The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  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 death will be quick. There’s no possibility of p
ursuing 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—

  *Break in text*

  Later. The shape of the scar stopped me as I sat looking at the marks by torchlight. It stops me now that K_ has left, and I sit alone in my tent again. I can’t—

  After I came down from these mountains, I published a partial account of my exploits. There were photographs of my grin on newspaper front pages, a certain level of celebrity, a short film in which I demonstrated my stalking technique. I had no notion of what was coming for me, of the way this forest would stay with me. I had no idea.

  After that film was screened, I borrowed a woman’s fountain pen to autograph a photograph for her, and ink leaked onto the pad of my thumb. Without care for observers, for cameras, she took my thumb into her mouth and licked it clean, her tongue turning sepia.

  “There,” she said, when she was finished, still holding my hand, looking up and directly into my eyes. “Now you won’t leave marks on me.”

  I took her to the coast. We fucked with the lanterns lit, bright enough that all the moths in miles flew to press their bodies against our tent. One night she ran into the dark, and I stumbled after her, calling her name, and waiting for her to show herself. I was tired of tracking.

  “You might have found me by my footprints,” she said, stepping out of the night, raising one foot to show me the scar on the right arch. “I stepped on a waterglass years ago, and didn’t get it stitched. Look at that mark. Beautiful, isn’t it?” I took her foot in my hand, and then stopped. The mark was a mark I knew.

  She looked at me. Her eyes were not yellow, no. She did not change into anything but what she was, a beautiful woman with a broken footprint.

  “You’ll never forget me now,” she said, and her tone was not quite playful. “Did you think you could? But you’ll have to follow me, and if you don’t, I’ll follow you.”

  I fled the next morning before sunup. She opened her eyes as I pawed my way out of the tent, and said nothing, only smiled. I could see her teeth in the dark.

  There were other women after her, and other nights like that, when I ran from imagined monsters. I knew there was nothing haunting me, and yet I couldn’t seem to resist the narrative, the tracks of the tigress, broken prints, broken lines. I shunned my own hallucinations, but I kept looking.

  I was a drunk, in those days. There are years of my life I scarcely recall. I will say that here.

  I will also say that the tigress, the long-ago tigress, the dead tigress, was paw-scarred by Henry’s knife. She’d surged up from below him as he leaned over a rock to peer at the place we believed she was lying up over a kill. He managed to roll from beneath her while she licked her wound, and I fired at her, but I missed. A few days later, he was gone, and I was broken.

  No one emerges unscathed from my profession. The line between sanity and insanity is imperceptible until you cross it, a mere game trail on a hillside, unmarked and unnoticed, until one finds one’s feet pacing that path, higher, higher, into the dizzying thinness of the air.

  As I sit here, writing this, I shake my head.

  The tracks—I can scarcely write these foolish lines—have appeared in various places over the years. In the dust of my stoop in Kenya, a woman’s bare feet, scar in the arch. And padding in soft circles around the bed I share with my wife, a tiger’s tracks, sliced cleanly across the pads by a knife. There’ve been times I’ve seen them everywhere I went. I know that guilt writes its own stories. These prints are true, though, the ones the tigress left here last night.

  I leave this entry to page through all the pugmarks I’ve seen in the last forty years, recorded and coded in my notebook, searching for another explanation.

  16 September, 1950 Later.

  I find myself longing for my old partner. I should never have returned to these mountains. Shaitan, my mind tells me, but I should know better. Henry would.

  In 1908, when I first met him, he was in his later 50s, but could easily spring shoeless straight up a mountain, fleet as a ghooral. I once saw Henry casually pluck a fish from a pool with his hand. I hadn’t even seen the glimmer of it in the water. He was a far better hunter than I, for though I was young then, and strong, I was bound by strange decorum, intent upon differentiating myself from the beasts.

  Henry’s skills had been passed down through four generations, and he had himself functioned as the Kumaon region’s chief shikari since the year I was born. The hunters did more than simply hunt. They catalogued the spirits in the trees and the devils in the waters, dispersed measured portions of the bodies of man-eaters to the villagers for their good luck charms. The rifles are lighter now, the bullets more destructive, and the ancient ways are being forgotten.

  The old shikari could track a butterfly on the wing, by the breeze created in its flight. They could find a snake the size of a quill pen, slithering up from a trail, and chart its passage through the streams.

  When Henry opened his mouth to speak, it was as plausible that a forlorn tiger’s call for a mate would come from it as words in human language. He could mimic anything in these woods. Once, in a moment of triumph, having together slain a leopard after weeks of stalking, he smiled slightly at me, and gave a whistling trill, then another. Eventually, I counted thirty-seven species of birds flocking to us.

  I would be remiss if I did not record here that Henry was also superbly mechanical, capable of combining two rifles into something better than either had been. Or of creating a precise and killing snare out of a length of silk thread drawn from a sari, a coil of spring, and razor blade. He mapped our prey with precision, and he knew which tiger might be near from the shape the creature’s body left in the grass. For ten years, Henry and I hunted man-eaters all over India, surveying the trees for motion, listening to the sounds of warning coursing through the mountains like ripples on a ginclear pond.

  When Henry and I came to Naini Tal in the final days of 1917, it was our goal to deliver the residents of the monsters they’d made. If a plague strikes a remote place such as this one, and there are not enough villagers left to carry the bodies of the dead down
to the water in procession, the rites of burial may be simplified. A live coal is placed in the mouth of the corpse, and then the bodies carted to a cliff, and thrown into the valley below, where the leopards and tigers find them, eat them, and develop their own desires.

  We were summoned by a desperate rumor, a cooee call from ridgeline to ridgeline until it arrived at us. This place was far from the world, back then. There were no telephones, no telegrams. There were no cars. The village had lost their own shikari to a Himalayan bear six months before the plague began.

  All the adults in the village were dead by the time we heard of Naini Tal, and only children remained. The tigers had taken over the town. They swept through the narrow passages between the huts, their golden bodies glinting in the starlight, their chins lifted to scent the air. It was as though the cats meandered through a night market, from stall to stall, sampling wares. There were twenty-six of them, and what had been a thriving village had become a place of terror.

  Henry and I arrived to a place in shambles, tiger’s marks before each door. The children were packed into one hut, and they’d left the rest of the village to the man-eaters. The pond where water was collected was halfdry, and all around it were the marks of claws.

  When we arrived, the children came cautiously from the hut. They were all skin and eyes. There’d been no forage, and their livestock were dead. Each of the children had about their neck a locket containing a piece of tiger: red fur or black fur or bone or claw, but the charms had done nothing to save them. I argued to remove them from their village. I’d never imagined so many man-eaters in one location.

  Henry, though, had grown up in the region. This was his territory. He knelt at the pond, treading on the tracks of the cats. He searched for a moment in his camp sack, and then brought forth an empty can, along with clockworks from my own recently smashed watch. I hadn’t known he’d saved them.

  After a few minute’s work, he’d made of these materials a tiny creature. As the children came closer, fascinated by the toy he made, trusting him, he finished it, a sharp-edged bird made of metal. He twisted something beneath its wing.