Negotiating with a Tiger

I was eight years old when I met a tiger in the woods.

There was a terrible fight after dinner.

I was in my bedroom, trying to read my library book. I remember that the book was called “Queenie Peavy,” and was the story of a tough girl who is misunderstood. I was enjoying the book, but I couldn’t concentrate for the shouting, the filthy name-calling, the slamming doors, and the breaking glass.

It was a warm night in the middle of summer. My baby brother was already asleep. I don’t know how he did it. He was a heavy sleeper for a toddler, blissfully unaware. I slipped out of the kitchen door and into the backyard.

Past the pear tree, at the edge of the lawn, there was a hayfield that belonged to our neighbors' neighbor, but stretched its boundary out behind our house. The sun was getting low, and the field was golden in the light.

Since the field was behind my house, and since there was a nice little wooded area on the other side with a brook running through it, I never thought anything of crossing it, even though that hay didn't belong to us.

When I got to that little wood, the tiger was there, crouching by the stream and lapping up some of the cool clear water. It was, as I said, a very warm night.

The tiger looked up.

"Hello Child." He said. "You look good enough to eat."

My mind was racing. What does one say to a tiger that talks? Especially one who wants to eat you? What on earth was a talking tiger doing in northern New England anyway? And, at the back of my mind was a nagging voice that said; “you are too far from the house. Nobody will hear you scream.”

I knew that I shouldn't run. Somewhere I had read that you should never turn your back on a tiger. Since this was an intelligent tiger, I decided to appeal to its vanity. The tiger in The Jungle Book had been vain, hadn’t it?  Perhaps this one would be too.

"Oh don't eat me Tiger!" I said, "I love tigers! You are so strong and fierce. Your um...your pelt is so beautiful." I couldn't remember where I’d heard the word “pelt.” I must have read that in a book too.

The tiger's eyes drifted down to my chest. I realized that I was wearing a tee-shirt with a tiger emblazoned across the front.

"You see!" I cried, “I care about Tigers. I’m sorry that you are endangered. I really, really don’t want for you to become extinct.” That was true. A few years earlier, when I’d learned about the endangered species list, I’d spent the entire afternoon bawling into my pillow over the fates of all those precious animals.

“Hmmm,” purred the tiger. His golden eyes flicked over my frame a second time. “You are intolerably scrawny. Hardly a fitting meal for me.”

“Yes! Yes, I am very scrawny.” I nodded my head emphatically.

The tiger lazily lifted one paw to his mouth and slowly licked it with his enormous, rough pink tongue. He never took his eyes off me.

“If you won’t be my meal, you must provide a suitable substitute.”

I gulped. “A substitute?”

“Yes. I must eat. Give me the name of one who would take your place.”

I thought of my baby brother, fat and snug in his crib. He was toddling now, which meant he was large and clumsy enough to break my toys on his screeching, careening trips around the house. But I loved his baby smell, and his soft red hair, and the way he tried to say my name, but it came out as a single syllable; “Day.”

I thought of my mother. She would leave us for hours at a time in the evening to work at the restaurant. I hated that. I also hated the way she didn’t let me win at checkers, and smoked cigarettes in the car, and held two fingers up to her lips to emit an ear splitting whistle when she wanted my attention, sometimes in public. But I loved the way she smelled like fresh bread and the cold softness of her wool coat when she hugged me after coming inside in the wintertime. I loved the way she did all the voices when she read stories, and the way she sang. I loved the way she could make any chore, no matter how tiresome, into a game.

Finally, I thought of my stepfather. It seemed like years since he had been kind to me. Since before my brother was born. I remembered one day, back then, when he took me fishing, just the two of us. We had laughed and told jokes on the dock together, and he had helped me reel in a small lake trout, for which he praised me lavishly. But lately, he hadn’t paid much attention to me at all, focusing instead on his new son. Worse, he had stopped being nice to Mother, and they fought often. It seemed that he called her a “bitch” at least once a day. I had never heard that word before I heard him call my mother that.

I thought again of that day at the lake. It was as if I was looking at the two of us through a spyglass; a small telescope like Captain Hook would have. I imagined myself taking the spyglass away from my eye, covering the lens with a cap, and closing it in a wooden case, never to be opened again.

I took a step towards the tiger, then another. When I was close enough, I bent towards his ear, and whispered my stepfather’s name.

Later that night, after it was dark. My stepfather huffed outside for one of his Marlboros, banging the screen door behind him. His footfalls were heavy, and I could hear his rough smoker’s cough below my open window. My mother waited a long time for him to come back to finish their argument. She was crying softly on the couch. Finally, she stood up. “To hell with this,” I heard her say, her voice breaking. She stomped upstairs, loudly enough to prove to herself that she was still angry, but not loudly enough to wake the baby, and went to bed.

I never heard a scream. I never heard a sound. In the morning, there was no trace of him. His truck was still in the driveway. When the police searched the woods, they found a scrap of his white cotton tee-shirt, with some of his blood on it, which proved nothing. When they questioned me, I said nothing. What was there to say?

Sometimes I was surprised that the tiger had accepted the trade. After all, my stepfather was tall, but he also had a wiry, muscular frame. His skin was leathery from working outside in the sun and from smoking his Marlboros. He must have been a difficult meal for the tiger. Still, I never had reason to believe that the bargain I had made had not been accepted.

My grandmother came to stay with us for a few months and help with the baby. She made casseroles and woke me up early on Saturday mornings to go with her to yard sales and church bazaars. My mother cried a lot at first, but then she started to smile and laugh again. She worried about money, but after a time she got a good job in an office and quit the restaurant for good. We survived.

But after a while, something strange began to happen. I barely noticed it at first, but with each passing year since my stepfather's disappearance, I have been changing. First, my hair started growing in thicker. Thick and glossy, it cascaded down my back. As I grew taller, I also grew round and stout, a little more each year. At puberty, I grew thick, soft, hair on my arms and legs and on my upper lip, which my mother painstaking taught me to shave and wax. Perhaps most surprisingly, on the day that I graduated from High School, I looked at myself in the mirror and noticed that the shade of my eyes was lighter. By the time that summer was over they had changed completely from a rich hazel brown to a glittering amber-gold.

Each year since he disappeared, I become a little larger, a little heavier. Each year I find more fur on my body.

And just this morning, as I was brushing my teeth, one of my front incisors suddenly crumbled and fell out. Shocked, I opened my jaws to the mirror, gazing at the bloody gum where my tooth had been. In its place, erupting just below the surface, was an enormous fang.

Chloe Horning is an erstwhile librarian, improbable yogi, and aspiring witch. She is also a writer. She lives outside of Seattle with her husband and dogs.