The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  It fluttered, and then, miraculously, took flight into the trees. It circled, swaying and wobbling in the air, and then landed again in his hand. The children looked at him as though he was a god, bringing animals to life out of broken things.

  Henry shrugged when I asked how he’d made it, and told me it was nothing, a children’s game. I never saw the bird again, though I thought of it often, the part of me that was still a child as enchanted as those children had been.

  One by one, over the next months, we stalked and killed each of the man-eaters. At last, there was only one remaining.

  I think of how I saw Henry last, his hand raised to protect his face, the choked sound he made—

  He’d changed in the months we’d hunted those twenty-six tigers. Begun to drink in daylight, and sometimes at night. At the time, I didn’t notice. I was killing tigers too. The night before he died, though, Henry looked over our fire at me, and asked if I thought the tigers deserved to win. I immediately answered that they’d developed a taste for humans, and killing them was all that could be done. I didn’t want to talk about anything else.

  After all of it was over, I convinced myself that Henry’s death had been his own doing, that he’d been drunk, and endangered us both.

  But in my mind, Henry looks at me again, mute as he was in my nightmare. I know what he wanted to say, I know.

  He’d seen a glimpse of color. In places like this, anything red means tiger. Anything white means bone. Anything golden means seen, and seen means eyes, and eyes mean death, unless one is luckier than one has any right to be.

  The tigress had watched as we placed ourselves, thinking we awaited her arrival, when in fact she’d been crouched patiently in her own blind, waiting for us all night.

  In the book that was published all over the world, the book that inspired generations of hunters to come to these woods, I did not say that my courage failed me. When I felt the tigress coming close on me, I abandoned Henry and ran.

  She didn’t pursue me. No. She took him instead.

  I regained my senses too late and followed the trail of her drag, but I found only a pool of his blood, deep enough to dip my hands in, deep enough to cover.

  For another five days, I stalked her, sleepless, out of food, my rifle jammed in my flight from her. I talked to myself, and to Henry, talked to the tigers I felt but could not see. I was a coil of rope caught by something invisible and swift, my soul tight between its teeth. I unspooled into emptiness.

  At last, I tracked the tigress around a crumbling mountain ledge, the only retreat back the way I’d come. She was there, sleeping in the open, confident in her size and speed, confident in my despair. Her abdomen was exposed, the fur around her teats matted down from suckling cubs.

  I brought my pistol from behind my back, and shot her in the chest, my hands too unstable to aim at her head. She was awake and nearly on me then, but mortally wounded. The man-eater leapt over me, lunging through the trees. I shot her again as she retreated, and she lost her footing.

  I witnessed her fall from China Peak, her body flipping, twisting, striped gold and black as a wasp, her back certainly broken as she flew.

  Irretrievable, the bodies. The tigress fell deep into the straight-sided ravine, and Henry was gone.

  I tracked the tigress’ two cubs to the place she had hidden them. Not man-eaters. No. Mewling still.

  After it was finished, I went down the mountain, eyes full of tears and blood, and I lied to them all about what had happened. I said that it could not be helped, that I had tried to save Henry, but even as I thought I was speaking, out of my mouth came something else, the cries of deer and the dying, the voices of birds and ghosts. One child wrapped my head in cotton while another packed my wounds and gave me, spoonful by spoonful, wild honey and herbs for my fever. They called from a ridge, and a message went forth to another village.

  Some men of my slight acquaintance came and carried me from Naini Tal, hospitalized me in Delhi, and there I stayed for six months, convalescing, writing the book of lies that made me famous.

  I wonder now if I’m still in 1918, and all I thought I saw and did since then a madman’s dream, because the tigress I’m tracking now, the tigress whose prints I see in the dirt of this village, has been dead for thirty-two years. I killed her.

  17 September, 1950 Nine in the morning.

  “What is it you seek in those mountains?” my wife asked me just before I left. She’d found me at the table, my rifle out for cleaning. “What is it you seek that is not here? Everything is everywhere.”

  She poured red tea into my porcelain cup, white milk into the tea. Blood, I thought. Bone. Tiger, I thought.

  I thought about the footprints on our stoop. I thought about how every time they appeared, my wife came out with the broom, and brushed them away as though they were nothing. Perhaps they were nothing but dust.

  She added an anthill of sugar to the cup, and then stirred it violently with a metal spoon, rattling the saucer.

  “Do you want to kill every tiger in the world?” she demanded.

  “Not all the tigers,” I protested. “This tiger. In this village. In my village.”

  “That isn’t your village,” my wife said. “I’m your village. Do you see me?”

  It was night, and a mosquito had landed on my arm to drink, its beak trembling. A calm came over my wife as she studied it. After a moment, she took the insect between her fingers and crushed its body, my blood smearing her fingers.

  “This is a tiger,” she said, and she didn’t look at me as she carefully placed the mosquito in the flame of the candle, igniting its wings. “This was a tiger.”

  And now, I’m in Kumaon, making my way up and into the forest toward Pali. Whatever haunts me, I intend to find it. A ghost, a tiger, a woman, a hallucination. Maybe these tracks are left by the wind, but I pursue my old enemy today¸ and if she finds me before I find her, I deserve what she plans for me.

  K_ and I have been over the nearby parts of the forest, and now we prepare ourselves to enter it. K_ has perversely overarmed himself, and his rifle is much too heavy. He carries eleven cartridges, far more than necessary, particularly considering that anything we shoot will be shot by me, not by him. Nevertheless, I can’t convince him otherwise. I didn’t bother to try.

  Strapped to his back is a suitcase filled with powdered preservatives and skinning tools. The taxidermist is nervous as a cat, he told me, with some degree of humor.

  “Tigers are never nervous,” I informed him. “Tigers are nothing like us.”

  I looped the ropes for the machan around my arm. Aside from the pug and scratch marks, there’s no other sign of the tigress in town, nor in the nearby trees. I’d expected to find scat, and other scratching, but I’ve seen nothing. All I see are her broken prints, familiar to me as my own hands, scarred pad, claws digging strangely unretracted into hardpacked dirt.

  Several of the village men traveled with us this morning, and after six hours walk into the forest, we stayed with them to make camp. It is no small thing to have people waiting. A camp plays the role of a wife, tempting the parts of a hunter that do not desire a return home. It’s too easy to choose to be lost.

  I wasn’t always so pragmatic about such things. When I hunted with Henry, we never set up camp. When he slept, if he slept, it was hunched in a tree. I’d be slung up in the machan, imagined man-eaters in my periphery, but Henry slept deeply, and if a tiger came near, he’d shoot. Nearly always, he’d kill his prey without aiming.

  Henry’s first hunt was when he was seven years old, a tiger that had killed two young sisters cutting grass. Later, their bodies would be found, naked and licked clean of blood, as peaceful as sleepers. Henry believed the tigress sought to replace lost cubs. I thought he was mad, imagining a tiger’s heart as a though it were a woman’s. Animals, I thought. Beasts. Heartless, I thought.

  I wanted, I admit it, to kill every tiger, man-eater or not. I thought of the damage they did to men, and I wanted
them to pay.

  Henry went to great lengths to avoid targeting cats that had not turned man-eater. The killing of cubs was far astray from Henry’s philosophy. He would have taught them about men by firing his rifle near them. He thought that without tigers the forests would disappear. We disagreed in those days. I saw the tigers as enemies. One killed enemies.

  Whatever comes tomorrow, a hunter dies hunting.

  Now, in our camp on China Peak, I feel observed, but no kakar call to warn us of creatures on the move. Only the trees watch us, I tell myself. And so, we sleep.

  18 September, 1950

  The forest was dark this morning and fragrant, the scent of needles and undergrowth, strangling orchids in bloom up a tree, a constellation of blossoms against a green sky. K_ and I marched through it, he heaving with exhaustion and altitude, myself with unaccustomed activity. I’d forced him to change his leather shoes for a pair with thin rubber soles, and he was, at least, stepping quietly.

  The temperature dropped as we ascended, and I saw a pugmark outlined in dew, another rimed in the light frost that lingers in the shadows long after sunrise. The marks taunted me, orphaned, one here, one miles onward, never two in proximity, not true tracks. High up a tree, a scratch, too high for a tiger, fifty feet, but I looked at it regardless, roped myself up into the branches to examine it more closely. I’ve never seen a mark like it before. Tiger, but impossible.

  On a twig near the scratch, I found a scrap of blue cotton from the shirt of the man the tigress had taken from the village. I lowered myself, painfully stiff from the climb.

  It is confirmed. This tiger is not a tiger. We are hunting a ghost. The tigress walked a dotted line, dancing her way up into the heights, leaving her tracks and signs like breadcrumbs for me. And thus the shikari succumbs to fairy tales, imagining a tiger’s ghost leading him not to heaven but to some airy hell.

  K_ knew so little about the habits of our prey he didn’t think to ask what was wrong. Beside me, he struggled up the mountainside, heaving his bags miserably. He paused suddenly, paralyzed, his mouth a rictus of uncertainty.

  “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 foun
d 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.