She dreamed that she was a little brown village girl. Her tail twitched as she felt again the heat of a cooking fire, the feel of sex face to face, the impact of witch-killing stones. A sleeping rumble, big fangs exposed. The fear of it woke her up and she stirred, trying to fall back into a different dream.
Noises pulled her back into the world. Birds and monkeys were talking about the arrival of people, coming in from the west, no doubt to the ford they used downstream. Kya rose quickly and splashed off the island, slipped into thickets of elephant grass backing the curve of the stream. People could be dangerous, especially in groups. Individually they were helpless, it was only a question of picking one's moment and attacking from behind. But groups of them could drive animals into traps or ambushes, and that had been the end of many tigers, left skinned and beheaded. Once she had seen a male tiger try to walk a pole to some meat, slip on a slippery patch, and fall onto spikes hidden in leaves. People had arranged that.
But today, no drums, no shouts, no bells. And it was too late in the day for humans to hunt. More likely they were travellers. Kya slipped through the elephant grass unobtrusively, testing the air with ear and nose, and moving towards a long glade in the grass that would give her a view of their ford.
She settled down in a broken clump to watch them pass. She lay there with her eyes slitted.
There were other humans there, she saw, hiding like she was, scattered through the sal forest, lying in wait for the humans to arrive at the ford.
As she noticed this, a column of people reached the ford, and the hidden ones leapt out of their hiding places and screamed as they fired arrows at the others. A big hunt, it seemed. Kya settled down and watched more closely, ears flattened. She had come upon such a scene once before, and the number of humans killed had been surprising. It was where she had first tasted their flesh, as she had had twins to feed that summer. They were certainly the most dangerous beast in the jungle, apart from the elephant. They killed wantonly, like kol bahls sometimes did. There would be meat left here afterwards, no matter what else happened. Kya hunkered down and listened more than watched. Screams, cries, roars, shouts, trumpet blasts, death rattles; somewhat like the end of one of her hunts, only multiplied many times.
Eventually it grew quiet. The hunters left the scene. When they had been gone a long time, and the ordinary shush of the jungle had returned, Kya shifted onto her paws and looked around. The air reeked of blood, and her mouth watered. Dead bodies lay on both banks of the river, and were caught on snags against the banks of the stream, or had rolled into shallows. The tiger padded among them cautiously, pulled a large one into the shadows and ate some of it. But she was not very hungry. A noise caused her to slink swiftly back into the shadows, hair erect on her back, looking for the source of the sound, which had been a cracked branch. Now a footfall, over there. Ah. A human, still standing. A survivor.
Kya relaxed. Sated already, she approached the man out of no more than curiosity. He saw her and jumped backwards, startling her; his body had done it without his volition. He stood there looking at her in the way hurt animals sometimes did, accepting their fate; only in this one's face there was also a little roll of the eyes, as if to say, what else could go wrong, or, not this too. It was a gesture so like that of the girls she had watched gathering wood in the forest that she paused, unllungry. The hunters who had ambushed this man's group still occupied the trail to the nearest village. He would soon be caught and killed.
He expected her to do it. Humans were so sure of themselves, so sure they had the world worked out and were lords of it all. And with their monkey numbers and their arrows, so often they were right. This as much as anything was why she killed them when she did. They were a scrawny meal in all truth, which of course was not the main consideration, many a tiger had died trying to reach the tasty flesh of the porcupine; but humans tasted strange. With the things they ate, it was no surprise.
The confounding thing would be to help him; so she padded to his side. His teeth chattered with his trembling. He was no longer stunned, but holding his place on purpose. She nosed up one of his hands, rested it on her head between her ears. She held still until he stroked her head, then moved until he was stroking between her shoulders, and she was standing by his side, facing the same direction. Then very slowly she began to walk, indicating by her speed that he should come along. He did, hand stroking her back with every step.
She led him through the sal forest. Sunlight blinked through trees onto them. There was a sudden noise and clatter, then voices from the trail below, in the trees, and the hand clutched at her fur. She stopped and listened. Voices of the people-hunters. She growled, then coughed deeply, then gave a short roar.
Dead silence from below. In the absence of an organized beat, no human could find her up here. Sounds of them hurrying off came to her on the wind.
The way was now free. The man's hand was clenched in the fur between her shoulderblades. She turned her head and nuzzled his shoulder and he let go. He was more afraid of the other men than of her, which showed sense. He was like a helpless cub in some ways, but quick. Her own mother had held her by biting the same fold of skin between the shoulderblades that he had seized, and at the same pressure – as if he too had once been a tigress mother, and was making an unremembered appeal to her.
She walked the man slowly to the next ford, across it and along one of the deer trails. Wapiti were bigger than humans, and it was an easy trail. She took him to one of her entrances to the big nullah of the region, a steep and narrow ravine, so precipitous and cragbound that its floor was only accessible at a couple of points. This was one, and she led the man down to the ravine floor, then downstream towards a village where the people smelled much like he did. The man had to walk fast to match her gait, but she did not slow down. Only a few pools dotted the ravine floor, as it had been hot for a long time. Springs dripped over ferny rockfalls. As they padded and stumbled along she thought about it, and seemed to recall a hut, near the edge of the village she was headed for, that had smelled almost exactly like him. She led him through a dense grove of date palms filling the floor of the nullah, then still denser clumps of bamboo. Green coverts of jaman fruit bushes covered the sides of the ravine, mixed with the ber thorn bush, dotted with its acid orange fruit.
A gap in this fragrant shrubbery led her up and out of the nullah. She sniffed, a male tiger had been here recently, spraying the exit from the nullah to mark it as his. She growled, and the man clutched the fur between her shoulders again, held on for help as she climbed the last pitch out.
Back in the forested hills flanking the nullah, angling uphill, she had to nudge him with her shoulder – he wanted to contour the slope, or go directly down to the village, not up and around to it. A few bumps from her and he gave that up, and followed her without resistance. Now he had a male tiger to avoid too, but he did not know that.
She led him through the ruins of an old hill fort, overgrown with bamboo, a place that humans avoided, and that she had made her lair several winters running. She had borne her cubs here, near the human village and among human ruins, to make them safer from male tigers. The man recognized the place, and calmed down. They continued on towards the backside of the village.
At his pace it was a long way. His body hung from his joints, and she saw how hard it must be to walk on two feet. Never a moment's rest, always balancing, falling forwards and catching himself, as if always crossing a log over a creek. Shaky as a new cub, blind and wet.