Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

“No!” She darted forward, placing herself between kittens and archangel. “They’ll never survive outside.”

“They are not defenseless. You should know that, being their creator.” His voice was firm but not unkind.

She hung her head. “But they are just babies…”

God signaled to Lucifer, who stood shifting his weight from one leg to another. “Well?”

Lucifer bit his lip. “My Lord God, they will not come.”

The kittens cowered at the roots of the Tree, a multicolored bundle of hissing fur. God turned to the Serpent.

“They will listen to you .” The promise of flood and fire now lurked in His tone. “See to their needs, but escort them out.”

Defeated, she nodded. “But will they endure? You’re omniscient. Please, tell me.”

He tilted His head sideways. “So be it. This I tell you: they will be revered as deities and hunted as demons. Often my mortal servants will know them to be not of my making. They will deem them evil, drown them in water and burn them with fire.”

“And you will do nothing to stop them?”

“I do not advocate their actions, and they will not go unpunished.” He smirked. “What happened to your support of free will?”

“It has gone with the kittens.”

The Serpent escorted the kittens through the wilder lands to a secluded oasis. They’d have fresh water there, and trees to climb on, and unsuspecting frogs and birds to hunt. But they’d be alone, easy prey to all the dangers that lurked outside Eden.

Back in Eden, she could no longer sleep in peace, her dreams now tormented by images of the kittens suffering. She had to find them a guardian, to shelter them in the eons to come. Had He not said, “ See to their needs? ”

Come morning, she climbed up the Tree of Knowledge and grabbed a fragrant fruit, then headed to the clearing where the humans dwelled.

“Eve! I have something for you.”

Daniel Wynn Barber lives in Denver, Colorado, where he teaches history at Englewood High School. Barber and his wife, Patricia, have two grown sons, Sean and Joel, and a lunatic cat named Phoebe. After suffering wounds in the Vietnam War in 1969, Barber was sent to Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver, fell in love with Colorado, and promptly abandoned his native Minnesota for a life in the Mile High City. While teaching and parenting have been his passion for the last twenty years, he hopes to find time to return to writing—a fire that was lighted in him many years ago, and whose flame has never died. His only other story was published in Bringing Down the Moon: 15 Tales of Fantasy and Terror in 1985.

Asked about the inspiration for “Tiger in the Snow,” he relates: “When I was a kid I had this tremendous fear of lions. I’m not sure where this fear came from, but lions stalked me in my dreams. When I would walk home late at night from a friend’s house, I just knew that a lion was out there, following me home, lying in wait. I was reminded of this fear years later when, as an adult with a child of my own, I was walking home from the milk store, in the dark. It was snowing and for some reason I thought of the old lion fear. The story was shaping up nicely by the time I reached home. Why I changed from a lion to a tiger is still something of a mystery; but I think it may have been the beauty of the contrast created by the image of a tiger’s orange and black against the stark purity of a world turned white with fresh snow. Or perhaps I still couldn’t confront the lion fear, and using a tiger was safer.”

Justin sensed the tiger as soon as he reached the street. He didn’t see it, or hear it. He simply… sensed it.

Leaving the warm safety of the Baxter’s porch light behind him, he started down the sidewalk that fronted State Street feeling the night swallow him in a single hungry gulp. He stopped when he reached the edge of the Baxter’s proper line and looked back wistfully toward their front door.

Too bad the evening had to end. It had been just about the finest evening he could remember. Not that Steve and he hadn’t had some fine old times together, the way best friends will; but this particular evening had been, well, magical. They had played The Shot Brothers down in Steve’s basement while Mr. and Mrs. Baxter watched TV upstairs. When the game had been going well and everything was clicking, Justin could almost believe that Steve and he really were brothers. And that feeling had never been stronger than it had been this evening.

When Mrs. Baxter had finally called down that it was time to go, it had struck Justin as vaguely strange that she would be packing him off on a night like this, seeing how he and Steve slept over at one another’s homes just about every weekend. But this evening was different. Despite the snow, home called to him in sweet siren whispers.

Mrs. Baxter had bundled him up in his parka, boots, and mittens, and then, much to his surprise, she had kissed his cheek. Steve had seen him to the door, said a quick goodbye, then hurried away to the den. Funny thing, Steve’s eyes had seemed moist.

Then Justin had stepped out into the night, and Mrs. Baxter had closed the door behind him, leaving him alone with the dark and the cold and… the tiger.

At the edge of the Baxter’s property, Justin glanced around for a glimpse of the beast; but the street appeared deserted save for the houses and parked cars under a downy blanket of fresh snow. It was drifting down lazily now, indifferent after the heavy fall of that afternoon. Justin could see the skittering flakes trapped within the cones of light cast by the street lamps, but otherwise the black air seemed coldly empty. The line of lamps at every corner of State Street gave the appearance of a tunnel of light that tapered down to nothingness; and beyond that tunnel, the dark pressed eagerly in.

For a moment, Justin felt the urge to scurry back to the Baxter’s door and beg for sanctuary, but he knew he should be getting home. Besides, he wasn’t some chicken who ran from the dark. He was one of the Shot Brothers. Rough and ready. Fearless. Hadn’t he proven that to stupid Dale Corkland just the other day? “You scared?” old zit-faced Corkland had asked him. And Justin had shown him.

At the corner, Justin looked both ways, although he knew there wouldn’t be many cars out on a night like this. Then he scanned the hedges along a nearby house, where dappled shadows hung frozen in the branches. Excellent camouflage for a tiger—particularly one of those white, Siberian tigers he’d read about.

He kept a close eye on those hedges as he crossed the street. Snow swelled up around his boots and sucked at his feet, making it impossible to run should a tiger spring from behind the mailbox on the far corner. He stopped before he reached that mailbox, listening for the low blowing sound that tigers sometimes make as they lie in ambush. But all he heard was the rasping of his own breath (“You scared?”) Yes. Tigers were nothing to be trifled with. They were as dangerous as the ice on Shepherd’s Pond.

Justin had stared at that ice, thinking about the warm weather they’d had the past week. Then he had looked up at Dale Corkland’s face, three years older than his and sporting a gala display of acne. “You scared?” And Justin had shown him.

But that was then and this was now; and weren’t tigers more merciless than ice? Oh, yes indeed.

Justin gave himself a good mental shaking. He tried to summon those things his father had told him at other times when this tiger-fear had come upon him. (Don’t he such a baby.) At night, when he would awaken screaming after a tiger nightmare. (It was only a dream.) Or when he felt certain that a tiger was lurking about the basement. (There are no tigers in the city. You only find tigers in the zoo.)