Monster of the Sundarbans Okir

Monster of the Sundarbans Okir

761171.edit clean. Doc

Monster of the Sundarbans
Chapter 1
The Man-Eater

Little nine-year-old Rubina Ali Qureshi knelt by the waterside with no idea that her brief life was about to end. The last thing she saw was her six-year-old little brother disappear in a blurry dream; he saw nothing. Just like a puff of smoke in the wind, they were gone, as if they’d never been, the blanket of death dropping suddenly, the unawareness total, like sleep without a dream.

Their mother, who had been watching her children, shielded her eyes with her hand and glanced down long enough to see the sun reflect in the ripple patterns of the water, then up, and they too had vanished, forever lost in the irredeemable fleeting instant. Her lips quivered, her face trembled, and she dropped to her knees in shock but made no attempt to find them, certain they were not to be found.

She could have begged in her mind to be dreaming, to awake and find her children still playing by the stream, undisturbed, but that would be a fairy tale, and this was the Sundarbans, the Sundarbans with a man-eater on the prowl that took whenever it wished whatever it wanted. And that which it took, the most precious of things was never returned.

Indeed she had already made her own pledge with the god of reality, who did not abide. The man-eater had taken her own mother in the field just a month ago. Lying in the tall grass that she was cutting, the giant tiger waited until it was nearly stepped upon, then sprang, attacking with more vicious fury than her tiny body could absorb. It ripped her literally to pieces. Little Rubina had even drawn a picture to help her understand the unthinkable. No, she would not plead with reality as before, would not again beg that which is as unalterable as it is unforgiving, to change its mind, which was already made up. They were gone, and nothing would bring them back. Such was the grim acceptance of the people living on death's edge waters. Everyone had lost someone; 389 times those living on the outskirts of the Sundarbans accepted their lot, but upon the loss of these last

small children, the villagers vowed revenge.

Having decided to hunt down the tiger, the villagers had no shortage of motives or methods. They had been killing tigers in the Sundarbans for hundreds of years. They killed tigers for medicine, they killed tigers for prestige, they killed tigers for sport, they killed tigers for every reason imaginable and not, and they killed tigers by the hundreds or thousands until there were nearly none left, and now in retaliation for two villagers, the government intended to kill the man-eater, the monster.

They decided to rid the jungle of the man-killer by the elephants back. It was a tried-and-true method; drum-beating villagers would drive the cat into a killing zone where the shooters could take aim at leisure. There was absolutely no reason for tigers to fear the drumbeat, but they fled from it as they would fire, and despite the big cat’s prowess, the sheer force of numbers and firepower seemed overwhelmingly in the government’s favor.

Tigers, though curious and intelligent, are animals that rely mostly on their instincts, so it was that the hunt played out just like a script. The beaters began with more than one hundred men that surrounded the cat in a huge ring, and then they walked each of them to a point in the center of a broad high-grass field. En route, the men climbed over or under or around any tree, ditch, river, or obstacle of any kind, chasing the cat into an ever-constricting circle. Then they either shoot it from the elephants back or, if the grass was too deep, burn the exhausted cat out and kill it. From high and behind the elephant’s head, mahout Satya Ban Pegu saw the well-formed image of a huge tiger. It must have been a thousand pounds or more, trotting deep into the tall grass. Gradually the image began to blur and fade until there was just a big oval orange blob in the dark-green grass. The tiger didn’t merely hide in but was rather absorbed by the weeds, as if it had changed color to blend in, then went a step farther and disappeared. Some of the other wildlife control officers saw it too, and the elephants were beginning to get spooked.

The elephants halted, and momentarily the beating paused as the blunt order “Burn it” was heard. From diametrically opposite Satya Ban, the fire started as the beaters resumed their rhythmic torment. The fire was spotty at first, burning on separate islands surrounded by a sea of deep dark-green grass. As soon as the tiger rose up, its orange coat would give it away. Then trapped by the flames and driven to exhaustion, the trapped tiger would flee the flames and be shot, but it was Satya Ban who was first to learn that this time, it was the tiger who had set the trap.

Soon the fire was all-encompassing, and the islands were joined together by fire bridges, turning the entire grass field bright orange as eddies of black smoke floated listlessly around. Against the burning backdrop of the field, the tigers coat was not easily visible, but Satya Bann saw the orange oval materialize, just as it had dissolved moments ago. It materialized in midair like a puff of smoke, then coalesced in the form of a giant tiger, leaping directly at the mahout. Behind mahout Satya Bann, Sergeant Mukherjee, with his rifle at hip level, was remembering something from his sharpshooter training. The human reaction time was about a quarter of a second. That meant that you could do anything at all to a man and he would be powerless to even begin to stop you, if you could do it in less than a quarter of a second. That was what occurred to Sergeant Mukherjee as he tried to raise his rifle from his hip to get a shot off at the humongous tiger flying at the speed of light into the mahout and himself. He never got the shot off, never even raised the gun, didn’t even blink an eye. The last thought that Sergeant Mukherjee had was “I never knew tigers could fly.” And while he didn’t feel any more than nine years old from Rubina, Satya Bann Pegu had the life ripped from him by the tiger’s left paw that tore a third of his body off by the shoulder as it flew past. Satya Bann’s body fell not far from Sergeant Mukherjee’s, who had been throated such that his head was held only by the flap of skin at the nape of the neck. And as both their bodies burned, it was Satya Bann Pegu who kept a death’s-eye view from above the fiery field.

From the vantage point, he could see the elephants turn and break as the tiger cleared another mahout, shooter from atop another lumbering beast struggling to escape the cat and the flames. What Satya Bann saw next he’d have never believed if he was still alive. The beaters, oblivious to the events in the killing zone, kept rhythm as the tiger went in a logarithmic spiral from elephant to elephant, ripping the humans off their backs. As the big beasts scattered, the tiger snapped the men’s necks in its jaws or carved them out hollow by a savage swat of its huge forepaws. Unnatural. Elephants usually chase tigers, but these were in a pure panic break with the tiger intercepting each and every one. It all happened in seconds, and the cat jumping from one elephant to the next through the wildly licking flames and floating embers with only a bound or two in between did seem to take flight, but unlike Sergeant Mukherjee, Satya Bann Pegu never saw the tiger that sent him from consciousness to nothingness.

The elephants weren’t the only ones to panic. The bureaucrats at the forestry department put a bounty on the man-eater, bringing hunters from around the globe. The result was disastrous. There were too many hunters in too close quarters. They shot each other, they shot villagers, and they shot anything they were not supposed to, anything except the man-eater, which eerily went away while all the commotion was going on. Finally, the local tahsildar rescinded the bounty and gave exclusive rights to the most famous hunter in the area, a Brit named Jim McCallum.

Chapter 2
The Monster

Into this storm walked a hurricane named Peter Harman, who had heard of the monster of the Sundarbans from colleagues, fellow hunters, and killers. Embittered by childhood, hardened by war, and able to love but unable to receive it, when it came to hunting and killing, there were none in the class of Peter Harman, not even Jim McCallum. Harman could only desperately hope to find that the hushed-up, fantastic tales of a flying tiger killing twelve armed shooters and their mahouts held an ounce of truth. He could only hope that here in this dead end of the universe, in a mangrove swamp called Sundarbans, that here of all places he had finally met that which until now through life and love and war had so villainously eluded him—a challenge worthy of himself. With hunting remaining as the only sanctioned killing he can do by which to redeem himself, Peter Harman entered the Sundarbans.

Although unaware, to Peter, who had grown up on the move between world wars under the militaristic rule of his wife-beating father, Col. Phillip Harman, US Marine, redemption was what killing was all about. It was from the colonel that he learned the heroics of war, witnessed the horrors of domestic life, became enthralled by his father’s warrior exploits, and grew up to worship and eventually despise the despotic monumental figure of his life. To the colonel, “war was hell,” and life was war. To his son, he made every sandlot game of baseball, every schoolyard footrace, and every endeavor of any kind competition—bitter competition to be won by any means, at all costs. When Peter was just seven and having difficulty with the nuances of poker, which his dad was teaching him for the first time, the colonel cleared the table with one broad stroke of an arm and went upstairs, leaving the boy shattered and confused with nothing like the ability to process what he had done so wrong. The last words he heard from his father for a week were “You’re stupid,” and the door slammed shut upstairs. He heard those words the rest of his life.
Peter took up boxing at that same tender young age, not for competition but for the colonel’s approval. Instead, his father forced him to fight in the children's league, and the colonel made his message clear, Boxing is war, and you better win. You better not come home unless you win.” That message and all its corollaries were well understood by Peter before his age was in the double digits. “You’re no good unless you’re a winner. You’re no good.”

By the time he was into his midteens, he could no longer overlook the colonel’s propensity for love taps toward his mother. Paradoxically, he loved her less than the colonel, but it was not she who cast the shadow over the life so volatile that sprang from one so vile. Still she had been so many times his representative; she protected him from the colonels abuse where he could not protect her. And even though as a teenager Peter could defeat their mutual abuser, still he was helpless to raise a hand to the man he loved and envied and, though he would not admit, whose approval he yearned for, would die for. He took many a beating for his mother yet never raised a hand to his father.
And it wasn’t just women and children that fell under the pall of the colonels abuse, if he wanted to, and he wanted the colonel to beat up fully grown men the way he beat up those of them when Peter was just eight. The colonel had left him in the car outside of Kelleys that night. Somehow, on the way out to his son waiting in the car nearby, he picked a fight with a large black man who worked for Kelley. Peter could not watch but could not take his eyes away as his father, Col. Phillip Harman, US Marine, kicked the living dogshit and human pride right out of him. The colonel put him against a wall with a flurry of head punches, then pushed the man’s head back with his right palm, and Peter watched as he bent his knees and wound up and delivered a blow to the man’s liver that dropped him to the fetal position on the ground. The man begged in a raspy dried-out voice, and they would never know if it was that punch or the vicious kick Phillip delivered as he writhed on the ground, but something ruptured the man’s liver, and he died a few hours later. Just before leaving, Peter watched his father spit on the man. Is that what killing a man is about? he has since wondered. Not just taking his life but also robbing him of his dignity as well, is that what he did to someone he wanted to hurt? Is that why we kill? Because his skin is black? Peter always remembered that incident always against his will every time he skinned a kill, and he did skin many kills.
Eventually the colonel was forced to retire and freed to abandon them both. Peter never once cared if his father beat him to death, but rejection from the man he hated was more than he could stand. So he was determined to blow the bastard’s head off first chance, but he never got it. Just after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Phillip, distraught over a world at war without him, got into his full military dress, took his pearl-handled marine revolver, and scattered his brains against the wall of a cheap dive on a remote stretch of Nebraska Highway 50. The Marine’s shrinks said they could find no reason. Peter, only eighteen, wanted nothing to do with reason but purpose. Peter had had a purpose, but now, that purpose lay scattered across the bloodstained wall of a motel. So seamlessly, Peter’s purpose morphed from murdering his father to something else, something much bigger and more difficult than killing the man. It was outdoing him.
Peter could not know of the deeds down deep in his unconscious, but way down in its bowels, it struggled to make sense of the senselessness in his life. Down there, the brain recorded every push, punch, and insult—physical, verbal, and emotional—of his father against his mother and himself. Down there, the mind made up its own stories; the unconscious wipers said its own things. About the colonel’s abuse of him, it said “You deserved it,” and of the abuse against his mother, the abuse that he as a small boy was helpless to prevent, it said “I’ll get you.” His was a life dominated by the tacit assumption that he had no right to it. Unconsciously he expected punishment; silently he screamed aloud for it.

So war couldn’t frighten Peter. It’s not that he didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to die before he could fulfill his purpose, but the son of a bitch had already cheated him of the chance of killing him. He was certain he could not be so unfortunate so soon again. Peter’s problem was that he really had no idea how many men his father had killed. It could have been ten or one hundred. It was definitely the nigger outside of Kelley’s. The juxtaposed combination of certainty of fortune and uncertainty of deeds created a very certain recklessness in the young soldier entering war. There was no definite number beyond which Peter could stop, so he just kept count as best he could and killed as many as possible. On the invasion of Guadalcanal, Peter didn’t just keep count of how many he’d killed but when time permitted, he also took scalps, literally. It was a technique he learned from a boyhood friend who lived on the reservation while he had lived on the base. It was eight on Guadalcanal, ten more on Iwo Jima. War brings out the worst in the very best of men, but in Peter’s case, it simply removed the veneer that at eighteen was already wearing thin. Peter didn’t have many friends; taking eighteen scalps didn’t win him many more. Men at war get accustomed to all manners of brutality. They accept it. But what they really need from their comrades is dependability, and just one look at Harman’s bloodstained scalp sack told them there was nothing like it in there. Most of the men were older than Peter, well into their twenties, but they were afraid of him, and with good reason. So the man who entered war steeped in the belief that he had no right to live left it a full-fledged killer.

For Peter, just like his father, life was war, so domestic life was hell. Peter had seen that firsthand and knew better than to even give it a try. Peter would never raise his hand to a woman; he hated his father too much for that, but he didn’t realize that he thought he was protecting them by keeping them out. Still, for Peter, there were lots of girls, and girls were like enemy fire, hot, and eventually, one always got in.

That girl’s name was Karen, a beauty from a loving family who knew how to love but had never loved one like Peter Harman. She loved him and wanted to marry him. She knew too that he loved her but could not have dreamed just how unwilling to be loved he was. It was in that chasm between love and unwillingness that their relationship died, where all of Peters relationships died. She had fallen in love with him unaware and was left by him uncertain about all she had known before, untrusting of all who would come after, feeling not just unloved but unlovable.

The night he left, he looked her evenly in the eye and, just like he was playing poker, told her a bold-faced lie. “I don’t love you. I don’t care about you. Marry another,” he said, then walked coldly out the door. A block away, he broke down. He broke down and bawled like a little baby. He was ashamed of himself, stopped himself, then cried some more, then was ashamed even more.

He thought he had killed that memory just like so many of the enemy, but he could never have dreamed that it would come back to haunt him or how.

Chapter 3
A Tiger’s Story

The man-eater was not born a killer. As with all tiger cubs, it had to be taught to kill by its mother. The man-eater was born the runt of the litter. By the time it was picking shooters off the backs of elephants, that cat had no memory of its larger brother and sister killed by a leopard less than a meter away. Their mother had left them in the hollow of a large old tree to go hunting. The kittens were too young to follow but old enough to stray into the open, away from the log. All it took was a shift in the wind for a prowling leopard to catch the scent. It was a large male who diverted his energies from killing for food to killing for vengeance. Leopards and tigers compete for the same food source, so leopards will kill tiger cubs.

The man-eater, too young to understand, saw the leopard pounce upon his sister and break her neck and shake her newly lifeless body like a rag doll and heard the sound of its body dropping in the leaves. His brother instinctively called for their mother in a high-pitched plaintive squeal sounding almost like a bark. Yip, yip, yip! But mother was nowhere she could hear. The man-eater saw his brother turn on his back in a pathetic attempt to paw his attacker off, but the leopard bit down and bit the kitten into two. The two halves of his body sounded like a pair of sneakers falling into the leaves. The leopard growled and snorted, sniffed the air, and searched the grass for another cub, for him. The runt had a strange sensation that he did not understand; it was the previously unknown sensation of fear.

Where his sister had been clueless and his brother tried to take action, the runt, much like Peter Harman at the abuse of his father, was too young to possess an emotional vocabulary to cope with what was happening. Confused by the leopard’s horrendous violence and bewildered by the dissevered, lifeless forms of his siblings, the forces within were incapable of grasping the forces without, which paralyzed him, leaving him lying silent in the grass, unsure of what was happening, unable to comprehend this world of his, the world to which he belonged, the Sundarbans.

Had he been able to comprehend, he would not have understood why the leopard turned away. Did the wind shift again, did the leopard think that the mother was returning, or just did it not see him? For whatever reason, the spotted cat turned and left, leaving the runt alone, afraid, and defenseless for hours, unaware even that the leopard was gone. It was the kitten’s first glimpse of violence, his first sense of something wrong, and the first alarm that all is not well from the kill-or-be-killed world that he was now unwillingly part of. And as he lay in the grass with his little body flattened against the ground, the new feeling of fear turned to terror—terror so stark that he attempted to deny his own existence, trying to lay so flat, trying to blend in with the ground, trying to become the ground. That was an art he would perfect, but not on this day. For all the horror it would inspire and horrors it would commit, real or perceived, on this day, the man-eater was just a confused, petrified little kitten lying helpless and flat, desperate for his mother who was nowhere to be found.

When the tigress finally returned, she was initially distraught, expecting to find three cubs to lead to her kill to eat. Instead, she found the lifeless remains of two and a shocked runt in the weeds. Again and again, the runt heard her roar and growl. Again and again, the jungle heard the hurt she could not contain. Langur and chital ran; vultures took flight. The jungle scattered as first the sound waves of her wounded roars crashed through every bush and tree, but gradually, inevitably, they wavered and wafted away like misty breath into the air.

Two-thirds of all tiger cubs in the wild are killed within the first year. With her family having contributed its fair portion to the statistics, the mother tiger was sure not to lose the last of this litter. She doted on her remaining kitten. She hunted exclusively for him. He did not have to compete for his meat. He learned fast. He grew strong. At nine months, he was already the size of a grown male tiger, but at nine months old, just as he had fully overcome the murder of his siblings, he got a brutal refresher about what murder was.

He saw it as he had witnessed his sibling’s murders—confused. His sense of the experience came in different order from its actual occurrence. He stood in the grass watching his mother stalking sambar, but what he saw was something else, something that gave him the same queasy feeling as the murder of his siblings, which made the world strange, unsafe. He watched her artful stalking from a safe distance. She moved only when the sambar moved, then stopped dead still the very second the sambar did. Subtly she pranced through the sun-dappled jungle at the perfect speed, not too fast, never too late, the consummate professional. Suddenly she broke from her crouched position in the grass, charged an adult male, then at the perfect instant, seamlessly changed her target to an adult female.

She was closing the gap when he heard her hit the ground. Then suddenly time, for a short time, moved backward. He saw her stumble, then heard a crackling blast of a rifle shot, then saw in the woods beyond his mother the man holding the gun, turning its smoking barrel toward the sky while standing up. Unlike the first time, when his siblings were murdered, this time, he knew exactly what was happening, knew it well beyond what a tiger should, possessed a full set of emotions with which to cope, for most of which was immediate acceptance. Her body had barely hit the ground before the cold acceptance of the dreadful fact made its appearance. His eyes zeroed in telescopically on the white man who fired the weapon. He could see the sweat drop that formed on the man’s nose and the mosquito as it lifted off his forehead. With no way of knowing, he instantly knew that this man was Jim McCallum, the man with the bounty on tigers. He lay in the grass with his stomach and four paws flat on the ground but his head up, his nose high, smelling the burned gunpowder pungent in the air. He remained absolutely motionless, watching detached as darker men appeared from the brush and moved toward his mother's lifeless form. Emotionlessly he sat, watching them tie her carcass by the paws to a long bamboo rod and carry her off. He remained there completely detached but totally aware, aware of the consequences of his mother’s death to him, aware of the consequences of these men, all men to the jungle, and suddenly aware that he was of consequence, the intended consequence to it all.

The men left and night fell. He felt his body's hunger but was not himself hungry. He heard leopards and knew his body was in danger but was not himself endangered. And when the sun rose once more, he saw a huge male tiger had caught his scent and was coming toward him. He was aware that male tigers kill tiger cubs, but this one would not try to kill his body just as he knew nothing could kill him, who was not a body. This was his father and his protector. As the resident male, his father would naturally keep competing males who would kill him away. But what would happen next was like his telescopic eyesight. It was beyond natural and unparalleled. It would be his father who would finish the training his mother had started. It would be his father, the irascible resident male, who would finish the job of teaching him to be a tiger, the job before the job of being a man hunter.

In the natural course of things, a male tiger would never raise an adolescent cub still a year and a half away to adulthood. But this already was not the natural course of things; this was nature at its most savage and desperate edge. This was the Sundarbans saving itself. He was the Sundarbans saving itself. He, the runt who was chosen to be savior, would be known to all who could know as Salvatore and to the rest as a monster. The leopard killed his siblings, a bullet ended his mother's life, but nothing touched Salvatore. And when another hunter eventually killed his father, it was time for Salvatore to leave school and go to work. And as twelve hunters and twelve mahouts and 389 before them knew, he learned his lessons well.

Chapter 4
Gurunath and Peter

Peter Harman already had the man-eater’s huge paw print embedded indelibly in his mind. He was making his way around the villages where the tiger attacked, not yet hunting, just looking for prints and other physical evidence, listening for clues. The man shepherding him around was Gurunath Mudlapur, a kalu. The two men met in a US army hospital in Australia during the war. Gurunath, fighting for the Garhwalis, was recovering from injuries he received when his unit was strafed by a German fighter plane, and Peter was fighting his release on section eight after his unit was wiped out on Guadalcanal, leaving him its lone survivor. Before he could be reassigned, the war ended. Together, they caroused the bars and red-light districts, generally pissing off the Australian army by fucking all the women and wives they left to fight for and, for Gurunath, a Sikh for whom kesh or uncut hair is a religious principle no less.

Peter had no conflict, either moral or logical, with being at once a racist and friends with Gurunath, a kalu, a nigger. To Peter, being a racist was convenient. It was simply another device for building a wall around himself, locking a door and keeping the outside world out, but letting someone in, letting someone close, that was something that life and war had taught him harshly against. How could he know that here was Gurunath who would soon be knocking?

“Tigers just don’t know about their footprints,” Gurunath said, “or they’d never leave them lying around everywhere.” Peter stood up still, not believing the enormous paw prints they’d been following. He wondered, Should he even be tracking such a thing? “Yea, about one thousand pounds I’d say, twice the size of a normal cat.” Gurunath said, “Cover me,” and Peter watched him walk to the water, expecting him to take a piss. He glanced back into the mangrove trees lining the river for a man-eating tiger that could devour Gurunath, then back at him. Instead, Gurunath went into waist-deep water and removed the red-orange turban in which his long hair was wound. Peter watched his friend remove his brown button-down shirt, submerge himself a couple of times, and wring the shirt with both hands, flexing a slim but superb frame as he did so. He stood there, with the water barely to his waist yet the last several inches of his hair floating in the water around his waist. Once more, Peter glanced the shoreline, then back at Gurunath as water dripped from his full but close-trimmed beard. He put his shirt on while walking ashore; he leaned down to retrieve his pistol and shotgun.

They were on a beach where the man-eater’s huge paw prints led to everywhere and all directions. It was as if the man-eater had a million twins. Peter was irresistibly drawn to following the tracks deeper into the mangrove swamps, but serious consideration of a full-scale hunt at this point was fantasy. Every big-game hunter knows that more than courage and good marksmanship are required for the successful pursuit of dangerous cats. Forethought, preparation, and persistence, though mundane, are indispensable. Peter had only a shotgun and revolver with him. If the man-eater walked out of the mangrove swamp and asked him to dance, he could shoot it, but he had no serious intention of deep penetration into the swamp. But as he would learn the hard way, the Sundarbans had intentions of its own.

Peter heard the growl of a tiger and a man yelling in a language that Peter didn’t understand coming from the swamps. There was no mistaking that Gurunath heard it too. The two men glanced at each other, then into the marsh. They both dropped into a three-point stance, with their right toes and right knee and left foot on the ground, and pointed their shotguns toward the sounds. Together and at once, both men raced toward the commotion. Gurunath was taking the lead for a few meters and then Peter, then Gurunath again. The men moved quickly despite their feet sinking slightly in the muddy dark undergrowth of the mangrove swamp. They heard the angry cat growl louder now as they moved away from the shoreline onto the grassy forest bed. The men broke into a full sprint on the firmer ground, hurling over logs and ditches and around standing trees like a slalom skiers. Feeling the ground flying beneath their feet, their weapons held loosely but firmly, moving side to side across their bodies, counterbalancing furious flying feet. They ran like that, breathing in rhythm, not too shallow, not too deep. Peter saw Gurunath moving from the periphery of his left side toward the center of his field of vision. He ran in a full break, brought the shotgun to his shoulder, and fired a single blast toward a tiger that was on its hind legs, with its two front paws on the tree, preparing to climb. The big cat was out of range, but Gurunath kept charging at light speed, shotgun firm against his shoulder, level with the ground. Peter expected the cat to scurry off into the woods, but instead, it charged full fury at Gurunath.

What happened next, Peter almost couldn’t believe. The tiger, from about twenty meters, leaped at Gurunath, jaws wide open and in full flight as Gurunath somehow jammed the shotgun down the cat’s throat and pulled the trigger and his arms from its jaws slamming shut. The big cat instantaneously reversed her direction in mid flight. It fell dead in the grass as Gurunath leaped over the cascading carcass and turned, reloaded, and pointed his shotgun at the cat. Peter never got a shot.

He heard the cacophony of disparate sounds—the resounding shotgun blast, the rustling of the grass the huge cat fell into, and the sound of his own footsteps pulling up at the base of the tree. All sounds had the same volume. Peter heard a twig explode high above as distinctly as the tiger roars and the shotgun blasts.

Breathing heavily at the base of the tree, both men now looked up. Peter had seen many a treed Indians. He had always marveled at the nonchalance with which they narrowly escaped death. Their courage was equal to that of any shikari. Tigers do not like to climb trees. It’s not that they can’t. They do so expertly. But coming back down for the big cats is difficult. When trapped by a tiger, the Indians climb the nearest tree and scurry out to the end of the highest branch. The man was hanging with both arms fully outstretched, hands firmly around the branch over his head. Peter judged him to be a good sixty feet above the ground. By the time he’d climbed back down, he was so calm that only his bloody palms would reveal that he’d been in any danger at all. It was obvious to Peter and Gurunath that this cat was not the man-eater that they sought, but neither can a man in the tree be judged safe. Tigers don’t like to climb trees, but they can do so expertly.

Peter had not come here to hunt the man-eater with Gurunath, nor was he easily impressed by other men, but though he didn’t show it, he was wide-eyed amazed by Gurunath. He had known the man but never saw him in action. Peter had not seen his skill, his fleet of foot, and his courage before today. Peter had heard a story from reliable sources, but to Peter, seeing is believing, and Peter was believing in Gurunath. Gurunath was a pistol man. When his position was overrun by Germans, Gurunath jumped out of his foxhole, sprinting like a gazelle with a pistol blazing from each hand. He hit everything he aimed at on a dead run, killing twelve Germans and saving at least ten of his own. Peter knew the story but didn’t know whether to believe it. Now he believed it. The only reason Peter was holding a shotgun instead of a rifle right now was on the advice of Gurunath.

Gurunath was the oldest, fastest, and strongest of three sons. He was proud to be their protector, his family's protector even at a young age. He was eleven when he killed a leopard. The cat broke into the hut where his brothers were sleeping. Gurunath lay awake with his father’s shotgun in the bed beside him. It was a shotgun blast that killed the leopard and saved his brothers, jolting them from the sleep from which they otherwise would not wake. Gurunath was a dead aim with the revolver, but in close where firepower is needed, Gurunath for such good reason believed in and only in the shotgun.

Gurunath held nothing against the leopard; he was protecting his family. He held nothing against the Nazis; he was protecting his countrymen. He held nothing against the tiger he had just killed and whose still-warm body lay in the grass just meters away, and he would hold nothing against the man-eater if he were to hunt it but would kill it just the same, just the same way he killed everything else that he put his will into.

Up till now, Peter had always hunted animals the hard and fast rule, which he’d learned as a sniper—go alone. When it goes bad for whatever reason, if your partner is injured, you’ll kill yourself trying to save him. If you are injured, you’ll kill him trying to save you. But hunting tigers is always more dangerous because in addition to their overwhelming power and supernatural stealth, the big cats always circle back on their tracks. It’s a natural ploy, and any hunter soon becomes the hunted as well. Though he’d often said anyone stalking a tiger could use backup, Peter had never found one he considered worthy. It was like a highly acclaimed award that had never been given out.

As they walked the treed man out of the jungle, Gurunath mentioned, as though he ordered tea, that he thought the tigress had a couple of broken canine teeth. Peter quipped that he was sure she did now, and they both laughed, but laughed uneasily.

Humans are not the natural prey of tigers. They only become so when the animal becomes sick or injured. The tigress that Gury had just shot had been shot before but, due to inadequate follow-up, had escaped injured and was forced to consume humans. Having more than one man-eater in the vicinity was not unheard of, but what could entice a huge powerful male, twice the size of normal tigers, to scavenge humans?

Chapter 5
A Wise Man

Gurunath suggested they see a witness and village wise man, Satish Sethi. Sethi was known to go into the jungle for days at a time with no provisions or weapons. He claims to have been with the man-eater in the wild and now lives to tell about it. All anyone has is his word, and though none could confirm it, no one doubted him either. Peter Harman would be the first to question him, with no way to know how costly verifying the truth would be.

Gurunath pulled the jeep’s bumper up to an old tree stump, and the men got out and walked toward a row of huts backed against the jungle. Peter noted how easily anything in the forest could strike the village and return to the darkness unseen. Either this Satish had nothing to fear from the man-eater or he was a fool. Gurunath said he was sixty, so that ruled out idiocy. He was dying to know if he was telling the truth about the tiger and, more importantly, how an unarmed old man could be alone in the wild with the man-eater and live to tell. The sun waned now, and the row of huts was being swallowed by the trees’ shadows. As the men entered Satish’s hut, Peter whispered to Gurunath that it would be dark when they came out and felt for his revolver.

Satish greeted them at the door and let them inside. Peter was a predator whose well-honed fight-or-flight response system took over automatically. To him, the sixty-year-old looked healthy but frail. He underestimated Sethi immediately. The man standing in the middle of the floor offering him tea in the queen’s most proper dialect had no business in the swamps, let alone next to a man-eater. Peter, having no interest in small talk, got right to the point.

“Did you see the man-eater? How big was he,” Peter asked.

“Oh, about one thousand pounds, I’d say,” replied Satish in a tone that intimated, “if you want to play it that way.” The two men stared at each other, and Peter smiled a wry smile.

“That’s twice the size of a regular tiger,” he retorted accusingly, knowing full well that as impossible as it might seem, one thousand pounds was about spot-on. He had been looking at the cat’s tracks all day.

“That, sir, is no ordinary tiger,” Satish said as he accurately gauged Peter Harman who had just missed the mark on his man again.

Creating conflict was Peter Harman’s way of life. Without it, he was barely sure that he was alive, and he felt himself coming to life now, but conflict with Satish was like lobbing a hand grenade only to have it tossed back, just before blowing up in your face.

“I know it’s not a normal tiger. It’s a man-killer. It’s a cruel, bloodthirsty man-eater.”

“Sir, you know tigers as well as me, and you know that they hunt to eat. They kill to ease the hunger burning holes in their stomach. Be honest, and you will admit that you have never seen a case where a tiger has been deliberately cruel, has killed unprovoked, beyond that needed to feed itself or its cubs. We both are well aware that a tiger, unless molested, will do harm to no one,” said Satish.

“You almost sound like you admire it.” Peter’s voice grew more accusatory.

Unapologetically Satish said, “I most certainly do admire that cat, sir.”

“Well, you shouldn’t. It’s a fucking man-killer.”

“Sir, you have killed more men than that cat.”

“And how would you know?” asked Peter.

“I can judge by your age that you survived the war but never left it, that you masquerade as a hunter, but in truth, war was just an excuse. In truth, you are a killer.”

“You figured me out awfully fast, old man.”

“I live in the jungle, and just as you, I recognize the cat by the paw.”

Sethi had indeed recognized the cat by the paw, but even he couldn’t see the rage he had unleashed. Peter Harman had always enjoyed the full cover of a reason for the exercise of his bloody rage. He was not particularly concerned with the welfare of humanity in general, but he was peculiarly obsessed with the opinion of him held by those he could not care about, including himself. He was peculiarly obsessed with having an excuse. That’s why Peter’s irritation, which had been growing exponentially, had continuously exploded beyond reason or reasoning, taking him, Sethi, and Gury aback.

“Fucking goddamn right I am. I’ve killed men and lions and tigers, I’ve killed birds and fish. At one time or another, I’ve killed anything that’s ever walked or crawled or moved. I’ve killed things on every continent on Earth and things they don’t even have in books yet, and I’m gonna kill your goddamn tiger, old man.” Peter said it—oolldd maaan. And Sethi could see every tooth in his mouth as Peters lips peeled back to say it.

“Yes, you’re obviously very proud.”

“Yes, and I’m still gonna kill it,” Peter said in the same firm monotonic tone that said he believed every word of it and revealed that he had entered a different state of mind.

“So why is it that you want so badly to kill this cat? What for?” asked Satish.

Gurunath, who had the unique ability of accepting Peter without judgment, looked on as though he were not present, as though he was watching a movie or a battle from a ridge high above it all. He saw that the question took Harman completely by surprise. It seemed as if he hastily scanned several alternative responses before selecting the appropriate one.

“For the people in the village so they no longer have to live in fear of being eaten alive.” But when just seconds ago Harman’s attitude was of white-hot, this reply he delivered with utter feebleness.

“Sir, I have seen the man-eater. I have stood right next to him alone in the woods. He does not frighten me, sir. You do.”

Even Sethi couldn’t know how damaging that simple truth was. Peter Harman, having spent just under four decades on the planet, had made a living out of killing and a habit of seeing in himself no evil. But here, a thin frail old man was peeling back the lid of both blind eyes, and it hurt to look. But Satish Sethi kept right on pulling, “You don’t give a shit about the people in the village,” he continued.” If you did, you could simply tell them to move back a few miles from the jungle and the tiger would leave them alone. It is they who have encroached on the tiger’s domain. It is they who put a choke hold on the jungle. They can leave or stay. The tiger is confined to the woods, and that, sir, is shrinking rapidly.”

“Fuck the forest, old man” was Harman’s retort.

“But mankind has been doing precisely that for hundreds of years, until now when Mother Nature must rein them in.”

“So the tiger kills for the forest?” Harman asked disbelievingly.

“The tiger is the forest fighting back,” Satish said. “Unlike you, sir, the self-appointed murder for the people, the tiger is the protector of the Sundarbans, its manifestation of a savior. I call him Salvatore. He is the jungle’s projection of a protector.”

Peter was stunned and turned his gaze to the old man askance. “This is almost 1960, old man.”

“The date is irrelevant. The jungle protects its own. It preserves the balance of life, even your life, my murderous young friend. Even in normal times, a tigers function is to help maintain the balance of nature, but in this most dire of occasions, the jungle created Salvatore as your body would white blood cells to restore the balance of nature.”

“I’m not your friend, old man.”

“Nevertheless, I am picking up that the Sundarbans are calling you here, not to kill or be killed but to be healed if you will be healed.”

“And I am picking up that you are a stupid, superstitious old man, and I’m going to shoot your tiger, and I’ll burn your fucking jungle to the last blade of grass to do it if I have to.”

“Young man, it’s not that you do or don’t have to, but you can’t. You can’t burn the jungle down, nor can you kill the man-eater. You may shoot it all you want, but you can never kill it. The Sundarbans doesn’t choose to create conflict or choose between mankind and the tiger. It seeks only to protect the priceless and irreplaceable life which dwells within. It will protect you if you allow it to or allow you to destroy yourself if you should force it. The choice is yours, but either way, the balance of life will be preserved.”

Peter Harman began a chuckle, which gradually erupted into full-blown contemptuous laughter. But as Peter Harman left laughing through the old man's door, he had no way of knowing that the joke was on him, that he had underestimated Satish Sethi for the last time.

Chapter 6
First Blood

“Sahib, Sahib, came the plaintive cry that brought Peter Harman out of his hut. Down the dusty dirt path, he saw Gurunath calmly following after the excited little man called out, “There’s another kill, another man-eater kill.”

“Where?” asked Peter intently.

“Not far from where we were yesterday,” Gury answered, walking up to Peter’s door. “About twenty villagers went to the water. They said they checked the beach and the jungle thoroughly and thought it was safe, but the man-eater came out of the bushes which they had just checked and killed two women. It just left their bodies there on the beach. They are still blaming each other for not being careful enough.” What Gury wasn’t saying was that there was no way to be careful enough. There was no well enough. There was only a man-eater that appeared from nowhere to be wherever he wanted to be. He knew that Peter understood that too, despite his protestations to Satish to the contrary.

Peter was already moving back inside when he said, “Then he’ll be back to finish his meal, and we will be there to clean up.”

“Does we mean me?” Gury asked expectantly. Peter never replied and just disappeared inside and quickly reappeared with his Aston Martini rifle and shotgun. Gury was hurt, taking Peter’s silence as a rejection.

“It’s four clock o now,” Peter said. “We'll never get there before dark.”

“Oh yes, we will, Sahib,” Gury assured. “We will go by sea,” Gury said, and Peter’s face changed from inquisitive to a smile. “We can drive upstream to a canoe and be at the kill site around a dark. The river widens there in the shoreline is shaped like a big horseshoe,” Gury continued. “When the tiger comes to finish his kill, he will be standing in about a thousand square feet of open sand. The problem won’t be seeing him through the cover but seeing him on the humongous beach. You’ll need two shooters.”

“We have two shooters, Peter said, and Gury realized that Peter had simply ducked back into his hut to retrieve the weapons and never heard the offer. In fact, Gury need not have even volunteered at all; Peter had implicitly taken him up to it.

“We don’t have a contract,” Gury reminded him.

Gury smiled as Peter said, “Listen, if that tiger is there, we are going to bag him. I don’t care about some bureaucrat sitting on his flabby fat ass or that fucking limey McCallum.”

Peter also agreed that having two shooters was a good idea. Tigers have superb night vision; they can detect a blade of grass rattling two football fields away in pitch-black. A man on a boat scanning the beach 270 degrees might as well put a neon sign on his swiveling head.

Gurunath Mudlapur was a kalu, but he didn’t give a fuck. That’s what Peter liked. He’d kill anything that moved, and he didn’t give a shit about the tigers magical powers. Tonight, there was only one man Peter Harman trusted besides himself, and that man was Gurunath Mudlapur. And if his father, Col. Phillip Harman, US Marine, wanted to say something about it, he shouldn’t have evacuated his skull captivity in a motel on US Highway 50 with a pearl-handled revolver. On this night, it was a nigger who would have his back.

So it was that as dusk fell on the Sundarbans in blood-red-and-yellow reflection that Peter and Gurunath Mudlapur rowed their boat as silently as a tiger’s crawl into the mangrove swamp in the tiger’s home range. They anchored the boat in the wide smooth river, both men on their stomachs, rifle butts snug against their shoulders, fingers tapping their triggers, and grips calm but firm under the barrels, and above all, each man was absolutely silent and motionless.

As the warm bloody dusk changed to dark red, then a dying purple, then to black, the men’s eyes adjusted in tune to the jungle’s rhythm of light to dark, better able to search in the darkness for the marsh’s man-eater. Gurunath took the stern and scanned the eastern half of the U-shaped shoreline while Peter reclined into the V shape of the bow, feeling very much as he had in a foxhole. But even to the veteran of so many a foxhole, the substance of the blackness and the visceral feel seemed like a curtain cloaking the man next to him, separating him from the man lying motionless inches from him. He remembered a night like this one in the war, when the cloak was suddenly blown apart, lifted by artillery fire, and he could see silhouetted against the blast the head of the man next to him exploded by a bullet, as capricious as it is deadly. And as the brains of what had been briefly his best friend, of what had held dreams of a future beyond the madness of war, and of what would have been a father and husband pelted his face in bloody droplets, Peter lost not just another friend but also another piece of his rapidly dwindling humanity. After his unit pushed back the Japanese advance, they found Peter in his foxhole with eight enemy infantry in his foxhole, shot dead and decapitated. It had sickened even the most hardened soldier but only served to harden the soldier called Peter Harman. He never made another friend after that. He’d put the final brick in the wall, separating himself from humanity.

Peter remembered that night as thickly black as this one and having a friend not unlike the man with him, and he began to tremble. There was nothing to worry about. There was no army out there, just one big cat that would be killed by one small bullet, traveling fast, as fast as the one that killed his friend. There was something wrong. In the war, he had learned to follow this extra sense of fear to be certain of the sense of danger when there was no reason to suspect it—and he was certain of it now. Where was Gury? It had been hours since dark, but the multitude of stars blanketed the sky. Altogether, they shed not a single ray on the earth, and he couldn’t know how long it had been. “Gury,” he wanted to say but dared not. He dared not so as not to reveal his true fear, to himself, to Gury if he was still there. Was he still there? He inched his left leg closer to where Gury was, should be, but felt nothing. Gury was gone. How? It’s a boat goddammit. You’d hear something, feel the damn thing rock. Nothing could come or go, but something did. It must have. There’s nothing to worry about.

“Not going to be a tiger here tonight, my friend,” Gury said, and Peter nearly jumped out of his skin. It was all he could do to restrain himself from asking Gury if he felt the same thing too.

Had he just made a prudent judgment or used that as an excuse? Instead Peter simply agreed, “Yea, you’re right. That tiger drank and left hours ago. Let’s get outta here.”

Then Peter put his oar in the water and began to row, half-waiting for a verbal agreement from Gury. He never got it. It took only a single stroke for Peter to realize that he was the only one rowing; he was the only one in the boat. He dropped the oar and grabbed the gun. There was the sound of a single splash, and Peter let rip a flurry of shots into the water in that direction. Through the red flash of muzzle burst, he could see Gury’s hand slapping the water's surface until his gun was empty. Continuously he dropped his and raised Gury’s gun, but the tiger was already ashore. Peter shone his flashlight along the muddy bank until the beam caught the glimpse of a soaking-wet tiger carrying the limp body of Gury by the nape of the neck. But just before the tiger dissolved into the mangrove swamp, in a split second, Gury became alive. His body flailed as if electrified. Peter dropped the flashlight and fired again and again into the night, but nothing was there, and just like his mother, he was powerless to help. And just as with his best friend in war, Gury was never seen again.

He fumbled the oar in his hands, banging it against the boat as he turned the water alongside it. Clumsily he paddled into the night. He bent backward in desperation and felt small beneath the carpet of stars in the sky, listened to the water sounds lapping against the boat, and tried to control his breathing. It was all he could do just to glide back with the tide.

When the sun broke, Peter sat alone in the beached boat with his arms around his knees and face buried in between them. He lifted his head and ran his hand across his stubble, his face half-light and half-dark in the shadows, whose relief was intensifying with the rising sun. It was as if the light laid bare all that he was ashamed of to himself. Peter’s mind had a mind of its own that calculated the most intensely painful way in which to recall it, then recalled it in the same manner again and again. His hands were still shaking, so he clenched his fists, trying to deny them, to deny that he was terrified, to deny that Gury might still be alive, but he did nothing to help him, just like he did nothing to help his mother.

But in every way, what had just happened seemed impossible. The tiger had swam up to the boat, grabbed Gury, and swam away without making a sound. Unnatural. Supernatural. In his life, Peter had experienced rage, been through the dangers of war, and had seen firsthand the ugliest of humanity, but until now, he had never felt stark terror, had never been truly rattled.

And just now, he recalled the shame of a deeply buried memory brought violently to light, and now, he felt the shame all over again. He remembered the night he walked out on Karen. He remembered the way he broke down, completely! He felt it, the shame of it, as though it had just happened, it had just happened and against his will. Compared to the events of the prior night, it wasn't much. It wasn't what swam up to the boat and carried Gury away. It wasn't making his hands tremble now. It wasn’t something that could kill him. But it was what made him vomit between his knees.

Chapter 7
Duel

Peter would kill the tiger to avenge Gury. He was aware that killing the tiger would not bring back his friend, and to many, that would seem unsatisfying. Peter didn’t give a damn. Killing that tiger would make him feel a lot better; killing always made Peter Harman feel better. But just like a wounded tiger, he would first have to get his edge back, and the man at his door had news to help him along. Peter’s dark hut gave way partway to the light as he opened the door. His eyes focused first on the tahsildar’s patent leather shoes. Tenderfooted prick, he thought, then quickly ran his eyes up the bureaucrats nondescript body, to the face of a man who disapproved of Peter as much as Peter did of him.

“Jim McCallum has quit his contract,” was the officials greeting. “Do you want it?”

“Fucking goddamn right I do,” Peter said righteously.

“He didn’t even say why,” the tahsildar offered, “just came to my office and said he was no longer interested.” Peter didn’t give a shit why or why not, but having the contract was no small matter. With more than one shikari in an area pursuing the same animal, it was sure to turn into a clusterfuck, and added uncertainty was the last thing he wanted now. Peter was willing to kill the man-eater when he didn’t have it but was more than pleased the contract was his.

He didn’t want to tell the bureaucrat about Gury, but he had to. Gury was Hindu, so it was imperative that some of his remains be found and properly cremated. The officious little prick didn’t even seem to care. Of course he didn’t. He just wanted someone to kill the tiger, to fix his problem. He didn’t give a shit about the harm it did. Peter could not see that part of himself in the tahsildar, the part that didn’t give a shit. He assured him that, yes, he had seen it well enough through the light of the muzzle burst, but he did not tell him that the last thing he saw was Gury snapping back to life and flailing, calling him to help him, to do something. He did not say that what he saw was impossible or that he was too scared shitless to do anything about it. He left that part out.

He had recovered Gury’s double-barrel from the boat. The end of the left barrel had been bent beyond repair, so Peter sawed most of both barrels off so that the entire weapon was not much longer than a revolver. This would be Peter’s in-close weapon, inspired by Gury.

Most shikari go out early in the morning, pick up the tiger’s tracks, and follow them. But it’s too dangerous to track the nocturnal beast at night, so they must allow time for return by night or hold up in a marchant. But now, Peter had the contract, the legal means to follow the innate will to kill, and for Peter, that meant no turning back. He would stalk that big cat, trap it, and kill it and not come back until he did so, or not come back.

The tahsildar had barely left when Peter, with just the clothes on his back, his Martini-Henry, sawed-off double-barrel, and revolver, set off down the dirt path. By the time the tahsildar’s patent leathers strolled into his office, Peter was off the trail and into the Sundarbans, and neither would see the other until it was done.

Running fast into the woods, Peter remembered what Gury had said, “Tigers wouldn’t leave so many tracks.” Here in the knee-high grass, there were no pugmarks, but it was still easy to track a tiger. The alarm calls off chital, and langurs made audible arrows pointing if not to the tiger then to his vicinity, and as the grass tickled his knees, Peter zeroed in on the clamor of frenzied panic calls.

Human beings have no sense of smell; tigers have a superior one. So Peter approached the area in which he both hoped and dreaded the man-eater was, from downwind. He was glad to be on foot. It’s much easier to kill a tiger when shooting on foot than when shooting down from an elephant or marchant. Random shots would not do for a one-thousand-pound animal; for this, only the vitals would do, and they are accessible when shooting down in the grass on the level with the tiger. Down here, the Martini-Henry’s power and accuracy would atone for its cannon kick, and if it didn’t, Peter would drop it to the ground immediately and bring up Gury’s ready-loaded double-barreled sawed-off shotgun. If that didn’t do it, then fuck it.

Scanning ahead, Peter could see the langurs scurry into trees around a clearing. From the flattened grass in the field, he could tell something large had fallen there. It may be a sambar, and it may be a tiger feeding on it. He was approaching downwind of the tree, and so long as the agitation in the grass marked the tigers position, he need only be patient and silent to get close.

Closer, closer, Peter had learned to stalk like the cats that he hunted. Slowly the left foot, then the right foot next to it, finger on the trigger, barrel to the sky over the left shoulder, then right foot, easy, easy half of the weight, and rest, then the left foot. Peter closed in with agonizing patience to the outer rim of the tree’s branches. He moved up next to it under the din of screaming, scurrying langurs. He was afraid they would give him away; he was wrong. The man-eater knew that he was there all along.

As Peter dropped to a knee and inched the barrel around the trunk and leveled it, a huge cat rose to all fours and stared at him. Peter had the clear view of its entire body standing in the flattened grass as he lined up his shot, but when he closed his left eye and centered the Martini-Henrys sightmark between the big cats eyes, something was wrong. He tried to refocus, opened his left eye, then closed it again, but to no avail. It was as if the distance between him and the cat was shrinking, then it disappeared altogether, and Salvatore was at the end of his barrel as though he’d been there all along. Peter could see nothing else, just the huge green eyes on either side of his sight mark down the long end of his barrel, and he couldn't move, couldn't even twitch. He tried to pull the trigger but heard his body hitting the ground, felt it rolling the grass, and saw the white underbelly of the monstrous tiger flying over.

Peter rolled over backward a few more times but came up to his feet with the sawed-off shotgun pointing in the direction of the disappearing tiger. Quickly he scanned 360 degrees and noticed that it was suddenly getting dark, and the langurs were dead silent.

He retrieved his rifle and walked for a half mile in the blood was red dusk. Finding a suitable tree, he climbed it, tied his rifle to his arm, and settled in for the night. But it was an unsettling night.

As the darkness fell, the deep recesses of Peter’s guilt-ridden unconscious came volcanically active. “You should have tried to save your friend.” “It was an optical illusion. He was dead. There is only one chance in a million he was alive.” “You should have taken that chance, you chickenshit son of a bitch. Because of you, he’s dead. You killed him.”

Gury was alive; was that an illusion? The man-eater in his sights today, was that an illusion? For how long had he had the shot? How long had he not taken the shot? Why not?

Peter was dreaming of Gury’s face in the light of the muzzle burst as he disappeared with the tiger into the swap. But it was not the dream that woke him up but rather the angry growls of a sloth bear nearby.

The bear was no immediate threat. Judging from the sounds of things, she had probably lost a cub to the stealth of a leopard or tiger. Sloth bears possess bad tempers at their best, but a mother wounded over the loss of a cub would doubtless be at her ugly worst. He could not have slept anyway, but with Gury’s face in plain sight at his mind’s eye and the sloth bear’s angry, plaintive calls caroming off the night, it had the effect of twisting an already deeply buried blade. By sunrise, his nerves were frayed.

Concentrating on the alarm calls of langur and kakar distracted his jagged nerves. The calls came from less than a mile away, and while there were many tigers and leopards to cause the alarm, with no way of knowing how, Peter knew that from now on, there was only one, and that one was waiting for him less than a mile away.

The calls led him to a ravine, shallow enough to see over the sides but too sparsely populated by shrubs for a large tiger to hide in. So he moved into the ravine and walked right down the center, looking always in all directions at once, even up. The constant surveillance was a procedure born of discipline, but what kept Peter alive until now went beyond training and the five senses. What had gotten him here was what couldn't be trained for, what couldn't be explained, what couldn't be experienced, only realized. He had realized it that night in the boat with Gury. Maybe they both had, but he didnt believe it, like a boxer who hesitates then gets hit. Why did he wait? So long as there was no accompanying sense of danger, Peter went dutifully along in the scripted manner. And when the ravine deepened so that he could no longer gaze over its sides, responsibly, Peter climbed to the top of it but did not feel that sense of urgency. He had even stopped looking for it, so when it came, it came from nowhere. It came from behind that large rock ahead to his left. That awareness coursed like electricity through his veins. For ten minutes, he stood perfectly still and absolutely silent, knowing he was being watched, being watched by a one-thousand-pound tiger behind the rock, staring through the rock at him.

He had to get out of this ravine. From here, the walls slanted upward about forty-five degrees for about twenty feet but went ninety degrees the top six feet. Holding his rifle in front of him made it easily to the perpendicular, then he swung his foot and arm up and slid over the top on his stomach. Taking to the high ground proved to be a wise move. On the other side of the big rock, staring calmly up at him, as he expected, was the man-eater. Peter was still taken aback by its size. Lazily the big cat turned then moved down into the ravine, and never letting him leave his sight, Peter jumped expertly back into the rocky walls and grassy bottom after it.

The big cat stopped, lowered its head, and looked back again. What a monster, Peter thought, leveling his rifle at a shot through the point of the cat’s shoulder. This was a certain kill shot, and this time, he did not hesitate. From twenty-five yards out, Peter put a bullet diagonally across the cats massive body, then for good measure pulled a second trigger even as the first was in flight. From twenty-five yards out, Peter missed the massive target twice. Pulling the first trigger produced nothing but a hollow click, the second a pure miss to which he could assign no reason. Watching the big cat calmly turn and disappear deeper into the ravine, Peter was suddenly in no hurry to follow.
Instead, he turned to his left and looked up about two hundred yards on the rock face where the sound of his shots had dislodged two goats. He reloaded, lined the first one up in his sight, and evenly pulled the trigger, then watched it stagger, fall, and slide down the face of the ravine. By the time he shot a second goat, it was 250 yards off, and it rolled down and slid past where the first one had come to a halt and then continued off the cliff, and Peter heard it rolling in the grass below. Killing two small goats at ten times the distance from which he missed the man-eater confirmed Peters suspicion that there was nothing wrong with his shot or his rifle. What Peter Harman could not know was that, for now, Salvatore was leaving him. The big cat had more pressing business farther down in the ravine.

Peter spent the night in a shallow cave just under the place where he shot the goats. He did not sleep, nor did he miss it, but he ate for the first time in two days, and despite the two misses for which he could provide no explanation, he would not be deterred. Glowing like a coal ember in the firelight, Peter listened to the jungles night sounds and schemed.

Having fed and feeling no ill effects from lack of sleep, he moved back into the ravine as soon as there was light enough to track by. The ravine deepened to about six feet, and the rock walls gave way to grassy sides that he could easily surmount with a running start. The man-eater’s pugmarks disappeared up the right side over the ravine. Peter did not follow; instead, he continued down the ravine, being sure to leave his own tracks and, more importantly, his own scent by which a tiger could track him.
This was a very delicate and dangerous game he was playing. He pulled the sawed-off shotgun out and rested it comfortably by the crook of his left shoulder, though it was not so comforting, thanks to the events of the prior evening. Now he proceeded forward slowly, ever so cautiously, with shotgun and rifle forming an X in front of him as he swiveled his body so that the arc of his guns covered the left side of the ravine to the right side, then back to the left again. He scanned vertically upward as well. The mode of progression, though awkward, maximized surveillance. Down on his hip was his revolver, if he needed it, if he could get to it.
The trick now was to go this way for as long as he could without being killed by the man-eater. It would all depend on the wind, which came from behind him now, but the instant that it shifted, Peter was out of the ravine and sprinting back to where he entered it, but as he did so the second time, he was downwind and downwind of everything in the ravine. The tiger was in the ravine.
Now Peter started tracking his own tracks. He wore his rifle diagonally across his back as he went, keeping the sawed-off shotgun out, loaded, arcing from side to side. Down there, it was tight and closed. Down there, he believed in what Gury believed in the shotgun and only the shotgun.
But this time, he was forced to move a little faster and, necessarily, with greater risk. He and the man-eater were playing the same game now, and who would win would depend on who played it best and had the best luck. In the latter, Peter thought he had the edge. He had never needed luck to kill anything; he had always just been too good at it.
Peter came across his old footprints and fully expected sooner or later to find the man-eater’s fresh-cut marks on top of them, but what he found instead were the bloody, shredded bodies of two poachers.
The bodies were spread along the length of twenty yards. It looked like a murder scene, reminding him of the time in Africa when a massive male lion grabbed a hyena and, while growling angrily, violently shook it to pieces then with disdainful indifference dropped it on the ground. It wasn’t feeding. It wasn’t self-defense. It was angry, naked aggression against a rival species, and it was precisely what Salvatore had done to the two poachers. Is that what mankind was to Salvatore, a rival species? It wasn’t the kind of question that Peter typically asked, let alone pondered on, but just now, he couldn’t refuse it. It was certainly a rival species to Peter Harmon.
He moved cautiously here. Looking down, he saw the huge pugmarks of the man-eater superimposed in blood over his own, and on he went. Beyond the shredded bodies, beyond where the entrails became entangled with the weeds, beyond the bits of clothing and smashed rifles, beyond the kill site and upwind of its stench, Peter Harman tracked the bloody pugmarks of the giant man-eater tracking him.

When Salvatore turned to give the shikari a shot, he had no way of knowing whether or not he’d take it. He observed the hunter intensely as he leveled a rifle at him from one knee. Salvatore did not understand this man any more than he had Jim McCallum initially. He understood men’s fire sticks since the day McCallum shot his mother. When a year and a half later he finally gave McCallum a shot at him, he felt the man’s pain that day, upon realizing his mother was not a man-eater for which he had been deputized to kill. His regret was sincere. Killing must be purposeful, and killing the wrong tiger did no one any good. He understood too that McCallum was a hard man, a man that could readily kill but not one that had to. The man simply knew of no other way to solve things, nor did he understand the damage of his deeds. Yet when Salvatore helped McCallum to heal himself, the ex-hunter lowered his rifle, hiked out of the swamps, walked into the tahsildar’s office, resigned his contract, and never fired a shot at another living thing for as long as he lived.
But when Peter Harman lined up to take a shot, Salvatore felt the burning rage, like the flames in the elephant hunt. This man’s thoughts were too scattered, too erratic to decipher. So he froze time in the air just before the man could pull the trigger. After getting his read and releasing his grip on time, he charged the man, and that was when Peter was knocked over and could only catch a blur of his underbelly. It was good that he did. What the young cat, the old spirit, did not understand on their first meeting came through clearly on the second. Unlike McCallum who was a hunter, this man was a killer. While McCallum killed things that were outside of him, Harman projected his inner rage and hate outward onto the outside world, which was blindsided by it. He hated and sought to destroy every living thing that could hurt him, and he thought that every living thing could. He sought relief from his pain, which was within, by destroying all that lay without. He could live a thousand years and never be healed. He was hunting the wrong thing in the wrong place. Still, it wasn’t that Salvatore couldn’t help heal him but rather that, like so many of his kind, he would not be healed.
Salvatore was still new to this game in this body, in this lifetime. He recognized that he still had much to learn, to remember. He now regretted pulling Gury from the boat in the darkness. It should have been the white man instead, but the burgeoning sense of himself was relentless. There were perhaps a few like him, somewhere in the Amazon or Africa maybe deep in the oceans, but here and now, in the Sundarbans, it was all up to him, and he was already aware that there was only one way for Peter Harman.
When Salvatore sensed the poachers further down the ravine, he left Peter. He wasn’t sure if he sensed or smelled the two men down in the gorge. Were they poaching leopards and tigers? Were they hunting for him? At this stage in his development, he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t be sure that the bullets that pierced his skin could do no harm. He was still remembering. For now, the only thing he could be sure of was that the men stalking down the gorge where hardened and capable and hunting for him. He must stop them. But how? He had learned from his mother to take no unnecessary risks, so even for a mighty cat such as him, Salvatore chose ambush. The problem for Salvatore was not intercepting them; it was where to set the trap for experienced, hardened men who would be looking for it. For this, he would return to his first days as a cub lying in hiding from the leopard.
Santosh Kumar and Deepack Parekh were nervous. Between them, they’d killed hundreds of big cats, leopards, and tigers, but now, they had the eerie feeling of knowing that they were being watched, being watched by something close and dangerous, something that must be right there but wasn’t. They eyed each other, then kept a distance of about twenty feet or so. Whatever it was couldn’t kill them both at once. They ran their eyes up and down the ravine.

They were at the epicenter of the animal rancor, with the langur swinging wildly in the branches and the entire jungle screaming that there was a one-thousand-pound tiger right next to them, but they still couldn’t see it. And the spot on which they stood was not the best place in the gorge for an ambush. It was relatively sparse, certainly no place down in it for a big cat to hide, so it had to be up on either side of the ridge. Santosh Kumar looked down into the orange clay earth for tracks but noticed only the long black stripes that ran for about ten feet toward each side of the ravine. Then with Deepack Parekh getting more and more spooked, he knelt for a closer look. Santosh put his hand on the ground and immediately thought it odd that it should be warm. He thought it was odder still to see a large oval red blood splotch hit the back of his hand. But when he looked up, he saw the entire sky raining blood. It was the last thing he saw.
Deepack was right to be spooked. Santosh was dead. But the only thing he was aware of was the ground moving beneath his feet. He first thought it was an earthquake when the ground moved, pushing him over as if he were rolled downhill. What he did not see was the enormous tiger that poured his powerful body out of the ground in the shape of a huge teardrop, then that of a vicious snarling man-eating tiger. Salvatore snatched Deepack from behind so that the back of his head hit the bottom of his feet. The last thing Deepack Parekh saw was the ground coming up hard. Then Santosh Kumar and Deepack Parekh had their bloody bodies smeared into the filthy earth until they lay dry and shredded and dead in the blood storm in the gorge.
Peter and the man-eater were tracking each other in a large oval down in the ravine, and neither wanted to be the one to be surprised by the other. Peter thought he could follow the pugmarks from the top of the ravine. So with the shotgun leading and the rifle secured across his back, he ran up the right-hand side of the ravine wall then moved ever so cautiously along its length.
A full-grown tiger can hide under a dry twig, so each bush and thicket of high grass and every tree became an enemy because the enemy, unseen, could strike from there. Yet under these conditions, Peter had to move quickly. He had to take that risk to avoid the certain risk of being caught from behind. So along the ridge he went with the shotgun snugly in the crook of his arm and pointing both barrels down rim, north, south, east, west, up, and down. He went that way, judiciously weighing the risks of speed and thoroughness against each other. He went that difficult way all the way until he nearly tripped over the tail of the one-thousand-pound tiger.
A lifetime of many wars had taught Peter to readily accept facts as they were, not as they ought to be. He had tried to shoot this tiger before and failed. Maybe Sethi was right. Maybe this was a spiritual tiger or maybe just a spiritual kitten. He knew things went weird when looking this cat in the eyes and went weirder when taking a shot. But no one else could have kept calm when the wires of nature shorted out and sparked, and the illusion became real, and a simple bush became a one-thousand-pound man-eating tiger. The tiger’s tail disappeared into the bush and became the bush, which in turn became a tiger. Before him, the bush curled and twisted into the shape of a tiger turning around in place, turning to attack. Peter didn’t expect for the illusion of the bush to become its reality. Salvatore wasted not a second in denial. He blasted it instantly.
Peter took the shot from a three point behind the great cat. The blast was louder than he expected, but as anticipated, the kick from the dense weapon pushed him over to his back. From there, he sat up and spread his legs in anticipation of delivering the contents of the sawed-off shotguns second barrel right down the throat of the beast, but what happened instead he would recall for all his days however numbered they may be.
The tiger turned around all right but leaped twenty feet into the air, four paws extended straight down, growling with the most vicious, snarling growls Peter had ever heard. Peter had to lie back flat on the ground to keep the acrobatic cat in his sights as it rotated tail to nose and crashed back to earth and crashed back right down on top of him. Just before it landed, Peter squeezed his eyes and the trigger tight.
In all his days of war, he had never seen such unbridled fury as the one the tiger unleashed on the ground surrounding where he landed. His left forepaw landed on Peter and crushed his ribs on the left side. Peter rolled onto his stomach was grabbed in the tiger’s mouth by the rifle worn diagonally across his back and was tossed like a ragdoll into a nearby tree. Desperate, he clung to the tree, but the tiger got him by a foot and ripped him down viciously against all the might Peter could muster to hold on to the tree branch. The tiger ripped him down and ripped the skin right off the palms of his hands so that, in an instant, he had not a centimeter of skin on either hand; it was all on the branch. The monster threw him down into the ravine and continued to savage the entire ground as though it were guilty of the offense, howling as he did, deep loud blood curdling roars, and Peter thought the tiger thought that he was savaging him.
From down under the ravine, Peter can see broken branches of a tree, bark, and dirt being thrown about as though hit by a tornado, and as the tempest in the bushes continued, he expected at any moment for the man-eater to find him and jump down on top of him. But even with his skin ripped from his palms and his ribs crushed, his body knew not to scream nor did it occur to him. He just lay in the grass at the bottom of the ravine in sweat and pain and prayed the storm to end. Before it did, he passed out.
It was sheer agony that roused Peter. He had lain on his back the entire night, and now the pain made him grimace and bend his head back, holding his broken left ribs. Painfully he rolled to his knees and elbows, then put his right foot out and agonizingly rose to his feet. He gingerly cut his trousers just above the knees with his field knife and cut them into strips and bandaged his hands. Ripped open as they were, his palms screamed at every movement required of them, and when the sweat seeped into them, Peter screamed. Unable to find his weapons, he lay back on his back and shimmied up to the grassy embankment out of the ravine.
Back at the scene, he found the large tree he had climbed up on was rooted. Congealed blood was sprayed everywhere. He found his rifle snapped in thirds by the man-eater’s jaws and scattered-around half-a-dozen shotgun shells. Away from the main carnage, he found the one thing that would let him continue laying in the grass. He found Gury’s shotgun and reloaded it.
The pain all over his body was unbearable, but he would have to bear it because it would be his constant companion. It would not let him sleep, and even the burning hunger in his stomach was barely noticed. He saw the blood trail leading back into the ravine, and he followed it.

Peter, in intense agony, became acutely aware of his predicament. He dropped to one knee and thought. He could neither survive here deep in the jungle nor could he likely make it to a village. He would die soon. He knew it from the day he was born. He would die soon; that he had no say in. But he could still kill or not kill the tiger. His father never could have achieved such a feat. Even being here, hurt, he had done well to be alive. He was proud of himself. He imagined that his father would have been proud, imagining that he rose and staggered down the ravine in pursuit of the most dangerous animal in the world—a gravely wounded tiger. He was gravely wounded himself, and lacking the energy to properly pursue, he passed out again in the ravine, in the open.
When he awakened, he reckoned it to be about noon. His blood-soaked bandages stuck to his palms and fingers, but at least they had stopped bleeding. He wished they would just stop hurting. He could barely hold a shotgun and sometimes had to use the back of his hands to carry it. But if he had to shoot with it, then he would be game, and so would his palms.

The grass was a little thicker here, and he lost the pugmarks, so he could only track by the blood trail. But inexplicably the blood trail ended. Peter reckoned that the tiger climbed up out of the ravine to circle back on him. He hesitated in place, staggered in a circle, then found what he was looking for. A little further down the ravine was a shallow spot by which he could more easily exit. He staggered to it, stopped in dead fright, then staggered back. From out behind a rock emerged a huge male leopard. The cat grimaced, roared, then sat on its hind quarters with its front legs straight.

Peter leveled the shotgun, searching for the tip of the leopard’s tail. He was looking for the slow snakelike up-and-down warning a leopard gives before striking. It never came. Peter’s eyes and shotgun never left the leopard as he walked backward, moving down the ravine about ten yards, but when he went to climb the other side, he heard a succession of deep-throated angry grunts. He spun around, winced, and saw the grass in violently agitated waves coming at him. It stopped just as it broke from the grass into view. It was the same leopard. Confused, he pointed his gun at the leopard’s first position, then it’s second, then the first again, then walked a few feet down the ravine and sat with his back to it, and understood.

It was obvious to Peter that he was being driven like a tiger to a kill zone that lay somewhere down there at the end of the ravine. Down there lay doom, so Peter, beaten, broken, and coughing blood, spied a tree that jutted up from the side of the ravine and a long branch that hung out over it. The tree itself was easily a hundred feet, no more or less than any other tree around, but its branches hung almost out over the middle of the ravine, which would give him a clean shot at a tiger down there. Peter spied on a branch about halfway up that caught his attention. In addition to hanging well out over the ravine, its branches split into a nice wide Y shape, which would both afford him cover and, most vitally, render him motionlessness. From the point where the branches split, he could effortlessly lay on his broken body and wait for the man-eater to come to him, but with all the pain his body was in, he knew he absolutely could not move. But now, how would he get up that damn tree?

His hands were such that he could not hold the shotgun, let alone climb the tree. So he tied a string around it and bit down on the end. Moving to the base of the tree at the top of the ravine, again the leopard appeared. He paid no attention to it, not even to its foul breath on his exposed legs. The cat’s moist breath was close enough to warm the skin, but it never touched him. With the menace just centimeters away, he wrapped his arms around the tree, interlaced his fingers, and climbed with the back of his hands against the bark. He shimmied up the tree and as far out on the branch as his weight would allow, then painfully he pulled up the shotgun. He tried the shotgun to the branch then lay on his right side with his left elbow protecting his ribs.

Where he lay on the branch, it brought him to the middle of the ravine a safe fifty feet above the ground, if fifty feet was safe from Salvatore. Peter was well aware that Salvatore would track him by scent, the scent of his own blood, but that would draw him to the ravine where, undetected, he could shoot it undetected if he absolutely did not move, even though mere breathing was excruciating. The only flaw that Peter could find in his reasoning was if the big cat could climb completely undetected halfway up this tree and all the way out to where he would lay in painful wait. This was not the only flaw to Peter’s plan.

Seemingly satisfied that he was confined to the ravine, the leopard dematerialized. So far, so good. As darkness set in, Peter lay on the branch, secure in the knowledge that he had foiled the tiger’s plan, and now lay in wait for the man-eater to come to him.

For Peter, it was time to wait, but in waiting, time wavered like mist in the air, then went on as the mind wandered. His mind went in turn to his father, Karen, and Gury, then all directions at once. Broken ribs and burning palms should have distracted it from such meanderings, but so strong was its desire to torment. He looked down into the pitch-black of the ravine and saw Gury disappearing into the mangroves in the jaws of a tiger. Alive? He squeezed his eyes tight and saw Karen, seeing that as mightily as he tried to keep her out, she somehow got in. He let her know him, and now he could die down here, and she would never know. He wanted her to know, even married to another, still he wanted her to know. He wanted his father to know, to be proud. He wanted to say, “Look, dad. I did it all for you. I killed men and animals on land, sea, and air, killed things on seven continents. I killed things they don’t even know about, and all the time, I thought I was killing you.” That was not all that was finally revealed.

It had never really hit him that his father was dead. That was a fact he was aware of like a spot on a map. But now finally self-deception relented, and he acknowledged that his father had never known a thing, that his father walked out and not only never loved him but also was never even capable of it, that his efforts were all in vain and his life had been meaningless. There in the pitch darkness, the killer cracked, and the small boy in a warrior’s body cried. In deep, heaving sobs, he cried uncontrollably, oblivious even to the intense pressure it placed on his broken ribs, aware that he would die as he had lived, alone.

A single flash of heat lightning revealed his tightly clenched eyes from which streams flowed, the body of a small boy wrapped shaking in the skin of a man, a warrior, a killer. Finally, he could bear no more. Alone in the dark, he fell into a deep dark sleep.

The rain woke Peter. It was the decisive factor in his body's battle of pain versus fatigue. Though perfectly content to have kept sleeping, he found it convenient to open his mouth and let the water soothe his savage thirst. But even this brought pain, as the water burned his parched lips and revealed unknown cuts on his body. Dutifully he picked a bug off the rain-drenched branch and ate it.

Then Peter saw something that made him take the shotgun as firmly in hand as he could. Lying on his right side to give reprieve to his bruised left ribs, he saw on the top ravine opposite a kakar. The kakar stood stock-still, staring at a spot at the base of his tree. When the kakar delivered its alarm call, Peter knew somewhere beneath him was a tiger, as he remembered that tigers don’t like to climb trees, but they can expertly.

Peter rolled to his back, wrapped his feet around the branch, and pointed the sawed-off shotgun. He was satisfied that unless invisible, the man-eater could not reach him unseen, but he was unsatisfied that the man-eater was not invisible. Then he rolled back over and scanned the ground. The kakar was gone. Until now, time for Peter had flown, but now, in terror and agony, it stopped dead.

He had the uneasy feeling of being watched before. But the sense of dread settling over and now was stark. He knew the tiger was here, and just like he knew the tiger was behind the rocks, he knew it was climbing the tree, coming from beneath him, but he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t feel the trees swaying under the cat’s mighty weight, but he was sure it was climbing. Why couldn’t he see it? Surely there was no cause for alarm. By his calculations, it was simple. There was only one approach—up the trunk of the tree and out onto the branch. Salvatore would have to follow the same route he had taken, and that route was entirely in plain sight beneath him. It was why he chose to climb this tree in the first place. When the man-eater came for him, he would be forced into the open, and he would have his shot. Peter scanned and recalculated again and again and came up with the same result. So why did he feel so creepily not just that he was being watched but also that the monster was right next to him, just behind him on the branch? He could feel the thing’s breath. He scanned the tree again and again. Nothing there. He passed it off as just nerves, then remembered what happened the only time he ignored the feeling—Gury was carried away into water-soaked darkness. Maybe it was there, and he just couldn’t see it. That’s it. It’s right here. I just can’t see it. OK, assume it’s right behind me on the branch. I don’t have to see it to shoot it. Slowly so as not to raise the monster’s alarm, he brought the shotgun around and pointed it straight behind him toward the trunk of the tree. Gently as if he could see it there watching him, he firmed its position in his shoulder and pulled the trigger. Boom! The blast was deafening, and though he fully expected to hear the tiger crashing in the bushes, there was nothing but the ringing in his ears and the splintering of bark on the tree. He was down to five shots. He gave it another blast at the trunk halfway from the ground to where the limb branched off. He could hear the pellets absorbed by the tree, and the bark blasted away in a dirty cloud around the wound inflicted into the tree. His shredded hands began bleeding again, and he clumsily reloaded. He was down to four shots.

While Peter could merely feel certain about the man-eater’s probable route, the tiger in fact was certain of it. And it wasn’t just a tiger below and beneath the man in the tree. It was a one-thousand-pound man-eater, and it was beginning to stalk and beginning to climb, climb like a snail.

First, a front paw slid up the bark, took a hold, then the next. There was no way for the man to feel him. It took more than an hour to get all four paws dug in high enough so that only his tail slid on the ground.

All night, he climbed that way, body snug against the bark. The fur brushed it as he gently moved his massive body up its length. His claws moved as though he wanted to tickle a man’s back without being discovered. All night he climbed, shielded from sight by the tree but the man still knowing he was there, somewhere. All night he climbed, knowing that the man was in an excellent position but immobilized. The man was far out but not too far out on the branch to reach. Salvatore just wanted no part of his fire stick. Slowly, so slowly up he went, just as he had seen his mother hunt, moving only when the man looked away, stopping when he looked back, toward the trunk. Infinitely, patiently, he went until finally he reached the branch. Putting his forepaws out on the branch, the man could not see him. The man could only guess that he was about twelve meters out from the trunk, but the man-eater knew exactly how far out he was, and when he got there, he waited.

All the while, he was sure it was there, down there, but where? Where was it? Where was the fucking thing? Down there, he knew it was down there coming up at him. With shredded hands that still ached, he shot twice and reloaded. “It’s down there, don’t be fooled,” he told himself. “It’s down there.” Death or redemption, one or the other, was down there, he was sure of it. But sure as he was, it wasn’t down there. When death came for him, it came from the sky. From high in the trees across limbs a spider couldn’t crawl dropped a thousand pounds of vengeance intent on a kill.
Enraged by everyone or everything that had ever hurt him, engulfed by grief and guilt, delirious and distracted by pain, he would never have imagined that the tiger got above him, never believed it could outdo him, never even thought to look up, but Peter Harman neither saw nor felt the slicing, bludgeoning blow that killed him and that eviscerated him into a misty mix of blood and bone and skin, illuminated for a split second by the flash from a shotgun blast. Then the man-eater disintegrated with the mist of the man into the air without ever hitting the ground, and no one saw, no one knew, and no one found any part of the man, nor did they see the man-eater again. The night was silent, the monster quieted, and the Sundarbans restored.