The Time Traveller and the Tiger

by Tania Unsworth

  ‘We gotta get to our guns!’ Nottle said.

  ‘Yes, the guns, the guns,’ Marjorie babbled. ‘Go and get them, Charles.’

  ‘But the place is crawling with tigers. I’m not fast on my feet, y’know.’

  ‘Oh, you and your dicky leg!’

  ‘It’s that boy,’ Gordon interrupted. ‘He’s to blame, I’d have had that gaur and the leopard too, if it wasn’t for him…’

  Sowerby’s voice cut through the hubbub.

  ‘All we have to do is keep quiet and stay together.’ He was standing apart from the group, and Elsie noticed that he was holding the walkie-talkie. He must have turned off the signal, she thought.

  ‘The tigers will disperse soon enough,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, I suggest we make our way to the servants’ quarters.’

  ‘That’s on the other side of the lodge,’ Marjorie protested.

  ‘I assure you, we’re in no great danger,’ Sowerby said.

  ‘Relief to hear you say that,’ Gordon said. ‘You’re the tiger expert, after all.’

  Sowerby lit a cigarette, his face expressionless in the flare of the match.

  ‘But where did they come from?’ Marjorie demanded. ‘What are so many of them doing here?’

  ‘They looked a little droopy to me,’ Nottle said. ‘Kinda disappointing, if you must know. Perhaps they were lost or something.’

  ‘Never had tigers interrupt my dinner before,’ Charles commented. ‘Most unusual.’

  ‘Maybe they were attracted by the smell of that food.’ Marjorie wrinkled her nose in disgust. ‘It was certainly strong enough…’

  John had been following the conversation with growing incredulity.

  ‘Don’t you get it?’ he burst out, finally losing control. ‘How dense do you have to be?’

  The guests stared at him, shocked. Sowerby’s jaw tightened.

  ‘I don’t recall anyone asking your opinion,’ Marjorie said.

  ‘Sheer impertinence,’ Gordon muttered.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Nottle said. ‘Don’t we get what?’

  ‘The whole thing’s rotten, completely rigged!’ John cried. ‘He trapped those tigers; he’s been keeping them drugged so they’ll be easy to hunt. Four tigers, one for each of you, don’t you see?’

  ‘That’s a very serious accusation to make against a respected—’

  ‘I’m telling the truth! There’s a building in the forest, with cages. Take a look, if you don’t believe me. The tigers came from there.’ John paused. ‘They must have… escaped somehow.’

  A brief silence fell as John’s words sank in.

  ‘Is this true, Mr Sowerby?’ Marjorie asked at last.

  Whatever Sowerby was feeling, his face betrayed no trace of it. He took a drag of his cigarette as though giving himself a chance to think. Then he shrugged.

  ‘You wanted to kill tigers,’ he said. ‘I got you tigers. And if things had gone smoothly, you’d have gone home with your trophies none the wiser.’

  ‘We didn’t know you were going to do it this way!’

  ‘You had no idea how I was going to do it,’ Sowerby said, flicking his ash. ‘As I recall, you were all quite happy to hand over your money without any questions asked.’

  The guests gaped at him.

  ‘How dare you?’

  ‘It’s an outrage!’

  ‘Hardly sporting!’

  ‘You’ll be hearing from my lawyers,’ Nottle announced, puffing out his stomach to even greater proportions. ‘Trust me. They’re gonna make your life hell.’

  ‘Living legend, my eye!’ Gordon’s whole body was stiff with fury. ‘Once word of this gets out, there won’t be a club in the country that will have you. You’ll be finished, you’ll be—’

  He broke off. A tiger had appeared at the edge of the circle of light.

  It was not like the others; a glance was enough to see that. Here was no drugged and bewildered animal. And there was nothing dazed about the way it was crouching, ears flat and haunches coiled to spring. It was by far the largest tiger any of them had ever seen, larger even than the one who’d lent its skull for Sowerby’s clock, and its head had a scorched and blackened look, as if burned by its own fire.

  The tiger bared his wet teeth, his eyes fastened on Sowerby.

  All day, the tiger had lain under cover, close to the foul-smelling building, his sleep disturbed and fitful. Humans had come, first two, then one alone, a small creature, filled with fear. The tiger had watched it stand and then suddenly dart away, noisy with panic.

  All day he had listened – even as he dozed – to the growling coughs and calls of tigers just beyond. He lay pressed low to the ground, his tail twitching, feeling the tremor of their endless pacing like a pulse in his throat.

  Then, after night had fallen, a new sound came. A distant, crooning hum, low enough to travel across rivers and over mountains and through the deepest of forests. The tiger raised his head, his ears pricked.

  The call of his mother, commanding him to follow.

  Throughout the apprenticeship he had spent at her side, from tumbling cub to full-grown animal, he had obeyed that call of hers. She had nursed him and protected him and killed for him, and taught him how to hunt, sharing her vast experience as he grew. He had learned how to survive from her. He had learned it by following.

  The tiger hesitated for a moment, the tug of memory too strong to be ignored. He rose and crossed the clearing, heading in the direction of the sound, moving cautiously, acutely aware of the presence of others. There were tigers nearby, four of them. Two crossed his path without any sign of acknowledgement, their step sluggish.

  The tiger had come across madness before, the stunned, erratic behaviour displayed by animals who had lost all sense of self-preservation. This was not that, but it felt too similar for comfort, and he drew back instinctively, keeping his distance as they carried on ahead.

  He was approaching the second clearing, where the large building stood, when the call abruptly stopped. The tiger paused and gathered himself. He was dangerously close to humans – a great many of them. The air was tangled with their scents, oil and charcoal and metal and sour sweat. There was nothing to be gained by going any nearer, and everything to be lost.

  He was about to turn away when he caught another scent, mingled with the rest. It was only the second time he had come across it, but he recognised it instantly. For as long as he lived, it was a scent he would never forget.

  Burning tobacco, sickly-stale.

  The smell of death itself.

  The tiger felt rage tighten every sinew. He had been noiseless before, but now a different kind of silence seized him, deeper and a thousand times more lethal. He crouched and began to advance, his body slippery in the darkness, as if his touch had turned the air to oil, his gaze on the circle of light beyond.

  Humans in a group, huddled like deer, the one he sought standing apart. He could feel the liquid of their fear. It flowed towards him in rivers, joining the ocean of his rage until it crested into fury.

  The tiger opened the cavern of his mouth and roared.

  There were no words to describe the sound of that roar, if sound was what it was. Elsie felt it as much as she heard it, the way an avalanche vibrates the bones or thunder twists the gut.

  The tiger’s contorted face was even more terrible. It was nothing but a gaping mouth, its forehead vanished, its eyes squeezed to slits, still locked on Sowerby, standing in his path.

  Sowerby’s whole body had tensed. Even the bones in his face had tightened. As if the tectonic plates below the surface of his skin had shifted in some impossible way, creating ever steeper cliffs and chasms of his features.

  Without turning his head, without even seeming to move his lips, he spoke.

  ‘You’ve got the only gun.’

  Elsie glanced at John, beside her on the verandah.

  ‘Shoot it,’ Sowerby said.

  John reached for the rifle at his shoulder.

  ‘No,’
Elsie said in an anguished voice.

  ‘Slowly, slowly.’ Sowerby’s voice was deathly calm. ‘Aim for the heart, boy.’

  ‘No,’ Elsie whispered. ‘Please…’

  She had stopped John from shooting the tiger. She had stopped him. But that didn’t matter, it was going to happen anyway.

  ‘You mustn’t, you can’t…’

  Nobody heard her. She might as well not be there.

  ‘Do it,’ Sowerby said, panic entering his voice for the first time. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  John’s finger groped for the trigger, the rifle stock trembling against his shoulder. Elsie shook her head desperately. He wasn’t looking at her. Nobody was looking at her. Not even the tiger. She was just an extra, forever in the background, someone not meant to change the past, or make any kind of difference.

  She felt a sudden sense of injustice, so strong she almost cried out.

  It isn’t true!

  Without thinking, ignoring the gasps around her, she marched down the verandah steps, passed the cowering guests, and kept going. Six paces from the tiger, she stopped. John couldn’t shoot it now, she was standing in the way.

  She lifted her chin and looked into the tiger’s burning eyes.

  And the tiger looked back. It looked at her as only a tiger can, with an unblinking, total gaze. As if it saw the whole of her complete. As if nothing in the world existed except for her.

  Elsie knew she was frightened, almost more frightened than it was possible to be. But her fear was a separate thing. It was standing next to her, and along with it, all the other things that made her who she was. All her hopes and loves and secret sorrows. Everything that had ever made her laugh, or cry, or wish one day could last for ever and another could end before it began. Her failures and her victories, and all the moments – the very many moments – that lay in between, when she had looked for the silver lining and made the best of things.

  It was all there, so close Elsie could have reached out and touched it. Yet she didn’t.

  I haven’t been born, I don’t exist, I am Kelsie Corvette, whose voice can tame the savage beast.

  Elsie drew a deep breath. Then she opened her mouth and began to sing.

  ‘There’s a dark and a troubled side of life,

  There’s a bright and a sunny side too…’

  Her voice, as Mr Nunes had so painfully noticed, was squeaky and out of tune. Yet it was utterly steady.

  ‘Tho’ we meet with the darkness and strife,

  The sunny side we also may view.’

  Around Elsie, nothing moved or breathed. Even the leaves on the trees were still, as if astonished into silence.

  ‘Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side!’ Elsie’s voice rose as she came to the chorus. She had only been allowed to hum it before, so she sang extra loud to make up.

  ‘It will help us every day, it will brighten all our way,

  If we keep on the sunny side of life!’

  The tiger halted, partly out of surprise, and partly because the sounds coming from the tiny human were so disconcerting. They reminded him in a vague, half-forgotten way of the mewling cries of a hungry cub. But what mainly stopped him in his tracks was the creature’s total absence of fear.

  Aside from encounters with other tigers, he had never in his life come across an animal that hadn’t displayed some degree of fear – from bristling caution to outright horror – in his presence. Fear was a living thing, the spark that fired him to action and fuelled the blaze of his anger.

  Now its absence had the opposite effect, like a lull in the wind that settles the long grass. The tiger’s tail stilled, and his lip uncurled.

  Of all the legends ever told about his kind, there was only one that was true.

  In the distant past, being small, and weak, and full of fear, man made a gift to the tiger. The gift had been created out of dreams, shaped by longing, polished to a shine by terror. It was the gift of extraordinary power.

  The tiger became a god, gods rode upon its back, the souls of dead heroes lived within it. It could fly through the air, magically appear and disappear, kill with the force of its gaze alone. Its eye was full of luck, and its heart full of courage, and its bones could cure a thousand ills.

  Being small, and weak, and full of fear, man gave the tiger extraordinary power.

  And then, being small, and weak, and full of fear, he wanted it back again.

  So, man tried. He plundered the tiger’s body, and ground its bones, and took its skin to wear, and stood for photographs above its corpse, as if to say: I have it! See? It is mine! But nothing worked. The corpse was just a corpse, and the pages turned on all the photographs.

  The tiger’s gaze shifted from Elsie. He looked into the forest, thinking of the miles still to be covered before he reached home. He knew, without knowing, that his power was not something that could be given or taken away. It could not be found among his bones, or in a trophy’s sightless eyes because it was not there. Only in the beating of his heart and in his living, secret self.

  He swung his head, the light gleaming for a moment on his copper hide.

  Then he was gone.

  For a good thirty seconds after the tiger vanished, nobody moved or made a sound. They stood as though they had forgotten they had mouths for speaking, or legs for walking, or even brains to process thought.

  Then Marjorie gave a juddering sigh, as if she was pulling her breath up in a bucket from the depths of a bottomless well.

  ‘I’m going to faint, I’m going to faint!’ she cried. ‘Oh, Charles, on our honeymoon…’

  Immediately, as though breaking from a trance, everyone started talking at once.

  ‘Is it gone?’

  ‘Did you see the size of that thing?’

  ‘The girl, singing to it!’

  ‘Damn foolhardy, if you ask me.’

  ‘Reckless, ought to have shot it while he had the chance.’

  ‘Kelsie!’ Mandeep’s voice rose above the noise. ‘Kelsie! Are you all right?’

  Elsie heard his feet on the verandah stairs. John was staring at her with a look of such stupefaction that she thought she might break into hysterical laughter, the kind that went on and on and didn’t stop until someone slapped you. But she couldn’t. The itching had started in her nose again, only it wasn’t itching any longer. It was more like burning.

  Elsie clapped her hand to her face. Her whole head felt as if it was on fire. A wave of pressure rose in her chest.

  John and Mandeep were beside her.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ John said. ‘Are you hurt?’

  Elsie shook her head. The pressure had reached her throat now, it was climbing higher and higher. She shook off John’s hand and stumbled blindly away, out of the light, across the clearing. Her foot caught the root of a tree and she staggered, eyes watering as though squeezed by some inner, unstoppable force. She drew a gasping breath –

  And sneezed.

  PART 3:

  What Happened Instead

  1948. KRUGER PARK, SOUTH AFRICA.

  If Sowerby had tripped over his lace almost anywhere else, he would have suffered a scraped knee at worst. He would have got to his feet with a curse, tightened his boots, and been on his way. But he was crossing a precipitous ridge in a lonely, mountainous area when it happened, and he immediately flew straight over the edge.

  As he hurtled down the steep slope, loose rocks tumbling around him, he had time to reflect that he had had nothing but bad luck since that disastrous episode at the lodge, two years before. His savings gone in legal fees, his lectures cancelled, his possessions – what was left of them after the tigers and monkeys had finished rampaging through the building – seized by the Indian authorities, his reputation ruined, even as far afield as here in South Africa. He had time to think too, of the remoteness of the region and the unlikelihood that his body would ever be found, even if there was anyone in the world who cared to look for it, which there was not.

  He even h
ad time – because it was a very long slope – to marvel slightly at the irony that he, who had brought down scores of the world’s most terrifying predators, should be brought down in his turn by nothing more ferocious than a dangling boot lace.

  Then a boulder, bouncing off the side of the hill, hit him on the head and all his thoughts were done.

  His body was discovered less than half an hour later by three lions. They had been alerted by vultures who clustered at a safe distance as the lions fed. What the lions and vultures left, wild dogs found. A family of hyenas took the bones and armies of ants and assorted beetles hauled away the tiny scraps that remained. By the time the last, microscopic crumb had gone, it was impossible to count how many creatures Sowerby had nourished, or how many lives in which – however briefly – he had played a vital role.

  He had finally become what he had prized above all else.

  An object of value.

  1977. NEW DELHI, INDIA.

  Mandeep shifted in his seat on the stage as the speaker at the podium made his introduction. The conference hall was packed with people, although he had no trouble making out his mother, sitting in the middle of the front row, looking both pleased and vaguely disapproving as usual.

  Mandeep’s hand crept up to straighten his tie.

  The speaker was taking a long time to get to his point. Mandeep sighed to himself, his mind wandering. Back through the years, to all the events that had led to this moment. The papers published, the speeches made, meetings with influential people, lucky breaks and unexpected setbacks, obstacles overcome.

  Before that, years of unrelenting study, scholarships to universities, qualifications earned… Mandeep smiled, thinking of the letters that had gathered after his name. Yet he knew that none of it would have been possible without the support of his family and his teachers, plus his own stubborn, unshakeable determination.