The Time Traveller and the Tiger

by Tania Unsworth

  Now the tiger rose and shook himself, and paced to the mouth of the nullah, every fibre in his body alive to the slightest movement, each step anticipating the one to follow. His eyes burned liquid gold. From the instant of waking, a single thought had filled his mind, stronger than fear, more implacable than hunger.

  Rage.

  His kind no longer roamed freely. Now their heads were stuck on walls, and their bodies lay skinned and stuffed and pickled. Even their bones were powdered and sold by the gram. A hundred years of murder had shrunk the tiger’s world to a fraction of its former glory.

  Yet the tiger had no way of knowing this. The cause of his rage was simpler, and much closer to home. His kingdom had been invaded. It was a ruined palace in the mountains, some fifty miles to the north and miles upriver. It had been abandoned for many years, its marble colonnades and graceful arches left for the forest to devour. But its high elevation provided excellent vantage, and there was shade and cover for the tiger among the tumbled columns, a reliable supply of water in the ancient stone cistern.

  This was the place from which he’d been driven; sent tumbling head over tail in humiliation. The place where he was master.

  It could not be tolerated.

  The tiger skirted the waterhole, his body a black-slashed rectangle of muscle, his great, scorched head swinging from side to side as he walked. Then, moving with extraordinary power and sense of purpose, he disappeared into the trees on the far side.

  The real Kelsie Corvette would not be in this situation, Elsie thought, as she plodded along, her arms grazed by thorns and itchy with insect bites. The real Kelsie Corvette would have everything under control, because the real Kelsie Corvette would not have gone time travelling in an old jumper and T-shirt with one measly protein bar in the turn-up of her jeans.

  She would have worn one of those jackets with a lot of pockets. And each pocket would have had something useful in it. Like insect repellent, Elsie decided, scratching her elbow frantically. And binoculars, and a nifty little battery-operated fan…

  She glanced anxiously at John. The back of his shirt was so damp with sweat she could see his shoulder blades. He was walking stiffly, his head down.

  ‘Are you sure we’re… going in the right direction?’ she asked. It had been nearly two hours since they’d left the waterhole and started to follow the gully from above. Almost at once, they’d found themselves in an area so thick with the impenetrable, crisscrossing stalks of dead bamboo that they’d been forced to make a wide detour. John claimed he still knew exactly where the gully was, but after skirting a meadow dotted with sand-coloured termite mounds, scrambling up a rocky slope and making their way through at least a mile of trees, Elsie wasn’t confident that this was still the case.

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ John said, not looking up.

  ‘Okay,’ Elsie said.

  She had seen many more langur monkeys, as well as groups of deer with white spotted backs which John said were called chital, and a stork wading in a muddy pool. Now she stopped abruptly in front of a huge web spun between the trees. Something the size of her fist was sitting right in the middle.

  ‘Giant wood spider,’ John said in a cross voice. ‘Perfectly harmless. You don’t have to be a baby about it.’

  One good thing about being short, Elsie decided with a gulp; at least she could walk underneath enormous spider webs without getting caught…

  But the real Kelsie Corvette would not be thinking this. She would’ve sorted everything out and be back eating breakfast with Great-Uncle John by now. Elsie hadn’t sorted anything out. Yet she hadn’t completely failed either. She’d managed to stop John from shooting anything other than his own leg, and she was still keeping up with him, despite being hot and itchy and tired.

  Elsie didn’t know how she’d found herself seventy-four years in the past, but perhaps there was a reason for it. Perhaps she’d been sent. On a kind of mission. To save the tiger. Or save John. Or save both of them. Which meant once the mission was accomplished, she’d be sent back again. That was how it worked, wasn’t it? Elsie very much wanted to believe this was true, because the alternative was terrible. If her arrival in 1946 was nothing but a random accident, she might never get back. She would have to live for seventy-four whole years just to catch up to her own time again.

  She’d be so old, Elsie thought, that by then she’d probably be dead.

  ‘Are you sure we’re going in the right direction?’

  ‘I said so, didn’t I?’

  He stopped and peered at the sun. ‘It’s this way,’ he announced, plunging off to his right.

  ‘Okay.’

  All she had to do, Elsie thought, was stick with John until he stopped following the tiger, and then she’d be able to go back to where she came from. In the meantime, she cheered herself up by imagining everything in Kelsie Corvette’s jacket pockets.

  A penknife with at least twenty different blades and tools, a pair of sunglasses, a first aid kit, a guide to the wild animals of India, a GPS device…

  Would a GPS device work in 1946? Elsie wasn’t sure, although it seemed unlikely. She had a vague idea you needed satellites for GPS. Well, if she didn’t manage to get back to her own time, at least she’d get rich and famous by inventing all the things she knew were in the future. Like satellites and the internet, and video games and microwave ovens, and those chairs that massaged your back, although they were kind of uncomfortable, as well as being creepy…

  But you couldn’t invent something from the future unless you knew how it actually worked in the first place. Elsie had no idea how a light switch operated, let alone the internet. It probably wouldn’t make any difference that she’d come from the future, she thought sadly. She’d have to wait for all the interesting stuff to happen, along with everyone else.

  She might have travelled to the year 1946, but she was still the same person who’d found the words, ‘Cell’ is spelled with a c NOT an s! written at the top of her latest science homework.

  Meanwhile, she had another, far more urgent problem.

  ‘I need to stop for a minute,’ she told John.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I have to go behind a tree…’

  ‘Oh,’ John said, going red again.

  Kelsie Corvette would definitely have had a roll of toilet paper in one of her pockets, Elsie thought, rather wretchedly. Although she’d probably not have needed it in the first place. Going to the toilet was not something main characters did, as a general rule.

  She emerged from behind the tree, feeling embarrassed.

  ‘It’s okay, you can turn around now,’ she told John.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I just said so, didn’t I?’

  They carried on, although before long, Elsie stopped once again.

  ‘Do those termite mounds look familiar?’ she asked. ‘Don’t they look like the same—’

  ‘All termite mounds look the same,’ John snapped. ‘They’re mounds. All right?’

  Elsie didn’t want to argue the point, but she couldn’t help noticing that the hill to their left looked suspiciously familiar too. And barely five minutes later, there could be no doubt.

  They were back at the waterhole, right where they’d started.

  Elsie was not the sort of person who ever said, ‘I told you so’. And if she had been, the look of total defeat on John’s face would have stopped her. He sat down on a rock, his knees about his ears, his rifle trailing in the dust.

  ‘At least we can fill your canister,’ Elsie said.

  ‘Can’t,’ John said, his head low. ‘It’ll make you sick as a dog. Water’s only good if it’s flowing, like a stream.’

  ‘Well, we can splash our faces, can’t we? That’s better than nothing.’

  Elsie went to the edge and looked at the green, soupy water. She was about to lean down and cautiously dip her fingers, when something caught her eye. A shape in the muddy gra
vel at her feet. She stepped back, still staring.

  ‘It’s another print,’ she told John.

  He shrugged wearily.

  ‘Actually, it’s more than one print,’ Elsie said, her hands suddenly clammy. She rubbed them on her jeans. ‘I really think you need to look at this…’

  When John saw what she was pointing at, his eyes widened.

  ‘That’s the tiger’s print, isn’t it?’ Elsie said. ‘And that other print, that’s one of ours.’

  ‘It’s mine,’ John said.

  ‘The tiger was here before us,’ Elsie said. ‘We saw its prints, so how come…’

  She didn’t need to finish the question. She could tell from John’s face that he knew exactly what she was going to say.

  So how come the tiger’s prints are right on top of ours?

  ‘It must have doubled back,’ John said. ‘Got behind us.’

  ‘Do you think it could be… following us?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ John said, his knuckles white on the strap of his gun. ‘I don’t know.’

  At once, Elsie realised an obvious, yet terrifying truth; it is one thing to be hunting a tiger, quite another when a tiger is hunting you.

  She had seen a tiger in a zoo once. It was walking along a path that ran down the side of its enclosure, next to the fence. It must have walked that path ten thousand times before, because the grass was completely worn away. When it got to the end, it turned and came back down again, heading directly towards Elsie at the other side, pacing slowly, as if it carried the boredom of the whole world on its tawny shoulders. It reached the edge of the fence and turned once more, moving like water around a bend in a river.

  Elsie had known it would turn. There was nowhere else for it to go. A steel fence and a thick sheet of glass stood between her and the tiger. But for a split-second, as she gazed at that massive form, it seemed as if the opposite would happen. That neither fence nor glass, nor any power on earth could stand in the tiger’s way. It would simply keep coming; terrible and unstoppable.

  As though it belonged to a world beyond all rules.

  Elsie stared at John, her heart shrivelling to a tiny knot in her chest.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ she whispered.

  He swallowed, his throat contracting.

  ‘We have to go back,’ Elsie said. ‘We have to go back now.’

  He nodded.

  ‘At least we know the way,’ Elsie said, still whispering. ‘All we have to do is retrace our steps.’

  He nodded again, then seemed to collect himself. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s no use losing our heads and simply charging off. We have to think. What direction is the wind coming from?’

  Elsie tried to concentrate.

  ‘I don’t think it’s coming from anywhere,’ she said at last. ‘It’s just still.’

  ‘It can’t be,’ John said. ‘The air’s always moving a bit.’ He licked the tip of his finger and held it up uncertainly.

  ‘Mandeep told me how tigers hunt. They keep upwind.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So their prey doesn’t catch their scent. Tigers usually attack from behind, so the worst thing you can do is walk in the direction the wind is coming from.’

  ‘Why not walk in the opposite direction, then?’

  ‘Because the tiger could circle around and wait to ambush you downwind. If that happened, you’d meet it head on.’

  ‘So what are you meant to do?’ Elsie’s mouth had gone so dry that it was hard to get the words out.

  ‘Our best bet is to keep the wind either to the right or the left of us,’ John said, nodding rapidly as if trying to convince himself. ‘Right now, I’m pretty sure it’s coming from over there, so we can’t take the direct route back home. We’ll have to zigzag a bit.’

  ‘If we do that, will the tiger give up?’

  ‘Of course not,’ John said. ‘But it’ll have to attack from the side.’

  ‘What difference will that make?’

  John slid the rifle off his shoulder and held it ready. ‘We’ll have a sporting chance of seeing it coming,’ he said.

  Elsie wasn’t exactly sure what a ‘sporting chance’ consisted of, but whatever it was, it didn’t sound nearly enough.

  At least he didn’t say ‘no chance at all’, she thought. But it was useless. For once, even she couldn’t make the best of it. She took off her hat and tried to wipe her clammy forehead. John said the tiger was a man-eater. He would have shot it in the clearing, only she’d stopped him. And now the tiger was hunting them. Elsie felt sick. She should have known. You weren’t meant to change the past. That was the first rule of time travel. You never knew the trouble you might cause.

  ‘Ready to go?’ John said.

  Elsie squeezed her eyes shut for a second, as if trying to will herself seventy-four years and several thousand miles away. Then she replaced the solar topee and took a deep breath.

  ‘I’m ready.’

  Mandeep sat on top of a hill eating the last of the chapatis he’d brought from home and observing the movements of three dhole – wild dogs – in the meadow below. After weighing up the pros and cons, he had finally decided that if he could choose to be any animal in the forest, he would be a dhole. There was simply nothing about them he didn’t admire. Their red coats and neat, high-stepping gait, their playfulness and discipline. The way they whistled to each other, working in formation, loyal unto death to their pack…

  He finished eating and shook his bag. Two tiny twists of paper fell out along with the chapati crumbs. Firecrackers. They must have been lying in the bottom of the bag ever since Diwali, a month ago. Mandeep smiled as he tucked them into the pocket of his jacket, remembering the sweets and the flickering candles, the boom and stutter of fireworks above the town, his four-year-old sister, beside herself with excitement, running in little circles, screaming and grinning and covering her ears all at the same time.

  A beetle appeared on a rock beside him, trundling slowly over the pitted surface. Mandeep bent his head for a better look. He was fond of beetles. There were so many kinds, all different shapes and sizes and colours, from huge, horned creatures lumbering along, to specks no bigger than a grain of rice. This one was about the size and shape of an almond, with black legs and a green iridescent shell, bright as a jewel.

  Mandeep placed his hand and let the beetle walk across the back of it. Its wing cases were like the doors of a tiny, richly crafted box, he thought. A box beautiful enough to hold a treasure. He watched it crawl over one hand and then the other, trying not to think of how angry his father must be at his long absence. There was bound to be trouble when he got home.

  Something glinted in the corner of his eye. Mandeep lifted his gaze across the meadow to the line of trees on the far side. The glint came again. He nudged the beetle off his hand and stood up.

  A figure was moving among the shadows of the trees. It was the hunter. Mandeep knew because the glint was coming from his glasses, catching the light when he turned his head.

  He was walking slowly, yet purposefully. Hunting, Mandeep thought. He must have left his guide and set off alone. What was he after? Not the leopard, that was long gone. Something else, then. Something big. A trophy to make him feel his outing hadn’t been a complete failure.

  Mandeep didn’t think the hunter was the kind of person who liked to come back empty-handed.

  He reached for his bag and slung it over his shoulder. Then, acting on impulse, he began making his way down the hill, taking care to keep out of sight as he followed the man below.

  The terrible thing about being tracked by a tiger, Elsie thought, was how it made you want to run and freeze at exactly the same time. She settled on taking short, pattering steps that felt as if she was hurrying, even though she wasn’t moving very fast at all. Every few paces, she stumbled against a root or tuft of grass, although she didn’t dare to look down to see where she was going. She was too busy glancing left and right, her attention riveted on every twitching lea
f and shadow. Her neck prickled. She wished her eyes could swivel like a lizard’s, so she could look to the rear as well as to the side.

  They had set off at a diagonal from the route home, John pausing every few minutes to test the air. He walked ahead of her, taking the lead to give him a better chance of a clear shot if the tiger appeared. After about a quarter of a mile, they entered a thick band of trees. The sun flickered through the trunks, making Elsie blink and rub her eyes.

  ‘Shouldn’t we stay out in the open?’ she said, her voice trembling slightly.

  John didn’t answer.

  They carried on, passing beneath huge banyan trees that blocked the light. Their branches were so interlocked and tangled that it was impossible to tell where one tree ended and another began. But the strangest things about them were the roots growing from the branches, descending to the earth in hundreds of long, snaky columns.

  It looked as if the trees were trying to pull themselves out of the ground, Elsie thought. She almost wished they would. If she had to choose between being chased by a gigantic, runaway tree or a tiger, she’d take the tree. At least she’d be able to see it coming.

  ‘John?’ she whispered.

  He stopped and tested the air, his body rigid. Then he turned sharply, making for a break in the trees.

  Elsie felt certain he had no idea what he was doing, but she decided to say nothing. It helped to have someone in control of the situation, even if they were only pretending to be. The alternative was panic.

  They were out of the trees, among low palm bushes, the ground sloping slightly. Elsie’s skin was almost raw from the chafing of her jeans, although she realised she could barely feel it. She didn’t feel tired any longer either. Or even thirsty. She was far too frightened for that.

  John must be feeling the same way. He’d been limping badly during their futile trek from the waterhole and back, but now he was moving as if there was nothing wrong with his leg at all.