by H. V. Elkin
Children were yelling and women were screaming. Maroney was trying to reassure them. “Ladies and gentlemen, do not be alarmed. Eric Hansen knows how to handle situations of this kind as he has many times before. You will see. But we ask your silence, please. Your silence, please!”
Hansen faced the crouched tiger. As the tiger growled and hissed, Hansen snapped his whip and shouted commands that went unheeded. Then, with what must have been the last bullet in his gun, he fired into the tiger’s face. Anna backed away scowling, then leapt back onto her perch where she crouched as though she had only gone there to pounce again.
Hansen snapped his whip a few more times until Anna, with an unconcealed reluctance and hatred, sat up.
Hansen quickly sent the lions out of the cage into their wagon. As soon as the lion wagon was wheeled away, one of the tiger wagons was in place and the second tiger left the cage. The third wagon was brought up, but Hansen hesitated, looking up at Anna, thinking. The men raised the gate at the back of the cage, opening the way to the wagon that was waiting for Anna. The tiger heard the familiar sound and turned her head, then looked back down at Hansen. Hansen thought a moment longer, keeping his eyes on the tiger, then signaled for the gate to be lowered. He left the cage by the front, preoccupied, forgetting the audience or maybe even that he was in the middle of a show. Maroney announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Eric Hansen!” The applause reminded Hansen where he was, and he bowed to the audience, a halfhearted smile on his face. Then as men brought in a tall pedestal and placed it outside the cage, and the clowns mimed their own animal act, Hansen and Maroney engaged in some intense conversation. Molly appeared in the entrance and was summoned over to the men. A great deal of loud whispering, nodding and gesturing, until the three of them seemed to come to some kind of agreement.
Molly left the tent, Eric returned to the cage where Anna waited and watched him, and Maroney signaled the band. The band played a fanfare.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Maroney announced, “you have had the privilege today of witnessing something special. It is one thing to see well-rehearsed, trained animals being put through their paces, bowing to man’s bidding for your entertainment and edification. And it is another thing entirely to see those same animals behaving as they normally would in the jungle whence they came. You saw a tiger attack a lion. The tiger pounces on the back of its prey and attempts to sink its teeth into the neck. At that point, you may have considered the lion as good as dead. Not so. The lion’s thick, oily mane provides a natural protection from tiger teeth. In fact, in our situation with two lions and two tigers, the lion usually has the advantage, by virtue of its throat protection, its greater weight and size and—as you were privileged to observe—by virtue of the fact that lions will assist each other while tigers will not.
“We are pleased that you have witnessed this spectacle today, for it should have given you a sense of the dangers involved in animal training, particularly where the great cats are concerned. If the show had gone smoothly, you would have been impressed without knowing the difficulties involved. A good trainer, like Eric Hansen, can make such things look simpler and easier than they really are.”
Cutler was not particularly interested in the lecture, and his attention was drawn to the entrance. In a moment, he saw Molly waiting there. Beside her stood one of the horses. It wore a kind of leather armor around its neck and head with small spikes sticking up out of it. It also wore blinders. Cutler drew his six-gun and checked the chambers. They were full except for the one beneath the hammer. He put the gun back in its holster and was beginning to wish he was holding the Winchester or the Krag that were out in his wagon in a rack behind the seat. He unconsciously rubbed his hand over the handle of the Case sheath knife on his left side.
Maroney seemed to be finishing his lecture. “In their relationships with man, the cats’ dangerousness shifts from the lion to the tiger. With man, the lion is less ferocious and will train more easily. Often his seeming ferociousness is merely sham. The tiger is exactly the opposite. She can be resentful, difficult to train, and never bluffs. The female tiger, or tigress, is twice as bad as the male of the species in this respect. I should point out that our tigers are female. So perhaps we could now have another round of applause for Eric Hansen.”
As the crowd was obliging with applause for Hansen, Maroney glanced to the entrance, then turned to some men at the opposite end of the tent and nodded to them. These men, each one holding a feeding fork or metal-tipped stick, spaced themselves out partway between the audience and the playing area. Maroney gave the audience time to grasp the drama of all this.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, you are about to see something truly spectacular. An educational demonstration of the adaptability of beast to beast and beast to man. We have performed this trick countless times all over this great land of ours. Some of you may have read about it in newspaper accounts and, if you have, we know you would be disappointed to leave here today without witnessing what is one of the most sensational acts performed by any circus anywhere. Although you are fully protected from danger by the men who have assembled between you and the performance, I assure you there is no danger.”
He nodded to the band. There was another fanfare. Hansen opened the door of the cage, then turned and snapped his whip at the tiger. Anna snarled, reluctant to move. Two more snaps of the whip and she obligingly jumped from her perch and went to the open cage door. There were some gasps in the audience. The band played a waltz, though, and the music had a calming effect on both audience and tiger.
The tiger looked around, Hansen snapped his whip, and the tiger jumped onto the high pedestal that had been placed outside the cage. She sat there looking straight ahead in a kind of trance, as though listening to the music.
Hansen nodded to the entrance and Molly led on the horse with the leather armor. Now Cutler could see the horse also wore a saddle shaped like a platform. Molly said something to the horse, and it pranced around the outside of the ring, passing under the tiger’s pedestal. Anna looked down, almost casually, as the horse passed beneath her several times. As the horse made its sixth turn around the ring, just as it was about to pass beneath the pedestal, Hansen cracked his whip, and the tiger leapt onto the platform on the horse’s back. Digging its claws into the platform, the tiger held on and rode on the horse as it made two more circles. Then Hansen cracked his whip for Anna to leap back onto the pedestal.
Anna leapt, all right, but not onto the pedestal. Instead she jumped off the horse onto the ground and bolted for the entrance where Molly stood. Molly darted out of the way and jumped onto the horse as it was coming around another time. A man with a metal-pointed stick was in the entranceway and looked as if he was about to run the stick down the tiger’s throat. But the tiger veered away and ran toward the audience.
The body of people that had been transfixed and staring in disbelief suddenly came to life with movement, shouts and screams. A mother pulled two children into her arms and fell over backwards with them between two rows of benches, then huddled there under the protection of the bench. Roy Bean stood and did not retreat, a strange upright figure amidst the crawling humanity, and he looked more outraged than frightened. Sam Bean stood beside him, protectively, with his six-gun drawn and aiming at the tiger. Roy put a restraining hand out to Sam’s arm and demanded, “Do you want to hit a constituent?!”
The men with sticks and forks managed to keep themselves between the tiger and the audience. They congregated in a tight semicircle around the tiger, prodding and jabbing at the snarling mass of anger and hatred. Hansen was close beside them, snapping his whip and shouting orders that the tiger ignored.
Anna half-stood on her hind feet and swiped at one of the feeding forks, knocking it out of the man’s hands, then leapt at the unarmed man. He fell over backwards with the tiger on top of him. Anna used the man as a stepping stone and continued on past him to the audience as he writhed in pain behind her. The screams got louder.
Then Cutler was standing there in the tiger’s path, his six-gun in one hand and his knife in the other. He held the gun pointed up and shot it near the tiger’s face, the bullet going on to put a hole in the canvas big top. The tiger hesitated and grimaced at the sound so close to her face. Cutler fired again. The tiger backed on her haunches. Cutler leant in toward the tiger and fired again close to her face. She snarled but backed. Cutler took a step to stay close to the tiger and once more fired near her face. Then she turned and ran into the safety of the cage. Hansen rushed up behind her and slammed the cage door shut.
Cutler kept going toward the cage, as though he would not grant asylum to the tiger. “Open the back!” he shouted angrily, as he continued to move toward the cage.
Some men were there and did as Cutler ordered. Anna watched Cutler approaching. Cutler fired and kept coming toward her, now having reached the edge of the cage. Anna turned and ran through the back of the cage into the wagon, and the door was slammed shut behind her. Then Cutler turned and glared at Hansen.
“You damned fool!” Cutler shouted. “You damned fool!”
“Ladies and gentlemen!” Maroney shouted from the other side of the ring. “Please! The danger is past. Please take your seats and be calm!” He signaled to the band which began to play, waveringly at first, then with the gusto of relief.
But the crowd was not easily calmed.
Cutler spat on the ground and started to leave in disgust. “My friends!” he heard from behind him. It was a different voice, and he turned. There was Bean, formally attired and unruffled, standing next to Maroney, his hands raised for silence.
Magically, except for two crying infants in their mothers’ arms, the crowd quieted and sat down.
Bean looked around at them reprovingly, like a schoolmaster with unruly students. “Now then ...” But the band was playing too loudly for him. He glared toward them, and the music petered out with a sound like someone stepping on a bagpipe. Bean held his stare on the musicians a moment, turned back to the crowd, glared once more at the musicians for good measure, then back to the crowd again. “Now what are you so het up about?” he asked them and waited for an answer he did not expect to come. “Is anyone hurt?” he demanded. And he waited again. “The animal didn’t touch a one of you, did it?” He pointed to the man who lay on the ground and was being helped up to be taken away by two others for treatment of his wounds. “Only one hurt,” Bean said, “is this poor man who gets paid for it. Them what paid to see it, they ain’t hurt. Least not from the tiger. Only injuries any of you got is the ones you gave yourselves by gettin’ so damned scared over nothin’. Why, I ought to fine every one of you for disturbance of the peace. That’s what I ought to do.” He looked them over some more, then bowed slightly. “But I won’t. I’ve been havin’ too good a time and feelin’ too good to want to go to all the work of administerin’ justice right now. But I got to tell you this. We ought to be more careful how we behave in front of strangers. These circus folk travel all over the country and any way we act in front of them . . . well, it could get around. Ought to think about that some.”
Cutler was surprised at the way everyone just sat and listened to what Bean was saying. In his opinion, everyone had a perfect right to panic with a tiger coming at them. But there was Bean scolding them, and they seemed to listen meekly without anyone making what would have been a valid objection to a circus endangering their lives by letting an obviously ornery beast out of a cage. Cutler had forgotten his own anger in the face of this phenomenon. He took another look at the crowd and changed his opinion. No, they were not just sitting there taking it like naughty children after all. Some of them were smiling. They enjoyed having the judge give them hell. He had become just one of the high points of the show.
Now Bean was picking out people in the crowd. “Jude,” he said, “I haven’t seen you so white since you took a swig of my tarantula juice.” Laughter from the crowd. “Maddie, I don’t know what you got to be so all concerned about. Everyone knows you’d be happier if you was a widow. This was your chance to push Charlie out there at the tiger and tell him to act like a man.” More laughter, even from the man who seemed to be Charlie. Bean picked out a few more and honored them with special comment along those lines, then he turned to Maroney. “You got any more show left?”
“Yes, sir,” Maroney said. “A little.”
“Don’t go bein’ embarrassed if it ain’t quite as excitin’ as what we seen already.”
“It isn’t, Judge Bean, I promise you that.”
“All right then!” Bean shouted in a big voice. “Let’s have it!”
The crowd cheered, and Bean walked regally back amongst them and reclaimed his seat. Cutler shook his head, partly in disbelief, partly in admiration, and left the tent.
Molly was outside, facing away from him toward the sun and shivering. He thought she would want to be alone, so he tried to get away around the tent without disturbing her or having her be embarrassed about being seen so shaken up. But she heard him try to move away.
“Mr. Cutler?”
He stopped and did not look at her. “It’s John.”
“That was a brave thing you did in there.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t brave. I didn’t have time to be scared.”
“But . . .”
“It’s doin’ what you have to even though you’re scared, that’s what bein’ brave is. What I did was probably more like foolishness.”
“Whatever it was, thank you.” Her teeth seemed to be chattering.
“You were the brave one.” He was doing everything he could to make her feel better.
“I don’t feel it, you can be sure of that.”
“Bringin’ that horse into the tent with the tiger out of his cage. That’s real bravery, Miss Barrie.”
She did not seem to comprehend what he was saying. She had her arms folded around her and was looking at her feet. “Molly,” she said finally. “Nobody calls me Miss Barrie.” He said nothing until she looked up at him like a shy colt.
“I’ll be goin’,” he said then. Something in that frightened look of hers made him want to get away fast, as if she were the bait over some kind of trap and he was the one who was going to get caught. But he waited for some sign from her that she understood, some indication that she would be all right now and he could go about his business.
She looked up again, gave a disgusted shrug of her shoulders. “Oh!” Then, unable to do otherwise, she rushed up against Cutler and threw her arms around his neck. He could feel her quivering against him and automatically put his arms around her.
“You must think me a silly schoolgirl,” she said, her face buried in his chest.
“No,” he said. He did not think that. He did not know what to think. “It’s all over now,” he said.
“I know.”
“Nothin’ like this ever happened before?”
“You mean my rushing up to a stranger and holding on like this?”
“No, I meant the tiger gettin’ out of hand like that.”
“No,” she said. “I guess we saw it coming, but it was gradual. You know, like each day it’s only one degree hotter or colder. You notice it but it happens so gradually you get used to it. The tiger was a little nervous one day, but not too much more than usual. She was a little worse the next day but not so terribly different from the day before. And so on. It went on like that until this happened. And now everybody’s shocked about it. I am anyway.”
“Cutler,” Hansen’s voice from behind them.
Molly backed away from Cutler, her face gone red, and she stumbled. Cutler involuntarily reached out to catch her but she recovered her own footing and got even redder. “I feel so foolish,” she said. “I can do flip-flops on a horse’s back, and here I am falling all over my feet.” She turned to Hansen. “Where are they?”
“We got about five minutes yet before the finale.”
Sh
e nodded. “Okay. I’m okay now.”
“Cutler,” Hansen said again, “I want to thank you for what you did in there. It was just the right thing. Another cowboy would’ve tried to shoot that tiger and that would have only made matters worse. It’s just the sound of the gun the cats don’t like. That’s what they’ll back away from.”
Cutler nodded. “I had my knife ready in case she didn’t.”
“I’m glad you didn’t have to use it, though I guess you’d know how to if you had to.”
Cutler said nothing. He just stared at Hansen. Hansen was making an effort to maintain the eye-to-eye contact. “Anyway, what you did might’ve saved a few lives today, and I wanted to thank you.”
“I explained that it happened so gradually . . .” Molly started.
“Well,” Hansen said, “we don’t have to wash our dirty linen in public, Molly. I’m sure Mr. Cutler isn’t interested.”
“Well,” Cutler said, “that’s right and that’s wrong. I am a little curious about one thing, one or two things.”
“Go ahead,” Hansen said.
“Where’d that cat come from, for one thing?”
“Come from? What do you mean?”
“What I’m gettin’ at is the problem might be she’d been trained before by somebody else.”
“I don’t see . . .”
“Hell, I’m no expert on tigers. Know the kind of cats we got in this country and that’s all. But I’d guess that if a cat was domestic to begin with, she might be more dangerous. She’d’ve got used to men and might’ve got to figurin’ that she was more dangerous than men were. Course, that would be true, but I imagine it’s something a trainer would want to keep a secret from a tiger.”
Hansen looked surprised to hear this coming from Cutler. “Oh, yes. As a matter of fact, you’re quite right about that. Yes, for training purposes, it’s best to get the cats wild from the jungle. I congratulate you, sir!” It sounded as if Hansen hoped a compliment would end the conversation.
