of presence. A crop of pimples straggled along his jaw, the flesh beneath his eyes was pocked by tiny indentations like those made by a silversmith’s hammer, and, unequal to the stare, his eyes darted back and forth between the two girls.
MAGICATS II Page 10
