Copyright (c) 2001 Theodore Beale. All rights reserved.
How I wish I could forget the autumn of that fateful year! I was new to India, and like so many unwary Englishmen before me, I was ensnared, my life forever altered by that magical, majestic, and mysterious land. But I was not caught immediately, certainly not when I first arrived on the subcontinent, my two battered suitcases packed near to bursting with t-shirts, textbooks, and a panoply of insect repellants.
Now I have seen the dark reality of that ancient place, and I know why those on whom the sun never set feared to leave it lurking behind them, out of their iron-fisted control. And yet I am still ashamed to remember that my first thought upon descending from the rickety Air India seven-twenty-seven was one of disgust, my delicate American sensibilities offended by the dirt and the smell. It was unpleasant, it was repellent, and it was bewildering, but I found myself fascinated by the sheer outlandishnesss of it all.
How very like a Westerner, I hear the good doctor saying even as I pen these words, not with a sneer, but with a smile both wise and wry. He was waiting for me as I deplaned, standing on the cracked and weedy pavement of the tarmac, a short, slender man with the quiet dignity that makes a giant of even the most diminuitive gentleman. Dr. Yadvendradev Jhala was his name, and though my knowledge of Hindi grew rapidly in the time I spent with him, I was always glad to keep things formal, and even now, I could not possibly think of him as anything but Dr. Jhala.
“Welcome to India, Mr. Cattaneo!” he said with a smile.
His English was good, though inflected with the lilting, bird-like intonations so common to subcontinental speakers. His appearance was pleasant rather than handsome, but I liked him at first sight. In the academic world there are many poseurs and pretenders, but Dr. Jhala was not one of them.
He shook my hand, and led me to what was presumably the baggage claim, though it was nothing but a circle chalked upon the asphalt. He was my sponsor for the study program which had brought me here, and although we’d exchanged many emails over the last six months, we’d never met before, nor had we even spoken on the telephone. I held a master’s degree in zoology from Columbia, and was in the process of writing my doctoral thesis on the efforts to prevent the extinction of the endangered Bengal tigers, efforts that were primarily in good doctor’s capable hands. He was India’s foremost expert on the large predators, and as far as I was concerned, the chance to study under him was the opportunity of a lifetime. And so it proved to be, although not quite in the way I’d imagined.
Dinner that night was rather better than I’d expected. The Indians may be a slender people, but they are not always balanced upon the precipice of starvation. The curried rice was hot and spicy, and we washed it down with a native beer that, while not up to German standards, wasn’t bad either. It certainly beat the Stroh’s I was normally accustomed to drinking on my limited student’s budget.
“You come at an interesting time, Mr. Cattaneo,” Dr. Jhala said as he waved off the waiter hovering at his ear.
I raised my eyebrows. It sounded promising, although, of course, ‘interesting’ could mean almost anything. “Why’s that?”
He didn’t answer my question directly. Instead, he sipped delicately at his half-empty glass and regarded me thoughtfully.
“How familiar are you with the popular legends of the Indian man-killers?” he finally asked.
I smiled. Tiger, tiger, burning bright. “Enough to know that the legends are real, from time to time. When a beast grows old, or is injured, or is simply too sick to pursue its natural prey, it may, upon occasion, turn to humans for its sustenance.”
Dr. Jhala nodded. “Yes, although it is certainly the case that crocodiles account for far more deaths than all the big cats of the world combined. Nevertheless, there appears to be something deep within the human psyche that causes us to fear the tiger, particularly here in India, where the risk is real, however slight.”
He was clearly leading up to something, and I was pretty sure I knew what it was. A man-killer wouldn’t do much for my thesis as currently envisioned, but that could always be changed. In fact, it would almost have to be changed. What an opportunity this could be! I hesitated, then took the plunge.
“Am I correct in guessing that there’s one out there right now?”
He nodded, and I slapped the table excitedly, knocking over my water glass in the process. Fortunately, it was empty. I sputtered my apologies, but Dr. Jhala waved them away without concern. I soon forgot my embarrassment, though, as the doctor solemnly confirmed my conjecture.
“It is quite possible indeed. One might even say, probable. There are a number of villages in the Ganges River Basin which have reported a disturbingly large number of attacks. Many children have disappeared during the night, and their bodies have been found later with signs of having been taken for the purposes of… how shall I say this?”
Doctor Jhala paused, and then shook his head sadly.
“No, there is no nice way. The fact is, they have been been devoured, either wholly or in part.”
I grimaced politely, but inside, I was thrilled. A maneater! Now that would be a thesis worth writing! Visions of celebrity and an Animal Channel sponsorship began entering my head, unbidden.
“You said a large number of attacks?” I cursed myself for not bringing any note-taking materials with me to the dinner. “How many, exactly?”
“Forty-seven,” Dr. Jahla informed me. My jaw dropped. “Thirty-two children have been killed, and fifteen adults. This has been over a period of twenty-four weeks.”
Forty-seven people in twenty-four weeks? Holy smokes, that sounded more like a religious massacre up in Kashmir than a maneating tiger! His words seemed to confirm my subconscious notion of India being a land where life was cheap and the people dropped like flies.
“Adults too, huh? Isn’t that a little strange? I guess I just find it hard to believe that a single animal could account for that many attacks.”
The doctor nodded.
“It seems unlikely, and yet when you consider the fact that adult male can be expected to account for one sambok every ten days, it is quite possible. An injured beast hunting easier and smaller prey might well seek out a meal every five days.”
“You’re sure it’s a tiger?”
“No, of course we cannot be sure at this moment. But the most important fact is that the attacks have taken place at night, which is a natural indication of tiger activity. There are those who insist that the large numbers must necessarily indicate that wolves are responsible, but bounty hunters have killed several wolves known to frequent the area, and when I examined their bodies- the wolves, that is, not the hunters, of course- I found no signs to indicate they had been preying upon humans.”
I have to admit that I wasn’t listening very closely to him at the time. I was so enthused by the prospect of actually studying a maneater that the doctor’s brief dissertation on lupine dissection was lost on me. But in my defense, you should understand that the number of verified cases of large cats intentionally preying on humans is extremely small, and the number of victims here exceeded every case I’d ever heard about, with the possible exception of the notorious Tsavo lions.
My interest in the maneater may seem morbid to you, but I assure you that I am, and always have been, totally committed to the preservation of wildlife in all its forms. I know that some people might regard my reaction as crass, but you see, if Dr. Jhala’s suspicions turned out to be true, then my future as an environmentalist academic was almost certainly assured, leaving me free to devote my efforts to where they would do the most good instead of scrabbling with every other post-graduate in the field for the very few paying jobs that were available. This promised to be an amazing stroke of good fortune!
I can barely remember the rest of the dinner, and although we made an early start the next morning, we couldn’t leave soon enough for me. But India is a vast country of poorly-paved roads, I learned to my dismay, and it took us more than a week to reach the village of Anacona, a place that appeared to have been very little affected by the nineteenth century, still less the twentieth. The small huts of the villagers lacked both doors and floors, and despite the recent tragedies there were still an alarming number of filthy, barefooted children running happily about, heedless of any danger.
I spent the first day helping the drivers set up our camp, as Dr. Jhala began the arduous task of interviewing villagers. Unfortunately, we learned very little from the local people, although I was amazed to discover that the beast had grown so bold that it had actually dared to enter several huts under the cover of darkness, on each occasion taking a child off to its doom. The villagers seemed to have a fatalistic attitude about these deaths; like other calamities that had touched their primitive lives, these mysterious deaths simply presented something to be endured.
The bounty hunters were another matter. They were loud and arrogant, slinging loaded thirty-caliber rifles around carelessly as if they were harmless pieces of wood, not deadly weapons liable to go off at any second. I hated being in their company, hated their outlandish moustaches and pseudo-English Gunga Din manners. However, I had little choice in the matter, as I was not yet capable of speaking with the villagers and the hunters were quite conversational in English, for the most part.
Ram Singh was the worst of them. He was a late arrival, having shown up only days before our coming. A big man, surprisingly big for an Indian, he had the powerful shoulders of a home run hitter and the attitude to match. He boasted often of his prowess on the cricket ground, and I, for one, had no trouble believing him. He soon proved to be the most successful of the hunters, and in only three weeks, took five wolves, as many as the rest of the hunters had collected in the previous month combined. His blustery manner concealed what was, beneath the hail-fellow-well-met exterior, a capable and crafty mind.
I despised him for what he was, a ruthless killer with no regard for the noble animals he slew, but I found myself forced to respect his abilities nonetheless. In this, I followed Dr. Jhala’s example, although the two men’s argument over the nature of the maneater continued through the summer’s end and well into the autumn.
Dr. Jhala was growing ever more sure that the animal responsible was a tiger, while Ram Singh’s conviction that the killer was a wolf remained unshaken. When the body of the eleventh wolf was brought into camp, a big brute with terrible white scars along its side, a likely candidate for a mankiller if I’d ever seen one, even Dr. Jhala began to harbor doubts about the tiger. But electrons don’t lie, and when the micrograph proved that even this great monster had never fed upon humans, most of the hunters began to come around to our way of thinking. Not Ram Singh, though.
Since our arrival, another eight children had been taken from five villages in the area, and two adults were missing. The beast seemed to be avoiding Anacona proper, perhaps because of our encampment, which was surrounded by barbed wire and lit brightly by generator-powered searchlamps. Dr. Jhala was of the opinon that even a mankiller so bold as this one would not dare to test our camp, and by daylight it was easy to agree with his blithe sensibility. But in that hot and sleepless darkness, I thought of Tsavo and shivered. My mind’s eye found it all too easy to picture that terrible duo leaping the high, but ineffective fence, and dragging helpless men screaming from their cots to be devoured noisily, messily, horribly, in the deep shadows of the African night.
As the weeks passed and my nightly terrors grew, I found myself coming to admire these villagers, who, I learned as I spent more time with them, eating meals, washing clothes, and burying the dead, were not ignorant of their danger. Rather, they had come to terms with the knowledge that their lives might end before the dawn, and they had learned that even the most unthinkable loss might be survived. Death, to them, was not the stark finality that I had always believed it to be, instead it was another step on the great circle of that which is and once more will be. How wise they were, and how brave. My fear did not disappear, but at least it did not increase, and it was not too long before I was able to sleep again.
I do not sleep at night now. I do not dare.
It was the fifteenth of October when we caught the killer. Over Dr. Jhala’s vociferous protests, Ram Singh had arranged for an impoverished family to move into two houses on the outskirts of Anacona. It was a large family, with four children under the age of five, and the cold-hearted hunter was callously using them as tiger bait. Or wolf bait, as he considered it, either way, both Dr. Jhala and I were appalled at his methods, as I hope you can imagine.
I was not sitting with Ram Singh that night, but I was having trouble sleeping and I heard the shots, like two corks popping out of a well-shook bottle of champagne. It took me a moment to realize what the sounds meant, but as soon as my fogged brain came to the correct conclusion, I leaped from my cot and ran towards the stand the hunter had been using. I reached it only a step or two before Dr. Jhala, and both of us nearly stumbled over Ram Singh, who was crouched beside the tree trunk.
He held up a finger, stained dark in the scanty light provided by my flashlight.
“I hit him at least once. In the shoulder, I think. He won’t make it far. Let’s find him!”
“What was it?”
The hunter smiled at the doctor.
“You’ll see very soon, I imagine. But I’m right, you know.”
His arrogant surety irritated me, and I hoped very much that he was wrong. But he wasn’t. Not a hundred paces away we discovered the motionless body of the largest wolf I have ever seen in my life. It was massive, the size of a small bear, and it had not died easily. Its teeth were bared in a rictus snarl of hateful defiance, and for the first time, I found myself doubting my belief that animals are innocent in their savagery, wholly outside the realm of good and evil.
“Hit him with both shots,” Singh said with satisfaction in his voice. “How about that?”
He was almost gleeful, mad with joy. For a moment, I had the terrible impression that he was about to dance a victory jig, like Hitler at Versailles.
“So much for the tiger,” I said, my dreams of a career with the Animal Channel as dead as the monster lying before us. This killer would only be a matter of academic interest to anyone back home. A wolf, even a monster such as this, simply didn’t have the majestic size, the dangerous cachet, to be worthy of the dread label “maneater” no matter how many people it had slain.
“I hope so,” said Dr. Jhala, much to my surprise.
He seemed dubious, somehow, that we’d really caught the killer. I didn’t understand why, not at the time, but he had his reasons. Ram Singh and I helped him lug the big brute back to his makeshift laboratory, after which, despite the late hour, Dr. Jhala began the autopsy. I would have liked nothing better than to return to my bed, as all the energy induced by the excitement had worn off, but I was determined to assist him. By the time the sun rose, no doubts remained. The great wolf was indeed our mankiller. Our long hunt was over, and the people of Anacona were finally safe.
Thus was I surprised to discover the doctor back at the micrograph following dinner the next evening. He seemed worried, and more than a little perplexed. Removing a sample from the little machine, he replaced it with another, examined it, then sighed and pushed himself away from the table at which he was sitting.
“What’s the matter?”
He stared at me as if he didn’t know who I was for a second, then rubbed at his temples and shook his head.
“I wish I could say. But there are simply no anomalies… and yet it makes no sense otherwise…. But there must be a reason!”
I had no idea what he was getting at. I pressed him for an explanation, but none was forthcoming. He refused to even hint at his suspicions, whatever they were, but he did admit that whatever was bothering him bore no connection to the wolf Ram Singh had killed the night before. The mankiller was well and truly dead, and our work here was done.
The people of the village did their best to thank us, and held a dinner in our honor which only made me feel guilty that we hadn’t caught the killer sooner. Ram Singh and his fellow hunters felt no shame, though, and they were more than happy to join the villagers in vigorously drinking each another’s health. Dr. Jhala was strangely withdrawn into himself, and more than once I caught him staring off into the jungle, with a pensive expression on his face.
He left early, while I stuck around for another round or two of warm Indian beer before turning in. Unlike the night before, I had no trouble falling asleep, and was sleeping the sleep of the reasonably drunk when my dreams were interrupted by an unpleasant commotion. It sounded nearby, but it wasn’t until I heard the distinctive crunch of glass being ground underfooot that I realized something was going on in the laboratory.
I burst through the canvas flaps of the tent, and my breath caught in my throat as I saw the destruction that had been wrought there. Everything was smashed, tables were turned over, the laptop screen was shattered, and notepaper lay scattered all about like a thin covering of snow. The light was dim, and so it took me several minutes to notice Dr. Jhala lying partially hidden by an overturned chair. He was dead, his chest crushed by a powerful blow from a blunt instrument. I choked back a scream, and forced myself to look more closely.
The poor doctor’s face was scored deeply by four parallel lines, and it occurred to me that the massive wound in his chest could have been caused by a large paw. A tiger’s paw? It seemed possible. But we’d already determined that the wolf had been the killer, that there never had been a tiger in the first place! Then I noticed something strange beside the doctor’s body. Not far from his right hand, lying there as if he’d dropped it, was a revolver. In checking to see if it was loaded, which it was, I saw that the unjacketed bullets in the chambers were shiny, not dark. They were silver.
I rose to my feet, turned around, and froze. Not twenty feet away was the tiger, a big one, perhaps fifteen feet in length. Its eyes were yellow, and startlingly intelligent. It growled threateningly, but fell silent as I snapped the cylinder shut and pointed the weapon at its face.
“I don’t know what’s going on here, but if you can understand me, then you know what it means that this thing is loaded with silver.”
The great beast simply stared at me, unblinking.
“Okay, so maybe my imagination is running away with me. I guess if you’re just an animal, then this won’t mean anything to you.”
I cocked the hammer with my thumb.
The tiger blinked once. Then it was gone, like a shadow in the darkness.
It was too late to do anything for Dr. Jhala. But if nothing else, I had to solve the mystery of his death. Still holding the gun in my hand, fearing the tiger’s return, I flicked on a stationary flashlight and began to gather the doctor’s notes, quickly perusing them as I did so. I had stacked perhaps twenty pieces of paper in a little pile when I found it, three short lines written in Dr. Jhala’s precise hand. It proved nothing, except that I wasn’t the only one with an imagination.
The word ‘why’ was underlined three times. So that what was bothering the poor doctor. Ram Singh had loaded his rifle with silver, and if my dreadful suspicions were correct, in the full knowledge that what he hunted was not a normal wolf. But that necessarily didn’t make him, what, a weretiger? I’d never heard of such a thing, not even in the movies.
But there was no denying two things. Dr. Jhala was dead, and something had killed him.
I heard footsteps rapidly approaching, someone running towards the tent. Ram Singh pushed his way inside, dressed as if he’d come from his bed and holding his thirty ought six.
“I heard a noise. What the hell happened here?”
His eyes, a dark, but very human shade of brown, were open wide with surprise as he glanced around the disheveled interior of the tent. Then he froze, and his mouth dropped open when he saw the blood, and the body of the unfortunate doctor. A look of horror filled his face.
Or so he thought. He was a terrible actor. I’d seen more genuine shock and astonishment in my high school acting class.
I lifted the revolver with both hands, pointing it at his chest.
“Drop it!”
He obeyed quickly, still affecting surprise.
“What’s the matter with you? What happened to him?”
“I imagine you know more about that than I do. There really is silver in this thing, by the way. Dr. Jhala must have been on to you, which is probably why you killed him.”
The powerfully-built hunter scoffed, but his eyes were hard, and calculating.
“Don’t you think you’ll have a hard time explaining why you shot me, old chap? This ridiculous notion of silver bullets and, I presume, werewolves, aside, I can’t imagine you’d relish the notion of spending time in an Indian prison.”
I kept a straight face, but shuddered inside. He had a point. I just wanted to get out of there, get out of that terrible country.
“Dr. Jhala was my friend,” I answered. “I know you killed him. But I can’t prove anything, so now I just want to get out of this stinking place. In one piece.”
“Then go.” He smiled, his teeth white against his dark face, and gestured towards the tent flap. “By all means.”
“I want to know why. Why you killed him.”
“I can’t tell you that. I didn’t kill him.”
“Then tell me why your gun was loaded with silver.”
“It’s an affectation.”
“Like the mustache?”
He glared at me.
We were getting nowhere with this, I decided. Maybe my suspicions were wrong, or maybe not, but he clearly wasn’t about to confess his sins to me. So be it. I wanted answers, but not enough to risk my life chasing them. I ordered him to kick the rifle towards me, and then carefully picked it up. Keeping both weapons trained on him, I forced him to move away from the entrance and towards the rear of the tent as I backed out of it.
Once outside, I sprinted towards the closest jeep. I wasted no time fetching my belongings, and my wallet, with my meager funds, was already in my pocket. I tossed Singh’s rifle in the back and kept the revolver in my hand, nervously looking about as the ancient engine coughed its way to life. As I shifted into reverse, the headlights caught a pair of yellow eyes staring at me from the darkness, some distance away. Was it the tiger? Was it Ram Singh? Or was it the two in one? I didn’t wait to find out.
I caught the first flight from New Dehli, not the least bit concerned about the ruinous expense of a last-minute ticket. Like the Empire, I am gone, never to return to that frightning and perilous land. Werewolves, weretigers, I want no part of their unseen war, and one glance beyond the veil was one more than I wanted. But my eyes have been opened, and even here, ensconced in the comfortable environment that is everyday life in America, I have seen things that I, as a man of science, cannot properly explain.
A glimpse of an oversized dog in Atlanta. A catfight in Los Angeles, hair-raising yowls interspersed with the clash of metal on metal. A tall, slender girl in San Francisco, her eyes gleaming too-brightly in the shadows of the moonlight, and her smile, the anticipatory grin of the predator.
I have kept my silence, though, and with it, my career. There is no Animal Channel, but they pay me reasonably well to work the night shift, caring for the great cats that spend their languid days at the Minnesota Zoo. And if the bullets in the revolver which I carry at all times are made of silver, well, what of that? It is an affectation, nothing more.