YEAR OF THE TIGER
Another exciting novel by Stephen Swartz
(Action-Adventure/Literary Fiction)
What would you do if you awoke deep in the mind of some wild animal, living its life—hunting, killing, mating?
Every night Karl Edwards has strange, violent dreams. He sees the world as though looking through the eyes of a huge Bengal tiger and it is driving him insane. His sexy wife notices and, fortunately, she knows a hunky young doctor who can help—help her have Karl committed, that is. Locked up, the nightmares worsen for Karl, growing ever stronger as the tiger hunts down the men who killed its mate.
Karl has a plan, however. All he has to do is persuade Althea, the mousy young nurse on his floor, to help him escape. Next, he must find a way to get to India. Then he must find that one tiger and kill it. Only then will Karl have the mind all to himself that they seem to share! Simple, right?
But others are interested in joining the hunt. The doctor who put Karl in the mental hospital, fearing Karl will reveal the doctor’s criminal behavior, sets out after human prey. And famous big game hunter Colonel John Barrington will come out of retirement, with worldwide media in tow, for one last chance at a man-eating tiger! Who will get to the tiger first? And will the tiger be the one to have the last roar?
Set in 1986, YEAR OF THE TIGER is a fast-paced adventure novel that weaves together a vicious jungle of intrigue, a blood grudge between man and beast, that explodes at the end of the trail!
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Chapter 1
The Hunt, the Hunters, the Hunted
The hunting party rumbles along the dirt road, heading deep into the valley where the locals have known tigers to pass. Ripples of heat split the landscape into horizontal bands of flickering images, real and fantastic, each waxing and waning with their own ceaseless, erratic rhythms. The blowing dust obscures the horizon, temporarily hiding the cruel bronze sun as the hunters advance.
“I dare say,” the older of the two hunters, the one introduced to them as Rupert, calls over the noise of the engine,“Grandfather was right up there with your Jim Corbett—and Colonel Patterson down in Africa! Grandfather just didn’t write a book about his adventures. No, sir! He was content to go about his hunting with quiet efficiency. He only told his tales to relations. It’s a fact: he was game warden in the United Provinces the same time Corbett was killing man-eaters.
“There was one incident, however, he made a great deal about in his later years: a huge marauding tiger back in, what nineteen-twenty-one or so? It was terrorizing thousands of people in two adjacent mountain districts—as well as annual pilgrims by the hundreds, mind you, going up to their shrines. ’Twas a man-eater! For several years it survived numerous poisons, traps, and armies of hunters. Bloody cat claimed over a hundred twenty human victims in its career. Its cunning was so magnificent the villagers called him shaitan—devil spirit. Grandfather said you could not appreciate the cat’s evil soul without spending weeks upon weeks of steaming, humid days and bone-chilling nights stalking, baiting, and hunting the beast.”
The two hunters had been introduced to the guide, their shikari, only the night before, at the base camp. He had seen these kind of men before: men who looked backwards, who refused to live in modern times. They had some kind of bug in their heads that made them believe they were someone else, someone better, when they actually were worse. The one with the fabulous imagination was Rupert, who liked to twirl his waxed moustache around his fingers whenever he talked. His younger brother was Reggie, more broad-shouldered and quieter than his senior. Their guide, a tall, turbaned man from Calcutta who sported several deep scars across his face, had hesitantly agreed to be their guide for this unauthorized excursion. The price they offered wastoo much to ignore. Even so, the guide never promised to laugh at their jokes, or cheer on their false bravura. This was a business transaction: the two fools wished to kill a tiger.
“Grandfather was a young officer in those days,” said the fool named Rupert, “so he and another officer went after the ten-thousand rupee reward. They knew the tiger hunted in mountainous territories separated by a narrow, raging stream. But in that district—for miles in either direction—there was only one bridge that spanned the gorge where those quick currents ran: a long, suspension bridge. You know the type: wooden planks sewn together with ropes, just wide enough for one adult to cross—swinging freely when the night winds pick up or when you’re bloody crossing it. And yet, the village women regularly used that bridge whilst carrying gigantic bundles atop their heads with no apparent regard for its flimsy construction.”
Scoring the grassy landscape with their tires, the two vehicles cut through the choking beige clouds, stringing the billowing dust behind them like trailing parachutes as they roll across the plain like mechanical beasts running down their prey. The shikari curses under his breath as Rupert drones on, raising his voice above the jeep’s roaring engine, his hard-edged words forced out through the swirling dust, disrupted by all of the jolts and lurches of their vehicle as they race through the terai, the sparsely wooded plains of eastern Ossia province.
“Now, when news reached them another kill had been made by the tiger on the north side of the river, they hurried to their ambush site at the bridge. Mind you, the tiger, it was discovered, always went to the opposite side of the river after each of its kills—this single bridge had to be the answer! All through the dark evening hours they waited, hidden among the tree branches at either end of that spindly, swaying bridge. Grandfather volunteered to be the one to cross the bridge so they might secure it from each end.
“The hours went by slowly—though quite anxiously! And their eyes strained to keep the bridge in focus in the moonlight, the steady thundering roar of the rushing stream below lulling them to sleep.
“Finally, Grandfather caught sight of the tiger’s shadowy figure, colored blue in the moonlight, standing midway along the bridge. The beast padded slowly across those ragged planks, no doubt confident of its own nimbleness, with a fine supper in its belly! Grandfather raised his twin-barreled shotgun to his shoulder, aiming it, and wondered why his partner—who was perched in a tree at the end where the bloody tiger was going—had not fired a shot. If he was going to get a good shot, he’d have to get it off while the tiger was on the bridge—another thirty feet or about.
“Grandfather aligns the sights, prods the branches and leaves to move out of the way so he can have a clear shot. His finger’s resting on the trigger, just starting to squeeze it as the cat’s chest falls into the sights. The beast pauses, looks back over its shoulder—as though it hears something.
“Then suddenly, his partner drops from the tree behind the tiger—beside those pegged ropes that brace the whole bloody bridge. He flings up his single-barreled shotgun to his shoulder and fires. But he rushes it: the shot strikes the cat’s left rear paw. The cat turns around and starts toward him! He doesn’t have time to reload, so he pulls his service revolver from the holster, cranks out all six shots before the tiger’s pummeling claws are slapping him down hard onto his back—puncture marks in his throat.
“Grandfather leaps down from his tree and rushes onto the swaying bridge, somehow keeping his balance despite holding his shotgun up to his shoulder and ignoring the ropes. The bloody tiger looks up at this other man—its eyes are glowing in the night, its blood-stained paws pressed over the quivering body of Grandfather’s partner—who’s bloody-well shocked stiff. His larynx is torn open, so he can’t even scream!
“Grandfather fires a shot at the cat but the swaying of the bridge throws his shot off the mark. The tiger rises from the other man and in a flash it’s charging Grandfather! He scrambles to reload on those shifting, swinging bridge planks. A whole handful of shells falls through his shaking fingers down into the raging stream below as he pulls them from his coat pocket, but he still manages to shove one of them into the breech of his gun.Immediately he swings the barrel center as the tiger bounds sure-footedly toward him. The seconds tick by like hours as the beast drips blood from its fangs and its eyes glow like moonlit death. Then its powerful shoulders and hindlegs propel his torpedo body straight at him.
“Grandfather jerks the trigger, so the blast splatters the left shoulder of the beast with shot and the tiger is halted in its tracks. It’s because of the surprise of the shot, not the force of it. For Grandfather, however, the kick of the unsecured shotgun throws him back against the ropes and his feet are grappling frantically for balance on those thin, wooden planks. He grabs at the rope as he slips from the planks, and his shotgun drops down into those swirling rapids below. He tries to hold on to the ropes, but his full weight’s pulling him down—below the level of the bridge planks themselves!
“The bloody tiger recovers from the shock of the gun blast and pads innocently across to the other side of the bridge. Grandfather said the cat just paused for a few breaths right at the point where he was grasping the flimsy rope, swaying against the bridge, unable to pull himself up. The cat gives him a ‘clever Dick’ grimace, eyes burning in the night—like he was figuratively thumbing its nose at him!
“Grandfather saw the blood spur from the tiger’s bit of a wound as it padded off to the safety of the forest, and he hoped somehow the wound would bleed the cat to death in a few days. But he was wrong. That tiger killed seven more people before Jim Corbett was called in to kill it—and after four more victims, and several harrowing weeks of his own, stalking and setting ambushes, Colonel Corbett finally managed to do in that shaitantiger.”
Then Reggie, caught up in the telling, jumps in: “But Grandfather spent the rest of that night hanging from the rope stretched across that high jagged-edged gorge—all the while the river raging below and the freezing night air above, sweat oozing from his nerve-rattled body. At mid-morning the next day, however, locals happened onto the bridge and not only found Grandfather, but also a piece of the tiger’s toe, including the claw, which was clipped off by his partner’s shot! A clawed toe for a souvenir! How’s that, eh?”
The shikari laughs automatically, not at their tale but at their foolish excitement—just as their jeep hits a rock and they are all flung ten inches off their seats. He takes some delight in Rupert’s animated speech. But the driver and the shikari cannot help but be amused by these aristocratic playboys who fancy themselves hunters.
“Grandfather was always quick to note that his partner nearly bled to death, plastered as he was to the dirt path by shock,” says Rupert.
And Reggie added: “But he did survive and was discharged from the army, never to utter a word the rest of his life. He had no bloody throat!”
“So our grandfather lived to hunt again, thank god!”
“And eventually to father two sons.”
“And one of them was our father,” Rupertdeclared, grinning with pride.
“Then why you want hunt tiger?” the shikari asks.
“Grandfather was killed by a tiger,” says Rupert. “A few years later.”
But the shikari does not see any point in asking them the details of the event.
“That’s another story, eh?” Rupert chuckles. “Back in camp, perhaps, I’ll tell you.”
As shikari, he knows his job is not to keep a client’s conversation going.
“This is the Year of the Tiger,” Rupert continues nevertheless, with a teasing leer at his baby brother. “In the oriental calendar. Every twelve years it comes. And this is the year for tigers. Next year will be the Year of the Rabbit.”
“And we’d rather not go huntingEaster bunnies,” Reggie chuckles.
“No test of manhood there!”
The shikari grins, thinking of the money.
Sporting fine red jackets, Rupert and Reggie, the two young sahibs, resemble the British soldiers who once ruled over the Indian subcontinent. They explained the night before to their guide how the bright red uniforms give them strength and confidence. The simply-clothed Bengali men in the lorry following them find it strange and compelling, though, that these white hunters would wear their heavy woolen jackets despite the intensive heat—forty-four degrees Celsius in the shade—and they are almost impressed.
“You see, my good fellow,” Rupert goes on, tapping their shikari’s shoulder, “since the times Grandfather lived through, our family has hunted tiger every twelfth year. Father bagged his cats in sixty-two and seventy-four. Now it’s our turn to do the family honor here in eighty-six. In ninety-eight, our sons will join us.”
“Yet, we have the idea,” Reggie jumps in, “to do Father one better. We’re prepared to go into the fray, as it were, armed in the style of the Moghuls. We shall kill our tiger with bow and arrow, with spear and lance, not with some high-powered rifle and a scope!”
“Then we shall cut it up with our knives,” says Rupert, “and hold its heart in our bare hands—and eat it!”
“To show our mettle as our father’s sons, and our grandfather’s grandsons,” says Reggie.
“Chips off the old block!” Rupert adds.
Not all of the words does the shikari understand but that is of no concern to him. They have already said it is their first hunt. He will lead them to a tiger, help them kill it, collect his money and feed his family. What they do with the beast afterwards does not matter to him. Sooner or later the tiger may kill livestock, or turn man-eater and strike down a child or old woman. He has no need of a sanctuary for tigers.
Behind them, boiling clouds of dust mark their passage as they charge ahead toward the naked hillock which rises as a sentinel over the whole valley. It stands crowned with a single bare, gnarled old acacia tree. A pair of tigers have been seen there off and on during the previous weeks.
The jeep hits another unexpected stone, nearly flipping the hunters out of their mount.
“Jolly good bump, eh?” the older brother howls in delight.
“Yes, sahib, jolly gooda boomp!” answers the shikari.
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