The Tiger's Wife

thunderclap blow at the correct moment and precise angle; these rare boys, few and far between, could never recover completely from the shock of their first kill, and their faces, in hunting photographs and for weeks afterward, would register smiles of stupefaction and little else.

But more and more, as times grew harder, Darisa found himself hunting specific bears, problem bears. Stories of his prowess had spread, and messengers would scour the woods to find him: a black bruin had made off with somebody’s child in Zlatica; an unseen devil-bear was coming down to a farm in Drveno, slaughtering horses in the field. A red sow the size of a house had lost her cubs to a male bear in Jesenica, and was jealously guarding the cornfield in which they had died, attacking the farmers during harvest; an old gray boar had made a lair for himself in a barn in Preliv, and was hibernating in there.

One by one, he found them all; and when the killing was done, he took their hides with him to the next village. The villagers would welcome him and take him in, feed and clothe him, buy the pelts he did not keep for himself; and then, when the time came for him to help them, too, they would line up in awe along the village streets and watch him leave the village for the forest beyond. Whether or not Darisa took the precaution of burying his weapons somewhere in the forest is irrelevant. Suffice it to say that he made an impressive sight, all five foot seven of him, disappearing into the forest unarmed, with the great bear pelt rolling over his shoulders.

Darisa the Bear. Behind him, knowledge of the golden labyrinth, and somewhere ahead of him, advancement toward it. And in the meantime, nothing but bears.

_____

And now, a tiger. It is said, of course, that Darisa interfered on Galina’s behalf as soon as he heard of the villagers’ misfortune; the truth, however, is that Darisa had little interest in hunting a tiger in the bitter winter. He was already in his late forties by then, reluctant to tangle with the unfamiliar; and, besides, he knew the war was coming closer, sensed it in the stories he had heard along the road. He was not compelled to stay in this part of the mountains with the troops moving quickly through the foothills, ready to come up at the first hint of spring. And though his refusal to the priest was firm, it was the apothecary who finally convinced him to stay, the apothecary who appealed to Darisa’s sense of compassion—not through righteousness or desperation or even the novelty of the quarry.

It was well known that Darisa, during his stays in the village, was content to sit in the square, sharpening his knives and eavesdropping on the breathless, well-side conversations of women; or to tease them in the marketplace, where they stood cross-armed behind their stands, eyes alert and unwavering. Darisa’s affection for women extended to an intolerance of the things that harmed or humiliated them: loud men, loutish behavior, unwanted advances. Whether or not this stemmed from his days of responsibility toward Magdalena, I also cannot say; but he was notorious wherever he traveled for dislocating the shoulders of aggressive drunks, or pulling the ears of neighborhood boys who stood about whistling at young women coming back from pasture.

So at daybreak, the apothecary took him to the edge of the forest on the pretense of showing him the tiger’s tracks.

“At least come see what we’ve got on our hands,” he said, “and tell me what you think of it.”

The two of them knelt over the previous night’s paw prints, and Darisa marveled at the size of them, the strong and unhesitating track that wound up the mountain and into the trees. Darisa climbed into the bracken to look for urine, and traces of the tiger’s fur snagged on the low-hanging thickets, and when he came back, they followed the tiger’s trail back to the village, to the pasture and over the fence. It led them, of course, to the butcher’s house, and the tiger’s wife came to the doorway and watched them pass by. She was already obviously pregnant, but something—perhaps the pregnancy itself, or Luka’s absence, or something else entirely—had made her come into grace.

Darisa took off his hat when he saw her, and kept it folded in his hands while the tiger’s wife studied him with flat eyes. The apothecary took Darisa’s arm. “That tiger seems to have taken a liking to her,” he said, “which worries me. She lives alone.” He did not call her “the tiger’s wife,” and he did not mention the liking she herself had seemed to have taken to the tiger.

“Isn’t that the butcher’s wife?” Darisa asked.

“His widow,” the apothecary told him. “Recently widowed.”

Nothing about the story indicates that Darisa had any other reaction to the girl; but because he agreed, later that afternoon, to stay awhile and see what could be done about the tiger, people say he was a little in love with her. He was a little in love with her while he walked the woods at the bottom of the mountain, reading signs of the tiger in the snow, and a little in love with her as he opened the jaws of bear traps along the fence where the tiger would come through. He was a little in love with her that second morning, when he went out to check the traps and found them closed empty, shut over nothing, slammed down over dead air; a little in love with her when he made an announcement to the whole village that he could work only with everyone’s cooperation, and that none of the children must go near the traps again, because this time they might not be so lucky, might lose an arm or leg to the iron jaws. With gossip blazing through the village—what was this new sorcery? how could the traps have closed on their own with nothing to set them off?—no one dared tell Darisa what they really thought: she had done it herself, the tiger’s wife. Their fears, to them, seemed smaller with Darisa there, shameful to bring up to him, so the girl’s magic was allowed to lie over the pasture, the village, probably the entire mountain; nothing could undo it.

Later that afternoon, Mother Vera pulled my grandfather’s ear and demanded: “Did you do it, boy? Did you go to the traps last night?”

“I did not,” he said sharply.

And he hadn’t. He had, however, explained Darisa’s efforts to the tiger’s wife in the ash of the hearth, and spent a sleepless night, praying that the tiger would not blunder into the traps, going to the window to look out over the empty streets in the moonlight. Mother Vera’s insistence that he stay out of it did not prevent him from taking advantage of Darisa’s tolerance of children, tailing the Bear as he went about his work; it did not prevent my grandfather from sitting innocently on a nearby tree stump while Darisa prepared bait carcasses, asking a thousand questions about the hunt; it did not prevent him from following Darisa out to the pasture—and then, as the days went on, to the edge of the woods, to the lowest bank of the forest—and puzzling over the sight of the empty traps.

When the tracks disappeared from the pasture altogether, the apothecary knew that the tiger’s wife was responsible in some capacity for Darisa’s lack of success. With this in mind, he did his best to steer the Bear away from revealing too many of his plans to my grandfather.

“Of course, he doesn’t want you to kill it,” he said to the Bear one evening.

“I’ll let him keep one of the teeth when it is done,” Darisa said, smiling. “That always helps.”

The tiger, it seemed, had disappeared from the village. This forced Darisa to hunt deeper in the woods; and after that came things that are difficult to explain. His snares, they say, were always full of crows—crows already dead, their wings stiff against their sides, and the bait untouched. Darisa’s traps were spread out and well hidden,