Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  Under the tree, the tiger scowled and yawned.

  Look, I said. He’s annoyed there’s a camera running.

  Indeed, Mr. Sharma said. I have never seen a tiger more desperately conscious of his dignity.

  Mr. Sharma and I were being driven through one of the inner zones of Jim Corbett National Park. Mr. Sharma was the eco-lodge’s head naturalist. He wore rimless glasses and a lodge-branded khaki ball cap and his round cheeks were roughened by salt-and-pepper stubble. Of course when I meet anyone from your country I cannot help but wonder what they think of this character, President Donald Trump, he had said, and when I told him, he said, Ah! Then it appears we can be friends.

  The jungle here was darker and seemed older than any I had visited. Mr. Sharma regarded the hushed forest, the towering trees, the masses of knuckled roots with an air of elegant possession, as though we were touring a particularly fine wing of his art collection.

  It turned out that I was not merely bad at spotting tigers. In the jungle’s half-light, I often saw things that weren’t there at all. A peacock was really a bush. A leopard became a dapple of shade on a stone. As we drove among the tree trunks, Mr. Sharma drew my attention to the calling of a fish owl, one of the large nocturnal birds that hunt the forest streams. The owl’s call sounded nothing like the who, who of the owls I was familiar with. It was a low moan, mmmm, faint but insistent, the sound of a person stunned with pain. Very hard to spot in this light, Mr. Sharma said, but the owl is somewhere near.

  Then I saw it. It was perched on a fallen tree limb a short way ahead. It was the most beautiful bird I had ever seen. Its body was brown, with a white outline, and the feathers of its head were white. It was beautiful because of its marvelous tail, which fanned out behind it, and because of the angle of its head, which somehow implied a gentleness and thoughtfulness quite different from what most owls’ heads express. I stared. Just when I was about to point it out to Mr. Sharma, we drew a little closer, and I saw that the owl was only a broken branch extending from the fallen limb.

  A few minutes later, the elephant charged us. We had come around a bend in the road. To our left was a wooded slope thickly covered with dead leaves. To our right a narrow track led into a bamboo grove. Bus, bus, bus, Mr. Sharma murmured to the driver, holding out his hand: Stop, stop, stop. We had seen, throughout the day, trees broken by elephants, branches ripped off and stripped of leaves, trunks splintered and snapped. Now, in the jeep, we looked around. I thought I saw movement in the bamboo grove. I was peering in that direction when Mr. Sharma bellowed and an unmistakable trumpeting came from the other side of the jeep and the jeep lurched, and I turned my head and an elephant was running down the slope toward us.

  Uphill, she looked even huger than she was. Her trunk swung from side to side, nearly scraping the ground. The jeep moved away from her, slowly at first, then the engine roared and we went fast. She doubled her speed. She was really charging now. I was in the backseat. She was a few feet behind me. When we swerved onto the track that led into the bamboo grove, she broke off the chase and stared after us, ears flapping.

  The jeep stopped. My heart was pounding. We were twenty feet ahead of the elephant. We looked back at her. Dust drifted across the road. Now, Mr. Sharma said, as calmly as if he were in a library, let us wait a moment and we shall see if she settles.

  The elephant’s tail swished. The lower part of her mouth, a strange, soft beak, opened and closed. She scooped up a trunkful of dust and hurled it over her shoulder, so that dust billowed down across her back. Mr. Sharma said something to the driver and we drove a few feet in reverse, closer to her. She kept her hard black eye on us. With her trunk, she began stripping leaves off the tree she stood beside and thrusting them angrily into her mouth. She chewed the leaves. We moved a few feet closer.

  A smaller elephant, a juvenile male with two little tusks, walked carefully around the corner and joined her at the tree. Then an even smaller elephant walked around. A baby. The baby elephant looked wobbly and happy, the way baby elephants do.

  I sensed movement again in the bamboo. Then, all at once, I saw them. Among the thin green reeds, elephants were walking. Elephants of different sizes and at varying distances to one another were visible as if through a screen. The herd was all around us. I stood up to take pictures, then sat down with my hand on my head and stared. Mr. Sharma smiled in contentment.

  It was after nightfall when we came to the town of Ramnagar. Ramnagar was not a village but a small city. There were motorcycles and cars and phone-repair shops and fruits laid out on blankets on the side of the road. In fact, Mr. Sharma said, Ramnagar is named not after the Hindu god Rama but after an English administrator, Henry Ramsay, who was the commissioner of Kumaon in the nineteenth century. You see at that time it was quite difficult for the people in the area to engage in trade, because to reach the nearest center they would have to pass through a rather miserable landscape. They had an unfortunate tendency, on such journeys, to contract diseases, or to be eaten by wild animals, or to be waylaid by dacoits, who were a species of highwaymen. Ramsay saw that what was wanted was a trading center for the people of the hills here, which they could reach without being molested or eaten. And so he caused Ramnagar to be built, and for many years, under the English, it was a well-run and orderly place, which prospered according to schedule. And then (he smiled, with the gentlest imaginable sarcasm) the English left, and we messed it up.

  Traffic squeezed together in a narrow cobbled road that led uphill toward the town’s limit. An oxcart was trying to pass across the road to an alley. Cars had been forced to stop for the ox, and motorcycles were nosing among the cars. The drivers honked their horns. The ox’s muscles slid a long way when it moved. I call it managed chaos, Mr. Sharma said with a laugh, because for all that each traffic jam seems insoluble, by some miracle they are always quickly resolved. I find it rather a pleasure to see collective human intelligence solving the problems collective human intelligence creates.

  People passed along the roadside, young people, old people, men in soccer shirts, women in veils, men in jeans and aviator sunglasses, parents with children, children alone, shirtless children, milling by roadside stalls; the stalls jutted out into the road; there were no sidewalks. Someone started setting off fireworks and a thin, vanquished silver drizzled over the rooftops. Music played from half a dozen radios. I felt relaxed, for the first time in days. That human intelligence could solve the problems human intelligence created was precisely the notion I was growing to disbelieve. For the moment, doubt seemed to press less hard.

  The oxcart reached the alley. The traffic jam resolved itself. Streetlights hissed between power lines. Above, on the hill, behind a wall with sawtooth spikes, the jungle was black, a void in the radiant jostle of everything.

  6

  The first time Jim Corbett hunted a man-eater, it nearly killed him before he saw it. Corbett had followed the blood trail of the Champawat Man-Eater’s latest victim, a young woman, into the jungle. The trail led to a small pool. Here Corbett found more blood and bone splinters, as well as deep pugmarks—paw prints—so fresh that reddish water from the pool was still seeping into them. From a distance, he had noticed an object near the pool that puzzled him. Now he crouched down to examine it. It was part of a human leg.

  It was 1907. Corbett was thirty-one years old; this was his first time tracking a man-eater. For a moment, the carnage overwhelmed him. “In all the subsequent years I have hunted man-eaters,” he wrote, “I have not seen anything as pitiful as that young comely leg … out of which the warm blood was trickling.” He felt an awesome isolation. The Kumaoni forest is a place of green shadows under dark canopies, towering banyans whose roots spill toward the ground like ropes of melting wax. The tiger was somewhere nearby. A chill crossed the back of his neck. He looked up; a bit of dirt was sliding down the face of the fifteen-foot bank in front of him. In his narrative he remembers the plopping sound the dirt made as it dropped into the pool. From fifteen feet,
the tiger had been looking down on him, about to pounce.

  He climbed the bank and followed her, stepping carefully through blackberry vines. The ferns ahead of him shook, then went still. Then ferns farther along would begin to shake. When he came to those places, he found streaks of blood. The tiger was dragging the girl’s corpse with her, pausing to feed while Corbett made his way over the rough terrain.

  Then, from some way ahead, the tiger started growling. A tiger’s growl sounds like a Harley engine idling; you feel it in the wall of your skull. “I cannot expect you who read by your fireside,” Corbett writes, “to appreciate my feelings at the time.” It was beginning to get dark.

  He shot the tiger the next day. The end was dramatic, as it usually turned out to be. He’d arranged for men from the village to drive the tiger toward him, banging pots and pans and firing guns in the air. He hit the tiger twice, but not fatally. He was out of bullets. He seized a shotgun from the village tahsildar and pursued the wounded tiger onto a large, flat rock. From twenty feet away, he fired. She fell forward with her head slumped over the rock.

  What’s more striking than the killing is what Corbett did the night before, as darkness was falling. He went back to the pool to bury the girl’s leg. Her family would need some part of her body for the Hindu cremation ceremony, and he wanted to make sure the tiger wouldn’t find it before they could.

  In 2014, a group of amateur Corbett researchers traveled to the north of India and made their way to a village called Phungar. They were trying to figure out precisely where Corbett had started from on the day he killed the tigress. (Corbett is almost clinically detailed in his description of landscapes, but he often omits place-names, which can make it hard to follow his movements.) For years, the group had thought Corbett set out from a different village, Gaudi, because of a claim they had read in a book. But though Gaudi was near the area where the tiger must have been shot, when you actually went there you found that it couldn’t have been the right village—the geography didn’t make sense.

  In the nearby village of Phungar, however, they met an old man who said he had information about Corbett’s hunt. The old man’s name was Dev Singh Bohra. As he spoke to the researchers, he alternated long drags on the German cigarettes they gave him with bites of chapati. His father, he said, had witnessed the hunt for the tiger. His father had been born at the end of the nineteenth century and was a young boy during the time of the man-eater. His father was perhaps ten years old when Corbett came to Phungar. His father’s older sister, he said, had been killed by the tiger while gathering oak leaves near the village. The tiger had carried her into the forest on the day before the final hunt. Corbett had found her leg beside a jungle pool. Her name was Premka Devi. She was fourteen years old when the tiger killed her. Corbett hid her leg so the family would have it for the funeral.

  Dev Singh Bohra gave the researchers directions to the spot his father showed him, the hill with the flat rock where Corbett shot the tiger. Starting from where he told them to begin, the group—one of whose members, Preetum Gheerawo, wrote about the search in a book called Behind Jim Corbett’s Stories—was able to follow the account in Man-Eaters of Kumaon to a site that corresponded exactly to the large, flat rock Corbett described in his book. Dev Singh Bohra told them how his grandmother had made her way through the crowd when the tiger was brought to the village. She had beaten its corpse with her fists. Phungar, then, was the village from which Corbett had hunted the tiger—the village whose men, at great risk to their own lives, had driven the tiger toward him. The nephew of the Champawat Man-Eater’s last victim was still living there in the year the Indian space program launched its first probe into orbit around Mars.

  * * *

  We were in the van, driving to the airport. We drove over broken pavement, past hulks of construction equipment, past fields lined with bell-shaped mounds of straw and dung. We passed crumbling stone farmhouses, turquoise tour buses, tall trees freckled with bats. We passed women making bricks at an outdoor kiln. The women’s saris were every bright color you could name.

  I was thinking again about man-eaters, though I didn’t say so out loud. Nor did I mention the last tiger I saw at Bandhavgarh, the twelfth I saw in India. I was the first to see it, before Jerry and Verbena, before the driver and the guide, even. In fact my glimpse of it was so fleeting that I never had time to point it out; no one else saw it at all. We were driving past a shadowed glade with a wide, dark pool on which dead leaves were floating. Beside the pool, on a raised ridge littered with more leaves, I saw a large animal. It was walking away from me. In the shadows it looked brown, almost monochrome, different from how I thought a tiger should look. Yet it moved almost like a tiger. It was almost the size of a tiger. I think it was a tiger. I think it was real. I am not sure that it was.

  In the Dark: Science Fiction in Small Towns

  1. ATLAS DRUGGED (2012)

  On Easter Sunday I fell down our back staircase and had to be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, so the following Tuesday I took more than the recommended dose of Vicodin and went to see Wrath of the Titans at the cineplex in our town’s Walmart parking lot. I needed an escape, and I thought if I took enough painkillers maybe it would seem like the Titans were starring in a Sofia Coppola movie. I kept picturing a thousand-foot-high flame minotaur aiming a gaze of numbed-out longing toward the space slightly left of a cyclops, “Wind Cheetah” by T. Rex kaleidoscoping in the air. Chained to the chalky / chalice of night. My right arm was in a sling and was basically useless.

  We’d moved eight months earlier, my wife and I, to Carlisle, a Cumberland Valley town of eighteen thousand in south-central Pennsylvania. Siobhan is a college professor, and in Carlisle there’s a good liberal arts school, Dickinson College, on a couple of neatly mown quadrangles off the center of town. That was how we’d come to acquire a large, run-down Victorian house on a not-quite-seedy stretch of Hanover Street, across from a funeral home and a Papa John’s Pizza. I’d grown up in a small town, in Oklahoma, but I hadn’t been prepared for the in-drawn Appalachian Valley character of Carlisle, the bleak quaintness of its row houses, its colonial steeples, its intricately diseased old trees. It made me uneasy, though we came to know wonderful people there. The town had been a frontier outpost before the frontier as we think of it existed, before the Louisiana Purchase; it was the place George Washington rode out from to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion. Now even the historical markers were faded, and the factories were long since closed.

  Every fall, because Carlisle stood at the junction of two major highways, I-76 and I-81, the sky filled up with migrating vultures. You’d see them sunning themselves on the roofs of churches, in groups of a dozen or more. At night they roosted in the neighborhoods. Once I left a party, late, and sensed something odd in the darkness. I realized what it was: The trees were full of vultures. Alien rustlings crept among them, which meant they were watching me.

  It was particularly galling that I’d injured myself in our house, because the house had been one of the reasons we’d decided to move to Carlisle in the first place, one of the borough’s few unequivocal lures. It was the kind of house—big, brick, not literally on fire—we’d never have been able to afford anywhere else. As it turned out, we couldn’t afford it there either, because nothing in it worked; everything had to be replaced. Redo this, tear out that. Local builders looked at us and saw dollar signs swirling like Heffalumps. You can try and last another six months with this pipe, but you’re gonna thank me if you put in copper. Our contractor was a wild-eyed Jimmy Buffett superfan who went by the nickname “Moon.” He spent a good part of each day narrating his long-ago sexual exploits, many of which he’d compiled on the Parrothead circuit. Often these stories made him emotional. He’d stand there with his lips pursed, thumbs tucked into his tool belt, shaking his head as if to say, life, my friends. It was nobody’s fault.

  We had no furniture and no money to buy any. We sat on camp chairs in the living room and slept on a mattress on
the floor. We moved walls. We hung ceilings. One day everything smelled like polyurethane, the next day like tung oil. The backyard was a jungle. I don’t mean “we’ll spend a weekend weeding and then plant hydrangeas.” I mean there were creatures out there that had lairs. If H. R. Giger had been into horticulture, he’d have planted a garden like that. I needed to clear it, but gardening on that level is like submitting to psychoanalysis. You have to be prepared to confront what you find in the depths.

  I’d never fully understood why the house had a back staircase in the first place. Maybe servants had used it? That made no sense, I mean logistically it didn’t, because the back stairs opened onto the second-floor hallway just a few feet from where the front stairs emerged, an arrangement that would have hilariously undermined the Victorian labor hierarchy it was meant to reinforce (“Go to your own staircase, Martha; I’ll see you at the top … in four seconds”). On the other hand, if we’d wanted a house that made sense, we wouldn’t have bought one whose electrical wiring had been spun by silkworms during the Rutherford B. Hayes administration. Our next-door neighbor was a man named Mr. Piety, who’d formerly been the religion editor for a newspaper in St. Louis. He told us how he’d answered the phones: “Religion! Piety speaking.” You took the good with the frankly bewildering, in Carlisle.

  * * *

  Vicodin is a weird drug in that, for me at least, it has absolutely no effect, not even the minimum advertised effect of reducing pain, yet when I take it I become acutely conscious of precisely this absence of effect and develop a feeling of numb acceptance specifically embracing the drug’s utter virtuelessness. It’s okay, I think. It is so okay that this isn’t doing anything right now. This realization does make me feel somewhat more mellow and washed-out about whatever else happens to be going on, possibly just because it gives me something else to (not) focus on. Which I guess qualifies as an effect, although kind of a watery, delicate one. Someone once told me, and I could see how this was the case, that hydrocodone turned pain into a movie you were watching or, if you were lucky, a song you could hear from the next room. As this paragraph probably makes clear, I’m not really cut out to take drugs of any kind, and for the most part I don’t, but this week I was making an exception.