The Time Traveller and the Tiger

by Tania Unsworth

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Elsie said.

  ‘You’ll be for it when they find you’ve wandered off.’

  ‘They won’t mind,’ she said. ‘I’m allowed to do anything I want too.’

  ‘No, you’re not. You’re a girl.’

  ‘That’s really sexist,’ Elsie said, outraged.

  John looked startled. His face flushed. ‘I say, does everyone in England… talk that way?’

  ‘What way?’

  His flush deepened.

  ‘I wasn’t talking about that! Don’t you know what “sexist” means?’

  He stared at the ground without answering. Even the back of his neck had gone red. Elsie sighed. A lot had happened in seventy-four years.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said.

  Now that he had accepted the fact that he was stuck with Elsie, John had clearly decided that he ought to look after her.

  ‘You’ll need to wear this,’ he said, handing her his solar topee.

  ‘But it’s yours.’

  ‘I’m more used to the sun than you are.’

  The solar topee was too big for her, and rather clammy on the inside, but she took it gratefully. John helped her adjust the strap under her chin.

  ‘That ought to do it.’

  ‘What about your leg? Doesn’t it hurt?’

  ‘Can’t feel a thing,’ he said, staggering to his feet.

  They continued on their way, moving slowly, John stopping every few moments to eagerly point things out. ‘The black bird over there is called a drongo,’ he told her. ‘Those webs were made by funnel spiders… that’s a mahua tree… and that white one’s a ghost tree.’

  ‘A ghost tree?’

  ‘It glows in the moonlight,’ John said.

  Looking more carefully at her surroundings, Elsie could see that she’d been wrong to think of it as a forest. But it wasn’t a jungle either. It was a mixture of the two. Except for the meadows, which didn’t seem to belong in either forest or jungle but in the English countryside instead…

  A flock of lime green birds crossed the sky.

  ‘Parakeets,’ John said. ‘The ones making all the noise are babblers, awfully chatty things.’

  ‘I wonder what species that is,’ he said, gazing at a plant with spiky leaves. ‘I haven’t seen that kind before.’

  A look of deep thought had taken over his face. Elsie knew that expression. For the first time, she could see that he really was her Great-Uncle John. The boy standing beside her and the old man in the greenhouse were a single person. Time would change him, and time would leave him just the same.

  ‘You know a lot,’ she said.

  ‘Mandeep taught me. He knows pretty much everything.’

  ‘Where does he live?’

  ‘At the house, of course. In the servants’ quarters. His mother was my ayah; she looked after both of us when we were little.’

  ‘Ayah?’ Elsie repeated.

  John stopped and gave her a disbelieving look. ‘You really don’t know anything, do you? An ayah is like a nanny. Ours has been with the family for years. She looks after my baby sister. She took care of my older brother too, before he went off to school.’

  ‘I didn’t know you have a brother,’ Elsie said, before she remembered she wasn’t supposed to know anything at all about her great-uncle.

  ‘Had a brother,’ John corrected. ‘He died. Six months ago.’

  Elsie gazed at him anxiously from under the brim of the solar topee.

  ‘Horse threw him.’

  ‘That’s awful.’

  ‘It was a freak accident,’ John said. ‘Hugh was a brilliant rider. Brilliant at pretty much everything, as a matter of fact. The headmaster took me out of maths class to give me the news.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ Elsie repeated.

  ‘Not so bad for me,’ John said in the same angry, matter-of-fact way he’d said, ‘just grazed the skin’ about his hurt leg. ‘I didn’t really know him that well. He was a lot older, already finished with school. My parents are pretty cut up about it, of course.’

  ‘Yes, they must be.’

  They carried on for a while in silence. The trees had thinned, and they were crossing an area of dry earth, dotted with scrubby bushes.

  John put a sudden, warning hand on her arm. ‘Snake.’

  Elsie saw a zigzag movement in the dust in front of her, a gleam of gold and black. ‘Oh!’ she cried, shuddering back.

  ‘Banded krait. You have to watch out for them, they’re lethal. But they usually leave you alone.’

  ‘Usually?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ John said. ‘I have a lot of experience around snakes.’

  The encounter seemed to have cheered him up. He began to tell her a long story about the time he’d found a viper in his bath. It had been at school. His school was in the mountains; he could see Mount Everest from the top of a hill behind the town. The school term lasted nine months, although it felt like nine hundred because there were so many rules. Everyone counted the days until they could go home for the holidays…

  Once he relaxed, Uncle John was almost as chatty as the babblers, Elsie thought. Even his hurt leg seemed better. He was hardly limping at all. She was beginning to hope that he had forgotten about the tiger when he stopped short, peering at the ground. They had come to the edge of a waterhole, its surface emerald with algae. A narrow gully led away to the left.

  ‘I knew it!’ John exclaimed.

  He pointed to a print in the mud by the water’s edge. Elsie saw the shape of a pad, twice as wide as her palm, the marks of four toes around it.

  ‘Know anything about tracking?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Loads.’

  ‘You’re looking at it upside down!’

  ‘How do you know it’s… the man-eating tiger? It could be a completely different one.’

  ‘The size, for one thing,’ John said. ‘It’s huge.’

  ‘Could be other big tigers in the area,’ Elsie said, glancing apprehensively around.

  ‘Not ones that leave prints like that,’ John told her. ‘Most tigers walk with their claws sheathed. This one has a claw sticking out, same as the pugmarks I saw this morning.’

  He didn’t have to sound so smug, Elsie thought.

  John gripped the strap of his gun, his scrawny neck stretched out as he peered into the mouth of the gully.

  ‘Obviously went into that nullah,’ he announced.

  Elsie stared at the steep, rocky sides of the gully, and the undergrowth covering the floor. ‘You’re not going to follow it in there,’ she protested. ‘You could run right into it.’

  ‘Are you saying I’m chicken?’ John’s voice was fierce.

  ‘No, ’course not,’ Elsie said, although she couldn’t help thinking that he looked rather like a chicken – a plucked one – all bones and pale skin.

  ‘I’d follow it in there,’ John said, his voice even fiercer. ‘I’d follow it in there if I wasn’t with a girl.’

  Very convenient! Elsie almost said.

  ‘Probably best to take the higher ground anyway,’ John commented, narrowing his eyes with an air of great wisdom. ‘Ideally, you want to be on the same level when you shoot a tiger. But a shot from above is almost as good.’

  Elsie gave him a sceptical look. ‘How many tigers have you actually shot?’

  ‘How many have you shot?’

  ‘There aren’t any tigers in England.’

  A maddeningly superior expression crossed his face. ‘Didn’t think so,’ he said.

  Elsie wanted to hit him.

  Four miles away, on the other side of the river, Mandeep was making his way home. He had been on the move all day, and most of the previous night, although he didn’t feel tired. He felt too many other things for that.

  Elation at the success of his plan. Alarm at his own daring.

  He had never done anything like it before, although he’d thought about it. But then, he thought about a lot of things.

  ‘Always think
ing!’ his mother said, managing in that way of hers, to sound both disapproving and pleased at the same time. ‘Always wandering off somewhere.’

  If his mother knew what he’d done, she would never let him out of her sight again for fear of the trouble he might bring.

  His mother worked for the Lassiters. His father too, as head gardener. And even though Mandeep felt fairly sure that the Lassiters had never met the hunter with the glasses and the brand-new jeep, that wouldn’t matter.

  Mandeep’s cousin had told him about it the day before. The hunter had been in the neighbourhood for a while, driving from one village to the next, making enquiries. He was after a leopard, he said. He would pay good money to whoever found him one, provided he wasn’t sent on some tomfool, wild goose chase. And it needed to be a healthy animal, not a mangy thing past its prime.

  Mandeep’s cousin had sold the man a goat to use as bait.

  Mandeep had thought about the hunter and the goat all that day, as he helped his father in the garden. It was light work, fetching and carrying, raking the fallen leaves from the lawn.

  In the past, his duties had included accompanying John’s mother as she collected blooms for the house. It had been their routine. She in her old gardening hat and floral dress, pruning shears in one hand. Mandeep a few steps behind, carrying the basket for the cut flowers.

  ‘Hold it steady,’ she would remind him, as his mind wandered. ‘You’re tilting it again.’

  And then she would place another rose, or dahlia stem, or yellow lily in the basket, and they would move on.

  Even after the death of her son, Hugh, the routine had stayed the same. The same basket, the same string of pearls around her neck, the same way she squinted up at the sky, as if bewildered by the sun.

  Yet it seemed she walked slower than before, and each day that passed, she walked slower still. Hesitating ever longer beside each shrub and flowering bush. Mandeep’s mind could wander across the river, and through the forest, and all the way up to the far northern hills, in the space of time between the opening and closing of her shears.

  One morning, about to cut a pale pink, budding rose, she paused for so long that Mandeep grew concerned. His eyes sought the figure of his father, on the other side of the garden. Mandeep was about to call out to him, when she turned, her arm falling to her side.

  ‘I don’t think I’m in the mood for cutting flowers today, Mandeep.’

  She had not been in the mood for it ever since. Nor for the pruning of the oleander, or the thinning out of the hibiscus and azalea. She didn’t even like it when the lawn was cut. The neglect upset Mandeep’s father deeply. He was proud of his garden. Yet there was no reasoning with her. She sat for hours in the living room, hardly moving, John’s father too. Their chairs positioned on either side of the mantelpiece, with the silver-framed photograph of Hugh in his school uniform placed in the middle.

  Mandeep imagined them sitting there until the garden inched over the verandah and up to the door, and the trees pressed dark against the windows of the house, and trails of nasturtium and clematis began to creep across the rug.

  But that day, he mostly thought about the hunter and the goat. And when his chores were done, and the evening meal was over, he was still thinking about them. He waited until everyone was asleep, and then stole out of the house, moving quickly, before he could change his mind.

  It was nearly a full moon, light enough to see the jeep tracks in the dusty road across the river from the village. But Mandeep didn’t need to follow them. He already knew where the hunter was. He knew every acre of these twenty miles of forest, the clearings and waterholes and groves of ancient sal and banyan trees, the crisscrossing paths of its many animals. He’d been exploring it all his thirteen years, sometimes with John, but mostly on his own.

  ‘Always wandering off!’ his mother cried, furious because he should be working, instead of wasting time in the forest. But even while she was scolding, she was already forgiving him. And away he would go again.

  Some way up the road, just before it curved west, Mandeep saw the parked jeep. From here, the hunter had proceeded on foot, a guide following behind, carrying the heavy gear. They had headed north, skirting the densest areas of trees, making for a place where the ground widened into a clearing with a tall, broad-branched tree in the centre.

  Mandeep covered the distance quickly and easily, only slowing as he grew close. He heard a noise and stopped. The noise came again.

  The lost baby-bleat of a goat.

  Moving with infinite care, Mandeep dropped to the ground and wriggled on his stomach through a maze of strangler vines and thick bushes towards the edge of the clearing. The cool of night had brought out the sweet, woody scent of the trees, mingled with grass and wild basil. A thorn caught his jacket and he paused to unhook himself, sweating despite the chilly air.

  He reached the clearing and raised himself on to his elbows to look. The tree was directly opposite. Mandeep could see a machan – a wooden platform – wedged between a couple of the lower branches, and the shadowy silhouettes of the hunter and the guide seated on top.

  The goat was a milky shape in the moonlight. It was standing in the open, between the tree and the edge of the clearing, a rope tethering it in place.

  Mandeep followed the rope with his eyes without turning his head. He knew the hunter must be looking in his direction, his gun ready, alive to the slightest movement.

  The rope ended at a wooden stake buried in a clump of grass near to where Mandeep was lying. He shifted forward, holding his breath, acutely aware of the extraordinary danger of his position. It wasn’t merely that he could be mistaken for a leopard and shot at any moment. There was also the fact of the leopard itself. If it was in the vicinity – and Mandeep felt sure that it was – it would have heard the frantic bleating of the goat, just as he had.

  There was no way of knowing how close it might be.

  From the machan came a faint chink of glass. The hunter was drinking to pass the time and keep his courage up.

  It would do nothing for his judgement – or his aim, Mandeep thought. But he took the opportunity to scramble the rest of the distance to the wooden stake. It had been driven deep into the earth. Too deep to pull free without a struggle. He groped for the knife at his waist and, shielding the glint of the blade, began cutting through the rope, keeping the movement restricted to his wrist.

  The goat bleated suddenly. Mandeep jerked with alarm, then found his breath and continued cutting. Two more strokes, three.

  The rope parted.

  Mandeep rested his forehead against the ground for a few seconds, his eyes closed. The goat bleated again, softer than before. He looked up. It was still standing there, foolish in the moonlight. As he watched, it bent its head and began to crop.

  Mandeep stared at it in frustration. Then his hand crept over the ground, searching. A pebble, neither too large nor too small. He wedged it tight between his finger and thumb and flicked it as hard as he could. It struck the goat in the middle of its back, and the animal instantly sprang away, crying in panic as it plunged headlong into the undergrowth.

  Mandeep heard a muttered curse, the sound of heavy feet descending the ladder from the machan. He shoved the knife into his waistband and crawled backwards through the bushes until he could get to his feet and run.

  Ten minutes later, he was half a mile away.

  It would take the hunter many minutes of crashing through the trees before he recovered his goat. The leopard would be long gone by then. And it would not return in a hurry. With luck, it would leave the area for a while, and the hunter could perch on his machan and whistle ‘God Save the King’, for all the good it would do him.

  Mandeep took satisfaction in the thought. The man had no right to go around killing leopards. It wasn’t his forest.

  He spent the rest of the night wedged comfortably in the crook of a tree. And next morning, being in no particular hurry, he took his time making his way home.

  M
andeep loved the forest. There was nobody to tell him he was wasting time or scold him for thinking too much. He was free to dream. And perhaps he was more his father’s son than he liked to think, because for as long as he could remember, he had dreamed the same thing.

  Of the forest as a garden, with a place for everything, and where every living thing was safe.

  The tiger had drunk deeply at the waterhole, lapping the golden surface of his own reflection. Then he’d turned and entered the nullah, searching for shelter. The water had helped restore him, but there was still a vague buzzing in his ears, as though a swarm of insects were nesting in his brain. He shook his head in a hopeless effort to dislodge them, then slipped into a shadow between the rocks, and lay still.

  Sometime later, he heard human voices just beyond, and footsteps advancing above his head. He growled, feeling the sound travel through the ground beneath him. The steps faded away. He slept.

  He slept without dreaming, utterly still except for the occasional twitch of his barred tail, and the stir of his breath. The pattern on his body was unique to him, as individual as a fingerprint, his stripes spreading from a central bar along his spine like branches of a blackened tree caught in a forest blaze. His head was marked too, the stripes across his brow unusually thick, giving his face a burned, charred look. They made the white above his eyes and at his throat stand out all the more in the shadowed gloom of his resting place.

  When he woke, the buzzing in his ears was gone. He bared his teeth, yawned, and felt his strength return in an elastic rush.

  He was hundreds of pounds in weight, yet he could jump triple his own height from a standing position and bring down an animal three times his size. Nothing on earth was faster than his strike. He could swim for miles, see in the dark, and drag the carcass of a buffalo through the thickest of forests. Even his tongue was barbed.

  But his greatest strength lay in his ability to think.

  The tiger knew how to use the light and the shifting wind to his advantage, how to plan and execute a hundred different methods of attack. His kind had once ranged across half the planet, living everywhere from watery swamps to arctic wilderness. They adapted, they remembered, they learned.