The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Read online

  “Hear that?” he managed.

  I did not.

  “That way. Roaring.” I listened, and heard nothing, though K_ heard it twice more. I wondered if I was losing my hearing, along with all else. My fingers ached, and my eyes, and my spine and my heart. Exhausted and too old for this.

  He pointed waveringly to the west, and on his certainty, we shifted direction, the forest darker this way, no sun having yet reached this side of the mountain. I led, insisting on lightening K_'s load by taking his weapon from him, though in truth I was keeping myself safe from any chance of his inadvertently firing.

  I'd seen no sign of the tigress in hours. I, who'd tracked the progress of man-eaters by counting single broken blades of grass, by touching bent leaves. I couldn't smell her, couldn't hear her. Wherever she'd slept, there was no sign of it. But ghosts don't sleep.

  K_ stumbled behind me and I heard him retch, a despairing, scavenged sound. I spun, my rifle already cocked, but there was no tigress. No, something piteous instead. The taxidermist had tripped over the remains of the man she'd killed. Shards of ribcage hung with meat, spine crumpled, half his jaw, a few strands of black hair.

  I knelt, unfolding the thin sheet I'd brought. We'd wrap him in it and return him to his family, that they might burn him. As I began to wind the sheet about the bones, though, I glimpsed something. I stood and aimed, squinting into the trees, as still as I could manage. Trembling fingers.

  “We should go,” K_ said, his voice pinched.

  I hissed him quiet. Red. No motion. Tigress, waiting. Tigress watching. My only hope would be to fire as she leapt.

  My vision focused at last, revealing that the red was no tiger, no blood, but a small building, peeling paint. I let out my breath and stood. No smells of humans. No cookfire smoke. Abandoned. High in these mountains for a hunting cabin, but that, I thought, was certainly what it was. In the trees above us, I could see old bones hanging, their meat long gone. A stake pounded far into the earth, a chain, for what creature I did not know. A dog, perhaps, though a very large one. There was a circle worn in the dirt below the stake, a deep, claw-scarred track, which I chose not to examine. Some brave or mad man had lived here in tiger territory, and someone with a wish for oblivion, too.

  I instructed K_ to follow me to the hut. Door closed. Some part of my mind was certain the tiger would fling open the door and stand upright before me, her belly still stained with undrunk milk, the toothmarks of the cubs she'd lost. I kicked the door open.

  And stopped. K_ gasped and then pushed his way past me.

  The exterior of the cabin was wooden, but the interior walls shone. Flattened cans and springs, pendulums and gears, glimmering rocks and iridescent feathers. Rough tools, and some better, nail-hung on racks. Papers nailed up, drawings, writing, but too dark and stained to read. Claws were strung from the ceiling, garlands of teeth decorating the beams.

  Against the far wall, a shape, bulky, striped. I shoved K_ back, aiming my rifle.

  “It's stuffed,” he said authoritatively, and I realized, to my shame, that he was correct. The tiger was motheaten, its eyes replaced with chips of glass, its pelt dull and its pose stiff. “Someone who didn't know the modern techniques. Hadn't studied.”

  There was a bucket filled with rusting wires at my feet, another of white dust, another of black soil. Another filled with red, old red, dried to nothing now, but I knew what it was.

  “A scientist working here,” I said, remembering something of the kind. “Long gone, whomever he was.”

  K_ was elbow deep in bones, piecing together a skeletal structure. Weapons and traps all over the room. Rifles soldered to other rifles. Triple-barreled here, and here, something rusted and still lethal looking, a bayonet-barreled pistol attached to a chain. A hunting cabin, yes, but a strange one, inhabited by both science and old craft. I opened a jar and sniffed at the contents. Local alcohol of some kind, doubtless poisonous.

  What fool had brought this stuffed tiger? I imagined the thing packed up the mountain by reluctant porters years before, the tiger standing on their shoulders, eyes staring at nothing, limbs leaking sawdust. The waste disgusted me, and the light was fading. I saw K_ thoughtfully measuring the poor beast's ear between his fingers, tugging at the ancient leather.

  “We will not be stopping here,” I'd just informed him, when something glittered in a beam of sunset shining through the roof.

  A metal bird. Perched on the stuffed tiger's back. I did not —

  I still do not. Impossible. A plummeting certainty.

  Thirty-two years spent in darkness, and now a blinding and horrible light shines on me.

  Henry. Alive, Henry, and perhaps stricken somewhere on the forest floor, mere feet from me as I stalked his killer?

  If you hear screaming, it is already too late. All one can do is track the man-eater. Henry's the one who taught me that. Was he in the cave where I'd found the cubs? Did he, bleeding, mute, watch as I killed them?

  No. Surely not. My mind can only have lost control, ancient guilt mingling with memory. In my book, I was the one who'd killed all 26 of the man-eaters of Naini Tal. In my book, I killed the tigress that killed him, and I said nothing of how he'd saved me. I couldn't bear to write his name, and so I took his glory. No one knows. Not my wife, unless I've confessed it in my sleep. Not the world. Not the villagers.

  But here I am, writing these words, and Henry. Oh, Henry.

  I held my head in my hands, feeling my skull spreading in my fingers. In a pouch at my waist, I carry my lucky pieces, my own superstitious version of the lockets worn by natives. Tiger bones, one from each tiger I've killed. I've carried them to Kenya, and to America, and everywhere I've gone, they've kept me safe.

  In Henry's house, I opened the pouch and spilled my luck out on the dirt floor. K_ glanced at me, uninterested.

  We found Henry under a coverlet on the metal cot in the corner. Skeleton undamaged, no bones taken, though one shoulder had been shattered and knit badly, the wound of the tigress. His long silver beard still clung to the last scraps of skin. Twenty years dead, longer.

  And there, closed in the jaw of Henry's skeleton, a coal, burned almost away. Ash on the ivory. My mentor did his own last rites here, no river, no hymn, no strength.

  “Did you know him?” K_ asked, and I didn't answer. Why did he never return to Naini Tal? What was Henry doing here?

  We sleep here, in this strange place, and we keep vigil over my friend's bones, though his soul is long departed.

  I twisted the wing of the little metal bird tonight, hoping that it might fly. It opened its beak and sang a single rusting note. Then all was silent.

  18 September, 1950

  The tigress was waiting for us, as I knew she would be. We slept for three hours and rose in darkness this morning, K_ protesting bitterly.

  I didn't want to stalk her any longer. I'd dreamed of Kenya, and of my wife sitting at the kitchen table, her tea in hand. I thought about how I would likely not see her again.

  I didn't expect to survive a tigress this large, to whom I'd already lost my courage once, to whom I'd lost my pride. A ghost made of hunger and air.

  She was out there. The forest wailed her presence. I felt her intentions, her bulk in the trees. I took a small bone from Henry's hand, and placed it in my pouch. I'd burn it, and give him his true funeral, if I made it out from these trees again.

  We walked, watched at every step. I felt her in the woods, moving parallel to us, but it was pointless to aim at nothing. One never heard a tiger if the tiger was planning an attack. One might hear a soft sound, as a tiger departed, having decided not to leap. K_ looked around, uneasy, pale. He felt her too.

  The forest felt brittle, each leaf frozen now, each twig K_ tread on cracking like a shot, and we ascended still higher. At last, something I recognized, a tiger's call, but not that of a tiger.

  Henry's version, a human voice, perfectly mimicking a tiger's roar. I heard him do it hundreds of times. It's nothing one for
gets. I shook my head, trying to dispel the hallucination.

  It was, of course, a tiger calling. A night spent in Henry's company. It was no wonder. Another roar, and this voice was Henry's as well, calling in the tones of a tigress, and a moment later, calling in the voice of a male tiger, and now another, an elderly cat, and a cub.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked K_ and his only response was quick breathing.

  “How many are there?” he asked.

  “Do you hear Henry?” The depth of my uncertainty had overcome me. I was queasy with it.

  “I hear tigers,” he said.

  A flurry of calls, the startling bells of a sambur, like automobiles in traffic, squeezing horns. Tiger here, tiger passing. All in the voice of Henry. It was as though Henry had become the entire forest, and all its occupants.

  I stood still, fighting that old urge, run, curl to protect stomach, meticulously checking my rifle instead. Tiger running, shrieked a peafowl, in Henry's voice.

  Through the trees, I saw red. And more red. More than one tiger. How many? They were not leaping at us, but running for some other reason. A mass of tigers, in step, all moving at the same pace, flowing through the shadows faster than I could watch. This was nothing tigers, who do not hunt in packs, would do.

  At last, I saw her, my old enemy, stepping out of the forest in front of us.

  My rifle was already aimed as she leapt. I fired, but did not come close to hitting her. Her spring took her over our heads, and she landed, softly behind us. K_ shook beside me, and I felt him considering a run.

  “Don't move,” I hissed. “If you move, she'll have you.”

  I scanned the trees for the other tigers, but they were invisible. She opened her jaws and roared to me in Henry's voice and I felt the tears of a madman running down my face.

  Perhaps this was his last gift to me, I thought, this aural hallucination that reminded me what to do when a tiger had gotten this close. Call her closer. He'd taught me the call, and now I made it back to her. I roared at her, at Henry's killer, at this killer who hadn't killed him.

  She stepped toward me, her pelt shining, her eyes golden and glowing, her muscles gathering, and as she launched herself, I fired into her throat, the rifle kicking my shoulder.

  The tigress screamed in Henry's voice again, and threw herself into the trees as though they, and not I, were her murderer. I could see no blood on her pelt, but her madness was that of the wounded. The tree trunk cracked as she bellowed and threw herself at its branches, and slowly it toppled, tigress atop it, her growls quietening now, her motions slower.

  I shot her once more, this time in the skull, just over her left eye, and she made a sound, a raw hissing, something beyond anything animal. I expected her to disappear, for there to be a cloud of smoke left behind, a ghost gone, but she did not. I edged closer, K_ on my heels.

  The tigress looked up suddenly, pupils fully dilated, and I knew that she was dying. How could a ghost die?

  I could smell my own sweat, and a deep, metallic odor too, tiger's blood, I thought, though I'd long since forgotten the smell of it.

  Above, the stars blinked on, one by one, and the bats began to hunt. Insects rattled their shells like shields.

  The tigress’ head dropped slowly onto her paws, and the light went out in her, as a headlamp on a train might go to black when pulled into its end station. There was a sound, a strange sound, which I attributed to bullets against stone, and then she was still.

  “Shaitan,” I said, quietly, a prayer to the devil I'd killed for the second time.

  K_ vibrated behind me. “Is it dead?”

  “A man-eater for your museum,” I told him, overcome by the sadness I always feel when I kill something large as her, and with this sadness, something more, something darker. Confusion.

  “You must know she's not for a museum, old man,” K_ told me, his voice returning, more confident than it had been before. “A museum wouldn't pay for something like this.”

  I looked at him.

  “Everyone wants a tiger,” he said. “Everyone wants a man-eater certified by someone like you.”

  “Who's this tiger for?” I knew the answer already.

  “A collector. Already has a table made of elephant legs.”

  K_'s wry laugh sounded to me like something from a moving picture, overheard from far down the street, through walls and bodies. Hollow and cluttered, the laughter of something made of less than nothing. My own laughter had, on occasion, sounded the same.

  He took his flask from his pocket, sipped, and offered it to me. I refused.

  “Don't misunderstand me,” he said, kneeling to unpack his case. “I read your book. That's why I do this. I show the world the things they want to see, but don't want to travel to. It's conservation, isn't it? People like that, here, they'd ruin things. You, though, you've killed what? Two hundred tigers? You know what you're doing.”

  With effort, he rolled the man-eater onto her back, and removed a scalpel from his pack.

  “If I don't gut her soon, the skin'll spoil,” he said, and then bent over the tigress, parting the fur on her chest.

  “An old bullet wound.” He jabbed her left shoulder, but I didn't look. I knew the wound. “There's another scar here,” he said. “As old as the other.”

  He ran his finger down the man-eater's pelt, from chest to abdomen. I could scarcely keep myself from tearing the scalpel from his hand. I felt as though she was the only one on earth who'd known my past. I didn't dare think of how she could be here at all, thirty-two years later, did not dare imagine what this all might mean, for it was her. I knew her face, her tracks. It was her. A dead, mortal tigress.

  “Peculiar,” K_ muttered, cutting into the scar. An echoing scratch. Scalpel on bullet, I thought.

  “What in Christ is this?” K_ whispered.

  I wasn't looking at him, nor at the tigress. I was focused into the distance, imagining Kenya, when he shook my shoulder. I turned my head, reluctant to see what he'd done.

  A gleam, straight down the center of the tigress’ body. K_ peeled back the flesh on either side of the incision.

  There was no blood. No. Only skin, and beneath the skin, metal.

  K_ began tearing at the pelt, pulling it away from the structure beneath, breathing through his mouth.

  “What is it?” he asked, looking suddenly, frantically up at me. “Is it a prank?”

  I couldn't speak.

  Henry, kneeling with a tin can and a watch spring. Henry, wounded, climbing down into that ravine to retrieve her body. Skinning her, hauling her back up the mountain, and bringing her back to life. He'd made a new kind of tiger, one that could resist hunters and poachers. One that could resist me.

  K_'s hands peeled the flesh back still further. I could see solder marks, where seams had been joined.

  “The hide isn't dry. How did he get it to heal? What did he use? How does it move?”

  He attempted haphazardly to slice into the tigress’ chest, denting the metal. He pulled up the tigress’ eyelid, his fingernail tapping at her pupil. Glass. I looked at her feet. The strange marks I'd seen in the village had not been made by claws. Henry had given her knives, forged into the shape of talons.

  I felt myself half-smiling, an echo of the old enchantment, Henry's genius, Henry as a shikari.

  “Whatever he's done, however he's done it,” K_ said, his voice scarcely under control, wobbling with joy, “We'll lead an expedition back here. Photographers. Film cameras.”

  He jabbed the scalpel into a seam between the metal pieces, levering at it. A dark fluid leaked out. Blood? Not blood? Henry never explained himself. I still had K_'s rifle. I swung it slowly around to the front. When he heard the click, he looked up, entirely startled.

  “What are you doing?”

  I fired into K_'s face, approximating the angle he himself would have taken had he stumbled over his own weapon in the forest, drunk on gin, and a fool. I left him where he lay, skull exposed. I used my handkerchief t
o polish his rifle and put it into his own hands. Took his scalpel.

  Anyone who found K_'s body would imagine he'd been attacked by a tiger, and inadvertently shot himself in the scuffle.

  I chopped down two saplings, lashed the tigress to them with my machan ropes, and began a laborious drag. I'd drop her into that ravine. Everything was clear to me now. If the world learned of this tiger, they'd cut down the forests to find more like her, though surely there were no more. This would've taken Henry years to accomplish, however it was he'd done it. Magic. Gears.

  Kumaon would be overrun. All the remaining living tigers would be taken, shot, opened like stuffed toys, left to dry in the sun, unused, unburied.

  I hauled her through the trees, straining at her great weight, squinting toward the earliest light, toward the place I remembered from 1918. If I threw her off the cliffs here, she would not be found. Dead, I'd tell the villagers, and fallen, just as I'd told them before. My fingers were blue with cold despite the effort of hauling her, and my breath came sharply, each gasp painful.

  At last, I found the place, and panting, unlashed her. My heart, by this juncture, was pounding inside me like something independent of my body, a metal bird flying for no reason other than someone else's will.

  I pushed the tigress over the edge. I watched her fall for the second time, her golden face and fur, her gleaming, opened breast. I was not watching my footing. Is it any wonder I fell? Not from the cliff, as I might deserve, but over a small rise, and into a clearing, flat rock beneath me.

  Hours have passed. I cannot stand. It's cold now, and the light fades again. My left leg, in my trousers, is bent in such a way that I know it would be useless to attempt to place it back in line. I've bled into the ice, and it shines like a glass ruby on an elephant's forehead.

  I have this journal, and my pencil, and I write for comfort. What else do I have, after all these years wandering in the wilderness? Tomorrow, I'll burn these words. I write only to tell myself what happened, not to place the story into the world.