The Time Traveller and the Tiger

by Tania Unsworth

  ‘Where did you come from?’ he demanded.

  Elsie hesitated. ‘England?’ she ventured.

  ‘Oh, you must’ve come out for the hols,’ he said. ‘Where do your folks live?’

  ‘I’m… not sure.’

  ‘Lost, are you? Is it your first time out here?’

  ‘Yes,’ Elsie said.

  ‘I expect you couldn’t come out till now, because of the war.’

  ‘Yes,’ Elsie said again, although she had no idea what he was talking about. She had decided her best strategy was to agree with everything. That way, she would make sense at least half the time.

  ‘I don’t know how—’ The boy broke off, staring at Elsie’s feet. ‘I say, does everyone in England wear shoes like that?’

  Elsie glanced at her trainers.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I can’t stand around all day talking to a girl.’ He squared his bony shoulders. ‘You’ll have to find your own way back.’

  ‘I don’t know how.’

  He pointed to the track behind him. ‘Keep going six or seven miles, you’ll get to town.’

  ‘Six or seven miles?’

  He tugged the strap of his rifle back into place. Elsie noticed initials carved into the wooden stock. J.L.

  ‘Is that your gun?’ she asked. An astounding – and disturbing – suspicion had begun to form in her mind.

  The boy nodded. Elsie searched his narrow, sweaty face, trying to find anything she recognised. There was nothing, except perhaps a faint resemblance around the eyes…

  ‘So, those initials… they’re yours?’

  ‘Whose else would they be?’ He peered at her. ‘Are you all right?’ he said. ‘You look frightfully pale.’

  Elsie felt frightfully pale. She couldn’t go on pretending to herself that this was a dream. Somehow, the flower that catches time had caught her too.

  ‘How old are you?’ she asked, her voice faint.

  ‘Twelve. I don’t know what you’re getting at with all these questions.’

  Twelve? Elsie struggled with the maths, the numbers slipping in and out of place. 1975? 1846? The last one sounded right. No, she was off by a hundred years. 1946.

  ‘What… are you going to do with the gun?’ she faltered.

  ‘I’m going to bag a tiger.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Elsie cried, before she could stop herself. ‘No! You can’t.’

  It was one thing to go back in time seventy-four years. But finding yourself in conversation with your own great-uncle was quite another. Especially when he was staring at you with a look of scorn on his twelve-year-old face.

  ‘You must have sunstroke,’ John said. ‘That’s what you get for wandering around without a topee. How old are you anyway? Six?’

  ‘I’m eleven.’

  ‘Bit short, aren’t you?’

  This was rich, Elsie thought, coming from someone who had to wrap their belt twice around their waist to keep their shorts up. But she decided it would be better to say nothing.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  Elsie hesitated. It had occurred to her that if Great-Uncle John was only twelve years old, he wasn’t her great-uncle yet. Or even her uncle. Her parents hadn’t been born, which meant that, strictly speaking, Elsie herself didn’t exist.

  She could be anyone at all.

  ‘My name’s…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Kelsie,’ she muttered.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Kelsie,’ Elsie said in a louder voice. ‘Kelsie Corvette.’

  ‘Kelsie Corvette?’ he repeated. ‘That sounds made-up.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t,’ Elsie said.

  He tugged at his rifle strap again. ‘I’ve wasted enough time. You ought to be cutting off home.’

  ‘But I don’t know how.’

  ‘I told you, follow the track.’

  ‘Wait!’ But he was already jogging away, his bag bouncing against his back. Elsie watched as he turned the bend and disappeared from view.

  She looked up. Even filtered by trees, the sun felt hot. After taking off her jumper and tying it around her waist, she found a bush with large, spreading leaves, tugged one free, and attached it to her head with a piece of grass. It wasn’t much of a hat; it kept slipping over her eyes, and the grass was already starting to feel itchy. But it was better than nothing.

  She drew a deep breath. Then she plodded off in the direction that John had taken, the roll-ups of her jeans chafing her hot legs.

  It seemed that, sometimes, even Kelsie Corvette had to make the best of things.

  John must have picked up speed. When Elsie reached the bend, he was nowhere in sight. It was darker ahead. On one side of the track, the ground sloped steeply upwards into dense thicket. On the other, sunlight flickered through ranks of tall trees, their branches far above her head. Somewhere, an unseen animal gave a sudden, shrieking cry. Elsie jerked with shock, half-turned, and saw John making his way through the trees, heading for a meadow that lay beyond.

  She hurried after him, one hand clasped to her head to keep her leaf hat in place.

  ‘Hey!’

  The ground was littered with dead branches, making her swerve and stumble. ‘Hey!’ she called again, louder than before. Something snagged her leg. She tried to pull free, lost her balance and tumbled into the meadow face-first.

  ‘What on earth?’ John came striding up, his knobbly knees parting the grass. Elsie got to her feet and straightened her hat. ‘I meant to do that,’ she said.

  ‘Fathead.’

  ‘Fathead?’ she repeated. It was obviously meant to be an insult. Elsie glared at him. Uncle John had been much nicer when he’d been old, she decided.

  ‘Go home.’

  ‘You go home.’

  ‘Are you a parrot or something?’

  Elsie was trying to come up with a suitable reply, when John froze. His eyes had left her face and were focused on a point somewhere to her left, towards the centre of the meadow. Slowly she turned her head.

  ‘Don’t move.’

  A tiger was standing there, quite still. It was so close that Elsie could have thrown a stone, and – despite her far-from-perfect aim – had a good chance of hitting it. The first thing she thought was how enormous its head was. The second was that even though she had always known the colour of tigers, she had never, up until this moment, realised just how bright, how impossibly orange they actually were.

  But she didn’t have time to fully register any of this. John’s left hand was reaching for the gun at his shoulder. She saw his fingers curl around the trigger, the barrel trembling slightly as it rose.

  The tiger ought to have seen them well before they saw him. He ought to have been able – had he wanted – to come within an arm’s length of them, hidden in his own striped shadow, betrayed by nothing but a brief shiver of grass. Instead he had simply walked into the meadow, moving in the way of all tigers, each massive paw placed outer-edge first, each step a decision. The weight of his long body shifting as easily as ocean swell.

  But there was a hesitancy to his progress, a strange looseness in his limbs. Something had happened to the tiger that he could not understand. He paced uneasily with lowered head and flattened ears. It wasn’t simply that he’d left his territory. It seemed as if he’d strayed from something even more important than that. A kind of path.

  He had been born on this path and had walked it all his life. It was the path of greatest advantage, where his feet fell the softest, and the cover was greatest, and the light tricked every eye but his. Never wider than the length of his whiskers, never louder than the snapping of a twig. The unrelenting path of the hunter who knows he is also the hunted.

  Now he stood as though lost, his mind blunted by confusion.

  Something had happened.

  The tiger remembered only snatches. The dawn air full of the cries of men, a hammering of feet, the long grass beaten to a storm. He twisted, crouching to meet the threat, teeth bared. />
  Then a stinging at his neck, and the ground shifting as if turned to swamp. Weakness seized him. He toppled and lay flat, felt the tremor of approaching steps. A shadow crossed his body. It smelled of something he had never come across before; a bitter, ashy scent, deep-laid and sickly stale. The tiger knew it was the smell of death.

  He rolled, caught the ground and bounded clear. He ran.

  He ran through a tunnel of fear, never reaching the light, the trees blurring and changing shape, until his hind legs buckled beneath him. He snarled and hauled himself forward, vast shoulders straining, the snap and crash of branches a dim roar in his head.

  He was slipping, falling headlong into empty space. Water carried him.

  Daylight. He lay high up on the bank, under thin cover, his eyes fixed on a figure at the river’s edge. It sat with its back to him, the size of a monkey, hunched like a monkey too, the same intent angle of the head. The tiger felt no hunger, he was too dazed for that. But his mind briefly cleared with a relief so strong it was almost gratitude.

  This he knew. This.

  The intent crouch, and the locked gaze. The inching advance. Each step the sum of a thousand calculations leading to a single, deadly point.

  He blinked and pulled back his head. He was mistaken. It was not—

  He heard a shrill cry. A stone struck his side, and he staggered, terrified by his own loss of balance. He wheeled and tumbled down the riverbank, clawing at the spinning sky.

  He swam, his huge paws beating beneath him, making for the opposite bank, and scrambled out, water sheeting off his back. Then he set off, his pace dogged, yet aimless, his senses dulled. He had been walking like this for several hours when he finally arrived at the meadow.

  Now he paused, uncertain of direction, and swung his head slowly around. Catching – too late – the movement in the corner of his eye.

  ‘Stop!’ Elsie shouted, shoving John as hard as she could with both hands.

  Several things happened, but in such quick succession that they seemed instantaneous. All Elsie registered was noise. John crying out as he fell, the gun going off, the flap and scream of birds. She covered her ears with her hands, her eyes squeezed tight.

  When she opened them, the meadow was empty.

  ‘It’s gone,’ she said.

  ‘Of course it’s bloody gone,’ John said, his voice jagged. He was still on the ground, struggling to get up. The colour had drained from his face.

  ‘Oh no,’ Elsie said. ‘Oh no.’

  There was blood all over his leg. His sock was sodden with it.

  ‘You’ve been shot…’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘Don’t!’ He was tugging at the sticky top of his sock, cautiously unrolling it, his breath hissing.

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  She was meant to be Kelsie Corvette. Kelsie Corvette could do first aid in her sleep.

  ‘We have to dig the bullet out. With a knife, or something.’

  ‘Idiot.’

  He peered at his bloody shin. ‘It just grazed the skin, that’s all.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He didn’t answer, either in too much pain, or too angry to speak. Probably both, Elsie thought. She had only been trying to help. And she had helped, although he wouldn’t ever know it. She had stopped him from killing the tiger.

  ‘You’ll have to go home,’ she said. ‘Do you think you can walk?’

  ‘I’m not going home.’ He rummaged clumsily in his bag, pulled out a scrap of faded blue fabric. His hands were shaking.

  ‘I’m not going back without that tiger.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  He began wrapping the scarf around his leg, wincing as he pulled the layers tight and knotted the ends together.

  ‘I’ll be fine, all I need to do is rest a bit,’ he said, not looking at her.

  ‘But it’s gone, it must be miles away by now.’

  ‘Good job I know how to track, then, isn’t it?’

  He flexed his knee cautiously.

  ‘What if it’s worse than a graze? What if it gets infected or something?’

  ‘I told you before, I’m not going back without that tiger.’

  Elsie stared at him helplessly. She had forgotten how stubborn her Uncle John could be.

  They had been walking for nearly half an hour, and every ten minutes, John had looked back at her and said the same thing.

  ‘Go away.’

  Each time she stopped a few paces behind, gazing at him in awkward silence until he gave up and continued his lurching, stiff-legged progress.

  Elsie was desperate not to lose sight of him. Up until then, she had been too surprised by the events of the day to feel much fear. But with every sweaty step she took, the alarming reality of her situation had grown clearer. She was somewhere in India, in the middle of a forest, with no idea how she had got there, or how to get back, or even if there was an anywhere to get back to. Everyone occasionally lost track of time, Elsie thought, but not seventy-four whole years.

  Stopping Uncle John from shooting the tiger was beginning to seem the least of her problems.

  They had set off in the direction where the tiger had disappeared. The meadow was wider than it first seemed; a sea of tawny grass, dotted with vast, spreading trees, and it was a while before John reached the other side. He stopped at the far line of trees and spent a while hobbling to and fro, staring at the ground and frowning.

  Elsie suspected that he had no idea what to do next. At last, with the air of someone who would rather make a random decision than no decision at all, he plunged through an opening in the bushes.

  Elsie found herself in a thicket of bamboo, the dense clumps rising higher than a house. It was so quiet she could hear all the ways it was not quiet. The whistle of birds, the shifting of leaves, the rustle and tap of a hundred tiny movements taking place just out of sight. She picked up her pace, glancing nervously this way and that.

  A movement low to the ground, a rich blue gleam.

  ‘Is that a… peacock?’ she said out loud.

  John carried on walking, as if he hadn’t heard, following the path of a narrow, dried-up riverbed before turning abruptly into the forest again.

  Something heavy shook the branches of a tree and a twig hit Elsie on the head. She gasped. There were monkeys directly above, five or six at least, with sweeping tails and boldly inquisitive faces. One was tearing at something with its teeth, smacking its lips as it stared at her.

  ‘Wait,’ she begged John. ‘Please…’

  He stopped, still with his back to her, and she hurried up. There was a moment of silence while he stared at the ground.

  ‘I don’t want you here,’ he said at last, sounding resigned.

  ‘I know,’ Elsie said humbly.

  They were standing in a glade, sunlight pouring through an opening in the trees. ‘I suppose we could take a short rest,’ he said.

  He sat down on a fallen branch, grimacing as he positioned his hurt leg. The scarf had dried to a rusty brown. Elsie hesitated, then sat beside him.

  ‘Bloody stupid outfit for the jungle,’ he said, gesturing at her jeans. ‘Why’re they rolled up like that?’

  ‘Everyone wears them that way in England,’ Elsie said. ‘It’s the fashion.’

  ‘Also, they make good pockets,’ she added, reaching into one of the turn-ups and pulling out a flattened package.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a protein bar,’ Elsie said. ‘I forgot I had it, until now.’

  It occurred to her that protein bars might not have been invented yet. John stared in fascination as she ripped it open.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The wrapper?’ Elsie stuffed it hastily into her pocket. She wasn’t sure about protein bars, but she was a hundred per cent certain there was no such thing as foil-lined plastic wrapping. ‘It’s nothing…’

  She carefully broke the bar in half and handed John his share
. They sat chewing in silence. John pulled a round, metal water canister from his bag and passed it to her. She took a mouthful and passed it back.

  ‘Why do you want to shoot that tiger so badly?’ she said.

  ‘Look, I know you feel sorry for him but he’s a man-eater. He was down by the river this morning, near the village. The dhobi – the laundry man – told me. They drove him off with stones. He was stalking one of the children.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘They don’t stop, you know, man-eaters,’ John told her. ‘They go on killing people until they die, or somebody shoots them. They have to be shot, even Mandeep says that’s true.’

  ‘Mandeep,’ Elsie repeated, remembering the name. Uncle John’s friend.

  ‘He said there was one up north that killed more than two hundred and twenty people before it was shot.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘They’re usually old tigers, or ones that’ve been hurt.’

  ‘The one back there didn’t look old or hurt,’ Elsie said.

  ‘What do you know?’ John said, biting his lip. ‘If you think you’re going to talk me out of anything, you’re wrong.’

  ‘Okay,’ Elsie said.

  ‘I saw monkeys!’ she told him, to change the subject. ‘They were looking down at me.’

  ‘Langurs. You’ll get used to them. They’re everywhere, common as anything. They’ll snatch food right out of your hand if they get the chance. Mother hates them, they give her the jitters.’

  Elsie thought of the stiff-looking figures in Uncle John’s photograph.

  ‘Won’t your parents be worried? Do they always let you go off by yourself?’

  He shrugged. ‘I can pretty much do what I want in the hols.’

  ‘Lucky.’

  ‘My father’s in the army. What does your father do?’

  Elsie opened her mouth to tell him that her dad was a project manager for an educational software company. Then she closed it again.

  ‘He’s sort of like a supervisor,’ she said.

  ‘I expect he’s ICS,’ John said. ‘Indian Civil Service,’ he added, seeing her blank look.