To my grandfather, the devil was many things. The devil was Lesi, the hobgoblin, whom you met in the pasture, and who asked you for coins—deny him, and he would turn the forest around and upside down and you would be lost forever. The devil was Crnobog, the horned god, who summoned darkness. You were sent to the devil by your elders if you misbehaved; you were allowed to send other people to the devil, but only if you were much, much older. The devil was Night, Baba Roga’s second son, who rode a black horse through the woods. Sometimes, the devil was Death, on foot, waiting for you at the crossroads, or behind some door you had been repeatedly warned against opening. But as my grandfather listened to Vladisa, who was sobbing about orange fur and stripes, it became clearer and clearer to him that this particular thing in the woods was not the devil, and not a devil, but perhaps something else, something he maybe knew a little bit about, and his eyes must have lit up when he said: “But that’s Shere Khan.”
My grandfather was a thin child, with blond hair and large eyes—I have seen pictures of him, black-and-white photographs with scalloped edges, in which he looks sternly at the camera with his schoolboy socks pulled all the way up, and his hands in his pockets. It must have been strange, his calmness, his level voice, and the fishmonger and the blacksmith and several other people who had come running from the village all looked at him, puzzled.
The apothecary, however, was there too. “You may be right,” the apothecary said. “Where’s that book I gave you?” My grandfather ran inside to get it, and as he came back out, he was flipping through the pages frantically so that, by the time he reached the sprawled-out form of Vladisa, he had reached the plate with his favorite picture, the one with Mowgli and Shere Khan. He held it out to the terrified cowherd. Vladisa took one look at it and fainted, and that was how the village found out about the tiger.
If the tiger had been a different sort of tiger, a hunter from the beginning, he probably would have come down to the village sooner. His long journey from the city had brought him as far as the ridge, and even he could not be certain why he had chosen to remain there. I could argue now that the wind and deep snows were no obstacle to him, that he might have pressed on all winter and arrived at some other village, with some other church, maybe some place with some less superstitious people where some matter-of-fact farmer might have shot him and strung him up, as empty as a bag, above the fireplace. But the ridge—with its bowed saplings and deadfall underfoot, the steep flank of the mountain studded with caves, the wild game wide-eyed and reckless with the starvation of winter—trapped him between his new, broadening senses and the vaguely familiar smell of the village below.
All day long, he walked up and down the length of the ridge, letting the smells drift up to him, puzzled by the feeling that they weren’t entirely new. He had not forgotten his time at the citadel, but his memory was heavily veiled by his final days there and the days afterward, his arduous trek, burrs and splinters and glass stinging his paws, the dense, watery taste of the bloated dead. By now, he had only an indistinct sense, in another layer of his mind, that, long, long ago, someone had thrown him fresh meat twice a day and sprayed him with water when the heat grew too unbearable. The smells from below meant something related to that, and they made him restless and agitated as he wandered the woods, instinctively sprinting after every rabbit and squirrel he saw. The smells were pleasant and distinct, entirely separate from one another: the thick, woolly smell of sheep and goats; the smell of fire, tar, wax; the interesting reek of the outhouses; paper, iron, the individual smells of people; the savory smells of stew and goulash, the grease of baking pies. The smells also made him more and more aware of his hunger, his lack of success as a hunter, of the length of time since his last meal, the calf that had blundered into him that bitter afternoon when he’d seen the man turn and run. The taste of the calf had been familiar; the shape of the man had been familiar.
That night, he had come halfway down the mountain. Stopped at a precipice where the tree line curved around the bottom of a frozen waterfall, and looked and looked at the burning windows and snow-topped roofs below him in the valley.
And some nights later, there was a new smell. He had sensed it here and there in the past—the momentary aroma of salt and wood smoke, rich with blood. The smell fell into his stomach, made him long for the calf, reduced him to rolling onto his back, head pressed into the snow, and calling for it until the birds shuddered free of their nests. The smell came up to him almost every night, in darkness, and he stood there in the newly fallen snow, with the trees arching in low around him, breathing it in and out. One night, half a mile from his clearing, he watched a lone stag—whose imminent death the tiger had been waiting on, had sensed days before it happened—buckle under the weight of starvation and old age and the bitter cold. The tiger watched him kneel and fold over, watched the stag’s one remaining antler snap off. Later, as he ripped the belly open, even the spreading warmth of the stag’s entrails couldn’t drown out the smell from the village.
One night, he went down to the valley and stood at the pasture fence. Across the field, the silent houses, past the barn and the empty pigpen, past the house with its snow-packed porch, stood the smokehouse. There was the smell, almost close enough. The tiger rubbed his chin up and down the fence posts. He did not return for two days, but when he did he found the meat. Someone had been there in his absence. One of the fence planks had been ripped down, and the meat lay under it, dry and tough, but full of the smell that frenzied him. He dug it up and carried it back to the woods, where he gnawed on it for a long time.
Two nights later, he had to venture closer to find the next piece; it was waiting for him under a broken barrel that had been left out in the field, just yards from the smokehouse door. A cautious return some nights later to the same place, a bigger piece. Then two pieces, then three, and, eventually, a whole shoulder right at the threshold of the smokehouse.
The following night, the tiger came up the smokehouse ramp and put his shoulders in the doorway, which was thrown wide open for the first time. He could hear the sheep bleating in the stable, some distance away, terrified by his presence; the dogs, fenced up, barking furiously. The tiger sniffed the air: there was the smell of the meat, but also the thick, overwhelming smell of the person inside, the person whose scent he had found on and around the meat before, and whom he could see now, sitting in the back of the smokehouse, a piece of meat in her hands.
Galina, meanwhile, had gone nervously about its business. The end of the year was marked with heavy snowstorms, knee-deep drifts that moved like sand in and out of doorways. There was a quiet, clotted feeling in the air, the electricity of fear. Snow had buried the mountain passes, and, with them, any news of the war. Somewhere nearby, high above them in the dense pine forests of Galina ridge, something large and red and unknown was stalking up and down and biding its time. They found evidence of it once—the woodcutter, reluctantly braving the undergrowth at the bottom of the mountain, had come across the head of a stag, fur matted and eyes gone white, the spinal column, like a braid of bone, rolling out gray along the ground—and this, with Vladisa’s encounter, sufficiently persuaded them against leaving the village.
It was winter, and their livestock were already slaughtered, or stabled until spring. The season had provided them with an excuse for staying safely indoors, which they already knew how to do, and the tiger, they hoped, would not last the winter. On the other hand, there was the possibility that the tiger—how had it gotten there in the first place, they wondered, if it belonged so far away, in jungles, in fields of elephant grass?—would realize it might not last, and come down into the village to hunt them just the same. So they lit fires in their homes, hoping to discourage it from leaving the ridge. The ground was frozen solid, they had already postponed all funerals until the thaw—only three people died that winter anyway, so they were fortunate, very fortunate—and they packed the undertaker’s basement with ice blocks and took the added precaution of stuffing the windows with cloth from the inside, to prevent any smell of the corpses from getting out.
For a while, there was no trace of the tiger. They almost managed to convince themselves that it had all been a joke, that Vladisa had seen a personal ghost of some kind, or perhaps had some kind of seizure up there in the mountains; that the stag had been dispatched by a bear or wolf. But the village dogs—sheepdogs and boarhounds, thick-coated hunting dogs with yellow eyes who belonged to everybody and nobody at once—knew for certain that
