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Game

  15 September, 1950 Nightfall.

  I write this entry from my tent in Naini Tal, a village in the Kumaon Province of Northern India, shadowed by the snow-tipped Himalayas. I arrived here at 1300 hours, as the sun steamed the dew out of the forest like a laundress pressing an iron on a damp shirt. The whole place hissed, and I closed my eyes to inhale the cypress and cookfire smoke. Much has changed in my old hunting grounds, but were I to depend on my sense of smell alone, it would be as though I'd traveled backward thirty-two years.

  A simple glance, however, reminds me of the landslip passage of time. Three years ago, the country dissolved its colonial status and departed from the reign of George VI. The time of the hunter is done, though I warrant that there is still a place for a man such as myself.

  The children I met here in 1918 are now grandparents, but to them, I'm not the old man who sits before them. I'm an earlier incarnation, a warrior from a picture book, brought here at their request, a man with mystical powers over their enemy. They need me now, here in Naini Tal. I am their last resort.

  My journey originated in Delhi, some four hundred rattling kilometers away. My bones ache despite the care of my porters, and of my colleague, the estimable Dr. K_, but when the Kumaoni greeted me this afternoon, I felt my heart rise to meet my title.

  “Shikari,” they cried, all of them in unison. “Welcome, Shikari!”

  Big game hunter. Usually reserved for the native men. For my kills, covered in international newspapers, my kills which inspired other kills, I was long ago granted an exception.

  My old partner Henry, also a Shikari, and native to the Kumaon province, knew this place better than I ever could, but even I can see the changes. The trees were thicker the last time I was here, and the huts were roofed in woven branches rather than tin. Time has not been kind to this place, nor to me. The village now shines bright as a grub dug up slick and blind from beneath a rock, and another addition, a high fence made from a combination of thorn bushes and barbed wire, encircles it.

  No one seems yet to have tunneled into the mountains, a mercy, nor taken their tops, but roads have been installed everywhere, and the locally manufactured automobiles known as the Baby Hindustan backfire and sputter their way toward the sky. With Henry, thirty-two years ago, I watched hawks wheeling high above these mountains, but now the air is streaked with machines. I notice a subtle depletion of birdsong. As likely caused by the creatures I come to hunt as by machinery, I know, but I imagine the tragedies to come in the near future, ornithologists aiming their glasses at the heavens in order to identify different species of aircraft.

  Given these observations, I will note here that it is immediately clear what has spurred the tigers to their current behavior. Less than a century ago, the cats had limitless forest and limitless game. Now the wild is striated with roads and mines, and armed villagers have beaten the remaining tigers from Nepal into these hills, calling them all man-eaters. Every man and boy in the region has a weapon, a museum's worth of defenses, rusty swords and axes to rifles, but shooting to kill is a skill that must be learnt. Wounding is easier. A wounded tiger is a hungry tiger. Here in Naini Tal, trouble has been brought into town, all in an attempt to keep trouble in the trees. It is an old story.

  Untwisting wire to enter through the gate today, I experienced a tremor in my thigh, no doubt caused by the climb, as unlike many men my age, I keep myself in fine form. A porter brought me the customary dish of metallic tea, lightened with buffalo milk and copiously sweetened with jaggery. Even as I sipped it, though, my cup chattered. An involuntary motion in my fingers, like that of a treetop in a fine breeze.

  I've been softened by civilization, I admit it. It's been years since I last participated in this line of work, years I've spent writing and lecturing, years of domestic comfort in a house in Kenya, trees of my own, a bed, a wife. As I write this, I'm thinking of my wife's hair, falling straight and black to her knees. Evenings, she sits before me on the floor, and I wrap her tresses round my hands, succumbing, greedy as a nectar-guzzling bat, to this late-life pleasure. I think of how the strands feel running over my fingers, delicate, but when braided together they are strong enough to strangle a man.

  Before her, I'd never thought of marriage. All my previous vows were to the creatures I hunted. I've done a good deal of seeing the world at grass level, my universe filtered through golden eyes, my world made of the pug marks of tigers, the tracks of ghooral, the mountain goats of this region, and the creamy camouflaged spots of the chital hind, my ears attuned to the barking of the kakar deer, and the hornlike belling of the sambur, to the chittering of monkeys and the churr of the nightjar. Before I met my wife, I'd never imagined anything of the world through the eyes of another human.

  She's angry with me now. She doesn't want me hunting. She certainly doesn't want me hunting here. As I left our house, she stood in the doorway and shouted: “Old men need not go hunting for tigers! Tigers are already hunting for them!”

  She's wrong about that. I'm equal to this, and Dr. Andrew K_, my taxidermist colleague, is beside himself with excitement. This afternoon, he sat beside me on a stump near the cookfire, knees bouncing, his uniform crisply ironed and starched by his own wife back in New York City. I'd promised him a hunt. He'd read in his boyhood my accounts of the Monsters of the Mountains who'd dragged entire villages into the darkness, leaving only shards of bone behind for the poor Hindu funerary rites that required something to burn.

  In certain cases, depending on how long the cat had uninterrupted possession of the dead, there'd be nothing left, the man-eater having devoured the entirety: skin and bones and bloodied clothing. On those occasions, I sometimes removed a fragment of ivory from my own baggage and presented it to the bereaved for burning.

  My wife would say that with my substitutions, I've sent elephants to the afterlife, along with rhinoceroses and whales. That I've populated the sky with things that do not belong there. Therefore, I do not tell her. I consider myself to have been, at some moments in my time as a shikari, a minister of mercy. I spent my career in these forests. I have my own rules of conduct.

  K_, in contrast, has, according to the vitae he supplied me, spent the bulk of his own career in the bowels of New York City's Natural History Museum, his hands coated in glue, sinew and fragments of stretched skin, refitting the dead for display to the living. Having begged of his institution a paid procurement trip to India, he quivers in anticipation.

  Naini Tal's man-eater will be taken to Dr. K_'s museum and displayed there as a conservationary tale. The teeth and body will be examined for wounds caused by hunters. No tiger turns man-eater of its own instincts. We are not its natural prey. For one such as myself, who has long struggled to reconcile a history of violence with the world's shrinking spectrum of carnivores, the offer of any redemption was too tempting to resist.

  Now that we are here in Naini Tal, however, I look at K_, at his too-gleaming weapon, and at his tapping fingers, with no small degree of suspicion. There is something of the town-raised boy visiting the country in him. Something of the tourist. He carries sharp implements, chocolate bars, and gin in his case. I earlier apprehended a small transistor radio in his belongings, about which he hedged. In case of emergency, he insisted, but I forced him to relinquish it. I'm certainly not convinced he should be armed. The nervous man with his finger on the trigger is as likely to shoot the hunter as the prey, but a man without a rifle will likely need to be defended from the man-eater, given any proximity.

  I have less tolerance than I once did. Since Henry's death, I've hunted alone.

  Upon arrival, we were given a feast of roasted ghooral spiced with the local peppers, and warm cola coddled over rough roads from the city, the bottle recognizable even in the dark. I interviewed the villagers about their experiences of the man-eater, and they answered me vigorously. At first, the Kumaoni tried churchgoing, petitioning Christ and country, but prayer is an inefficient weapon, and the people in these mountains are finished w
ith begging for miracles. Something is stalking them, and they mean to have its head.

  There've been sounds in the forests, the villagers tell me, phantom noises of devils. Gunfire, and roars, but they swear no one from Naini Tal hunts tigers. I believe them. It is no longer in fashion, my profession, that of the skilled and specific tracker, that of the shikari. These hunters will be poachers. Everywhere now. Every forest, every jungle, the world over. Thieves of tigers and elephants, leopards and monkeys. Recently, an acquaintance of mine saw a tiger in the back seat of a car rattling through Delhi, the cat so recently slaughtered that blood was still seeping out, leaving a trail behind the sedan.

  Pillbox hats made of wildcats and leopard skin capes over shocking pink taffeta dresses have lately appeared in Vogue Magazine, igniting a craze for fur. Couture demands man-eaters, and in truth, man-eater is no longer a reason to kill a tiger. Tiger is a reason to kill a tiger.

  Everyone goes into the forests now, and a man with my history is every man on earth, or so you might believe if you sat down at a barcounter in Delhi and listened to men tall-telling about tigers. Pith helmets and Martini rifles. Waxed cotton tents. Triumphs.

  I was, therefore, quite surprised to be personally summoned last month to Naini Tal, the request relayed first by the local version of the cooee, shouted village to village, and then by runner, at last arriving to me by phonecall, the villager's petition read aloud to me over the wires.

  Dearest Gentleman,

  We the public beg your kindly doing needful. In this vicinity, which is well known to you, and which has long suffered from famously troubles with tigers, we beg your help in hunting this demon that has turned man-eater since June of five years past. We venture and invite you, shikari, to shoot this demon, and save us from calamity, for she is no tiger, but an evil spirit, and no one of all the men who have tried to kill her has got near her heart. Please tell us of your arrival, and we will meet you with a cart to bring you to our forest.

  I did not need to consider. I'd been haunted by this place, this village, these mountains long enough.

  I've never ceased scanning the news for Naini Tal, even from afar. They've suffered more from man-eaters than other similarly situated villages, or so it seems to me, though I am possibly biased toward that perspective. Naini Tal and Pali, higher up the mountain, have long been plagued by a stream of bloodthirsting strangers walking out from the woods at night. That the village still exists is surprising. Superstition might long ago have caused the citizens to depart, pragmatic, their belongings on their backs. Who, after all, would choose to live in a place claimed by tigers?

  From Kenya, I read of this man-eater's five year reign, a factory owner on an exploratory hunt being her most recent victim. The villagers showed me a list with some eight dozen names, the missing and the dead, and for every lost person, there is a story.

  Initially, the tiger attacked only men, and those armed, typically game hunters, particularly those who'd come in from outside Naini Tal. Not two weeks ago, however, a young woman, just sixteen, was taken by the man-eater at midday as she gathered firewood, scarcely out of sight of her friends. Her silk sari was left draped on rocks, a trail of blood going up the mountain, and her hair spider-webbed from the bushes. That was when the villagers began counting their coins and mold-velveted paper money, begging their wives and mothers-in-laws for household funds that'd been secreted away, smashing their jars and tithing their tobacco rations.

  The men here are gleeful at my presence. I declined a fee, unseemly for a man in my position, though they do not know my reasons. This man, ministering to this village. There is no pay for that. They saved their money for me despite my protestations, and brought it out to show. I complimented them on their hoard, and then ate heartily. In my early days as a hunter, I once found myself faint before a black leopard, having, due to gastrointestinal distress, eaten almost nothing for several days. Tonight, I noticed K_ pushing his meat around his plate, and admonished him. He took a tiny bite, and swallowed abruptly and unhappily.

  As darkness fell, I heard the call of a cat.

  “It is a shaitan hunts here, shikari,” one of the men said.

  I listened to the tiger call, wondering at the sound of the roars, a scraping sharpened edge to them that I'd somehow forgotten, and I felt the familiar feeling in my stomach. It's an instinct I've long denied, the urge to curl myself into a protective position, and I suddenly found myself nearly not denying it. I am, suddenly, seventy-one years old. My father died at sixty, in his bed.

  “The shaitan welcomes you home,” said another man, and smiled at me, a kindly smile, even for the words he said.

  The devil welcomes you home.

  I stood and stretched, hearing my left shoulder crack, the bones themselves remembering my encounter with that leopard. My skin, as is true of any hunter who has truly hunted, is a Frankenstein's monster of a canvas, stitched together first with black thread, and now with scars, old wounds packed with chewed leaves, five claw marks stretching from right clavicle to left pubis, the mark of the Widower of Champawat, dead and gone these twenty years. Not the smallest tiger, and not the largest, but one who got close enough that I could see into his throat and feel his heartbeat as he savaged me. I felt that heart stop as I shot him. His shoulder, upon examination, housed an old bullet, suppurating, and his right front arm was darted with porcupine quills. Yellowed, soapy flesh beneath the balding pelt, a withered limb, and thirty-six quills, fat as pencils, broken off at the level of the skin.

  I have never blamed him.

  “Shall we?” I said.

  K_ radiated unease. “It's nearly dark,” he replied.

  I gave him the look that said dark is how this is done, clapped him on the back once, and then walked away from the firelight.

  He needn't have worried. We were patrolling the perimeter for signs, but I did not intend to go deep into the trees. The cruelty of this commission was that it was necessary to await an attack. The tiger would have long since scented the roasting ghooral, and concluded that there'd be heavy sleep in the village. The man-eater would come to us.

  The forest lay before us, black and singing. A hunter listens, and if a hunter does not, then he will not stay a hunter long. Any and all of the animals here will tell tales of a tiger. They'll explain where the cat is, whether it is still or in motion, how fast it moves.

  Though I did not say it to K_, though I would not admit it to anyone save these pages, mute as they are, I too hesitated to walk back into those trees tonight. The last time I entered this forest, I was carried out on a stretcher, mute with loss, the children surrounding me, my hands bloody. The last time I came down that mountain, I vowed I would not go up it again.

  After that kill, there was nothing left to bury, nothing left to burn.

  The birds are silent now, as I write these lines, and I feel observed. We've returned to our tents to wait for screams.

  16 September, 1950 Dawn.

  I woke three hours ago, blurred by nightmares, having been dreamstalking a man-eater, not the present tiger, but the one from 1918.

  With me in my dream was Henry, his elbow in tattered cotton, his silvered beard and long hair, his skin a dark contrast to the yellowed whites of his eyes. I looked over at him once, and saw him open his mouth, but his lips moved, and I heard nothing.

  The screams, when they came, seemed a part of the same dream. They were not. At 4:13 this morning, a young man of twenty-three was taken from his hut, and dragged through the center of town. A villager shot at the man-eater, and swears he hit her chest, but she leapt with her victim over the briars and barbed wire, twenty-five feet, a seemingly impossible height, and returned to the forest. Pitiful scraps of the man's clothing hang from the highest thorns.

  Dulled by exhaustion from yesterday's travels, by the time I was on my feet and out into the main area, it was too late. In truth, I need not excuse my speed. If one hears screaming, rescue is already impossible. Those left behind can only hope that dea
th will be quick. There's no possibility of pursuing a victim into the dark, not when they've bled so much that the dust is red mud, and the man's wife, having woken to the feel of something heavy and vividly alive brushing past her bed, is already keening in her doorway.

  For twenty seven minutes after the attack, we listened to the tigress departing through the trees, heralded by a sound like a kennel of dogs readying for a feeding, though it was something quite different, the kakar barking their alarm, tiger passing here, tiger coming.

  The man-eater scratched her victim's door, and the scores in the wood are deep. I showed them to K_, who examined them with interest. There's a slight odor of alcohol drifting about the man this morning, that and a cloying floral cologne, for which I severely remonstrated him. He purged it with a gin-soaked handkerchief. Gin is better than lilies.

  The tigress left pug marks in the dirt, and with them, I'll be able to identify her with certainty. K_ dutifully cast them in plaster of Paris, and annotated his drawings with measurements. There is no blood trail. It is often the case that a tiger one shoots to kill, even as the bullet seems to have connected, remains strangely unwounded. This is the way things are here, even, in some cases, for a shikari.

  K_ has arrived with the cast and his rudimentary drawing, and I will examine them, taking notes here, as part of this entry.

  Size: Extremely large, at least ten feet over curves, a nearly unprecedented size for a female, and her paws are strikingly unsplayed, unusual in a tiger so immense. Her claws are so sharp as to suggest daggers.

  Age: She is, by her prints, young, though her intelligence would indicate experience. This is a tigress who's been terrorizing the villages in this region for over five years, a beast who certainly must at some point have been at least superficially wounded.

  Tracks: The symmetry of her tracks shows almost no sign of such wounding. On her left front paw, there is an old scar across the pad.

  A clean gash that clearly went deep. Can this —