“Not here,” answered Dalton. “Last time we shot birds, the villagers made a huge fuss. The egrets are part of the founding myths of Pegu. Bad luck to shoot them, my friend.”
“Superstitious nonsense,” huffed Witherspoon. “I thought we were educating them to abandon such beliefs.”
“Indeed, indeed. But I, for one, would rather hunt a tiger than spend my morning quarreling with some local chieftain.”
“Humph,” said Witherspoon, enunciating the noise as though it were a word. But this answer seemed to satisfy him. They rode on. In the distance, the men threw spirals of fishing nets, blurs of rope that spun out water droplets in illuminated arcades.
They rode for an hour. The marshes began to give way to a thin brush. The sun was already quite warm, and Edgar felt sweat trickling down his chest. He was relieved when the trail turned and entered a thick forest. The dry burn of the sun was replaced by a sticky humidity. They had ridden only a few minutes into the forest when they were met by the lead Burman. While the man conferred with the others, Edgar looked around him. As a boy, he had read many tales of jungle explorers, and spent hours imagining the chaos of dripping flowers, the teeming legions of ferocious animals. This must be a different type of jungle, he thought, It is too quiet and too dark. He peered into the depths of the forest, but he could only see five yards into the tangle of hanging vines.
At last the men ceased talking among themselves, and one of them rode up to Dalton and began to speak. Edgar was too distracted to follow the conversation. His glasses steamed over and he took them from his nose and wiped them on his shirt. He put them back on his face and they fogged again. He took them off. After the third time, he let them sit on his face, watching the forest through the thin layer of condensation.
Up ahead, Dalton had finished conferring with the Burman. “All right then,” he shouted, and turned his horse around, the animal’s hooves trampling the tangle of underbrush. “I spoke to our guide. He says that he rode to the nearest village and asked the villagers about the tiger. Apparently, it was sighted only yesterday tearing the throat from the breeding sow of a local swineherd. The whole village is distraught, one of the soothsayers said that this same tiger is the one that killed an infant two years ago. So they are organizing their own tiger hunt, trying to flush it out of the jungle. They said that we can try to hunt it. It was last sighted three miles north of here. Or, he said we could try heading south to a series of swamps where there are many wild boars.”
“I didn’t come all the way out here to shoot pigs,” Fogg interjected.
“Nor did I,” said Witherspoon.
“And Mr. Drake,” asked Dalton. “Your vote?”
“Oh, I won’t even be firing a shot. I couldn’t hit a stuffed, glazed pig if it lay on the table in front of me, let alone a boar. You decide.”
“Well, I haven’t hunted a tiger in months,” said Dalton.
“It’s decided then,” said Witherspoon.
“Just watch where you fire,” said Dalton. “Not everything that moves is a tiger. And Mr. Drake, be careful of snakes. Don’t grab anything that looks like a stick unless you are certain that it doesn’t have fangs.” He kicked his horse’s flank, and the other men followed, winding on through the forest.
The vegetation grew thicker, and they stopped frequently for the first rider to cut at vines that hung over the trail. More plants seemed to grow from the trees than from the ground, twisting creepers that climbed vines toward the sunlight. Jagged epiphytes, orchids, pitcher plants, clung to the larger trees, losing their roots in the confusion of shoots that crisscrossed the sky. Edgar had always enjoyed gardens, and he prided himself on his knowledge of Latin plant names, but he searched in vain for a plant he could recognize. Even the trees were foreign, massive, borne by elephantine trunks that stretched across the ground with finlike buttress roots, tall enough to hide a tiger behind their walls.
They rode for another half hour, and passed the ruins of a small structure, wrapped in the tangled roots of the trees. The Englishmen rode past it without stopping. Edgar wanted to call out to ask what it was, but his companions were too far ahead. He turned to look at the stones, hidden in moss. Behind him, the Burmans also seemed to notice. One of the men, who had been carrying a small wreath of flowers, quickly dismounted and laid it at the base of the ruins. Edgar turned as his horse walked on. Through the tessellations of hanging vines, he saw the man bow, and then the vision was lost, the vines closed in, and his horse pushed forward.
The others had ridden ahead, and he almost collided with them at a turn in the trail. They were all gathered at the base of a large tree. Dalton and Witherspoon were arguing in a whisper.
“Just one shot,” Witherspoon was saying. “You can’t let a pelt like that pass. I promise I could get it in one shot.”
“I told you, for all we know, the tiger could be watching us. Fire now, and you will scare it away for certain.”
“Nonsense,” said Witherspoon. “The tiger is scared already. Three years and I don’t have a good monkey pelt. They are always so old, and the only fine pelt I could have had was ruined by an inept skinner.”
Edgar followed the direction of their argument up the tall tree. At first he saw nothing, only a tangle of leaves and vines. But then something moved, and the small head of a young monkey poked out over an epiphyte. Edgar heard a rifle being loaded next to him and Dalton’s voice again, “I am telling you, leave it alone,” and then above, the monkey seemed to sense something was wrong, lifted itself up, and began to leap. Witherspoon raised the rifle, and Dalton again, “Hold your fire, damn it,” and then above, the monkey’s jump was matched by the flick of Witherspoon’s finger, the flash from the gun barrel, the explosion of the shot. For a brief second there was a pause, silence, as above a scattering of debris from where the monkey had jumped drifted down through the clearing. And then Edgar heard another sound, directly above, a soft chirping, and he looked up to see a figure, silhouetted against the backdrop of trees and fragments of sky, falling. It seemed so slow, the body rotating in space, tail streaming up, fluttering, avian in its descent. He stared transfixed as the monkey fell past him, not three feet from his horse, and crashed into the brush. There was a long pause, and then Dalton cursed and kicked his horse forward. One of the Burmans jumped down from his saddle, picked up the monkey, and held it out to Witherspoon to inspect the coat, now bloody and matted with dirt. He nodded at the Burman, who threw the monkey into a canvas sack. Then Witherspoon kicked, and the group moved forward. Following behind, Edgar watched the tiny figure in the bag swing against the side of the horse, shifting shadows of the forest playing over the stain of red that spread across the canvas.
They marched forward. Near a small stream, they passed through a swarm of mosquitoes, which Edgar tried to wave away from his face. One landed on his hand, and he watched it with fascination as it probed his skin, looking for a place to bite. It was much larger than those he had seen in England, with tiger-striped legs. Today, I am the first to slay the tiger, Edgar thought, and he crushed it with a slap of his hand. Another landed, and he let it bite, watching it drink, its belly swelling, and then this one he crushed as well, smearing his own blood over his arm.
The forest thinned and opened into rice fields. They passed several women bent over in the mud, planting seeds. The road widened, and they could see a village in the distance, a scrambled mass of bamboo houses. As they approached, a man came out and greeted them. He was wearing nothing but a worn red paso, and spoke with animation to the head rider, who translated.
“This man is one of the village leaders. He says that they sighted the tiger this morning. Men from this village have joined in the hunt. He begged us to join them too. They have very few guns. He will send a boy with us as a guide.”
“Excellent,” said Dalton, unable to control his excitement. “I thought that after Witherspoon’s hastiness, we had lost our chance.”
“And I will have a fine tiger pelt in addition to the monkey,” said Witherspoon.
Even Edgar felt his blood surge. The tiger was close, and dangerous. The only other time he had seen a tiger was at the London Zoo, a thin, pathetic animal losing its hair to a disease that puzzled even London’s best veterinary surgeons. His discomfort at having to kill something—amplified by the shooting of the baby monkey—vanished. Indeed, Dalton was right, this village needs us, he thought. He looked behind the villager, to where a group of women had gathered, each of whom held a baby against her hip. He felt a tugging at his boot and looked down to see a naked little boy touching the stirrups. “Hello,” he said, and the boy stared upward. His face was smeared with dust and mucus. “You are a handsome little fellow, but quite in need of a bath.”