and she found them all, found them night after night, filling them with dead birds. How could she—small as she was, carrying the added weight of her belly—make that nightly journey, covering her own tracks, covering the tiger’s? How could she bury each poisoned carcass Darisa left out—not rabbits or squirrels, but deer, sheep, boar— so that no trace of it could be found in the morning? When Darisa, growing frustrated, set a pit-trap over a frozen streambed, how could she break the trap herself and leave, in place of the twigs and ropes, a worn blanket thrust down over the tip of the spear? How could she do all this and come back to the village unbruised, unharmed, her eyes full of innocence, and watch the villagers pretend not to know it was her?
I cannot explain any of it—but the baker’s daughter thought she could. Unable to restrain herself, she stopped Darisa one evening in the street, and held on to his arms as she told him all about the blacksmith, about Luka and the baby.
“People have seen it,” she said, her eyes full of tears. “The tiger is her husband. He comes into her house each night and takes off his skin. That apothecary—he knows, but he will not tell you this. He’s not from here.”
I cannot say whether or not Darisa believed this; but he was a practical man, and he was aware of his own tendency to prey, through his reputation, on the superstitions of the people of Galina. It did not surprise him to learn that the villagers had hatched a theory of their own. But he realized, then, that the apothecary had taken advantage of him; that he had led Darisa to protect the girl above all the others without presenting the possibility that she did not want this protection. He had been suspicious of deliberate sabotage for some time, and he was a fool for ignoring the signs. That night, Darisa flew into a rage. “You’ve lied to me,” he shouted. “There’s far more to this than you led me to believe.”
“Why would I tell you village stories?” the apothecary demanded, holding his ground between Darisa and the ibis in the cage. “What are they besides superstitions? How could listening to this nonsense have helped you?” Nevertheless, that night Darisa sat at the window of the shop, and the apothecary, for better or for worse, was forced to keep him company. They sat in silence for hours, watching the village street and the distant square of light in the window of the butcher’s house. But for all his years as a hunter, the countless vigils he had learned to endure, Darisa found himself falling into dreams that made no sense to him—dreams in which he stood in front of the house of the tiger’s wife and watched the return of her husband. He would see the tiger, broad-shouldered, red skin glinting in the moonlight, cross the square and come down the road, the night behind him drawing in like the hem of a dress. The door of the butcher’s house would open, and then, through the window, Darisa could see the tiger rise upright and embrace the girl, and the two of them would sit down at the table together to eat—and always they were eating heads, the heads of cattle and sheep and deer, and then they ate the head of the hermaphroditic goat from the pasha’s trophy room.
The villagers were not surprised to find Darisa preparing to leave the following morning, and they stood out in the snow, silent and pale while he rolled up his carpet and piled the remaining pelts onto his cart without looking at any of them. They were not surprised, but they were angry; he had been their surest line of defense, the last reliable weapon they’d been able to offer up against the tiger, and the girl’s magic had proved too powerful even for him. They were alone now, with the tiger and his wife, alone again for good.
The tiger had been in the thickets above the ruined monastery for days, his ears straining for the faint sound of the hunter setting traps along the bottom of the hill, obvious to him now that he recognized the sound and smell of them. He had not come close enough to determine what they did. She had brought him here, walked with him patiently with her hand on the ridge between his shoulders, the meat she’d brought him hidden somewhere inside her coat. He had gone a week without the warmth of the village and the smokehouse smell of her hair, though he had found faint traces of her in the air now and then, almost always at night. Once or twice he had gone to her, had tracked her down in the blackness of the trees, but she had always led him back. And so he had lain there among the ruins of Sveti Danilo while the snow fell through the caved-in roof above the altar, and watched the birds huddled along the golden arch of the altar-piece.
He did not fear the hunter because he did not know how or why he should. He knew only that the smell that clung to this man was different—a cluttered smell, the smell of earth and heavy rot, of possessions over which death had been repeatedly smeared—and he found that it did not invite him. It did not invite him when he watched the man from his clearing from the ridge, or when he found it around his old hiding places, along paths he had walked the day before. It was not the hunter’s smell, but the scent of a badger, unsteady and warm with winter sleep, that he followed down from Sveti Danilo the day he came across the ox cart, hidden in a pine grove.
The tiger had come up from behind, upwind of the cart, and the surprising shape, the sheer size, of the cart had pulled him down onto his belly. Crouching behind it, he could see beyond the bracken to where the wheels had sunk into the snow, and to where the oxen stood, half-blind with hair, flank to flank for warmth, their breath curling out. The smell of the hunter was everywhere.
The tiger lay in the black thicket behind the wagon for a long time, waiting for something, something just out of reach of his understanding of the situation. Then the wind turned, and the oxen got his scent and they began to shift nervously, their harnesses clanking, the chains that yoked them to the wagon shuddering with silver sound. This pulled him forward a little, only a little, out of the bracken, and their side-slit eyes caught sight of him, and the wagon rumbled forward as they bolted. The tiger, finding his instincts slammed open, was up and running, a full rush of blood already in his chest as he cleared the wagon and sprang for the hindquarters of the ox on the right. He had him, for a moment—claws ripping into the hips and his teeth on the thick base of the tail—but then there was the harness and the cart and the other ox, and somewhere in the confusion something struck him in the ribs and he let go and dropped away, and was left behind, watching the cart’s wavering path until it came to rest beyond the clearing.
The hunter was nowhere in sight.
My grandfather should have been comforted by Darisa’s departure. But he awoke that night, after hours of half-dreams, with hysteria raging through his bloodstream in the dark. Sitting up in bed, he could not rid himself of the feeling that something had shifted, crawled between himself and the tiger and the tiger’s wife until the distances between them, which he had slowly and carefully been closing, had gone back to something insurmountable. The idea of the walk to her house alone exhausted him.
The sky was cloudless, and the moon made shadows on the floor by his bed. The fire was already dead, embers breathing on the hearth. He got up and slipped into his boots and his coat, and, like that, in his nightshirt, his head bare, he went outside and ran through town, the wind biting his face and fingers.
There was no light in the village. All around him, the pasture was shining with new snow. Somewhere behind, a dog was barking, and another dog took up the call, and their voices rang to each other in the dark. The weight of the afternoon’s snowfall had freed the slanted shoulders of her roof, piled the hedges thick and uneven, and my grandfather stood at the bottom of the porch steps and stared up at the black attic turret and the black windows. The house seemed strange to him, unfamiliar, and he could not summon a memory of being indoors with the tiger’s wife. He could see that something had crossed the stairs and the porch, leaving white furrows behind. He tried to tell himself that perhaps the tiger had done this coming home; but the footprints were small, the trails short and two-footed, and they led away from the door. He thought about going up, letting himself in, waiting for her by the hearth. But the house was empty, and he would be alone.
My grandfather ran down to the end of the pasture and under the fence, following the trail, which was becoming deeper as the snow thickened out in the field. All winter, he had not come this far, and now, with the snow groaning under his boots, he ran blindly forward, his breath beating wide clouds that fanned out around him. His eyes were watering with the cold. At the edge of the field, the ground dipped down into a streambed, where he
