Tea Obreht - The Tiger's Wife

Lola stood outside the tavern this way for months, and when the spring brought trappers back from the mountains after the season’s hunt, they marveled at her authenticity, and demanded to meet the man who had done her such remarkable justice. The trappers were hard-faced, ugly men, ugly in every way, but they got less ugly the more they drank, and they drank a lot that night, buying round after round for Dariša. There was no more money to be made in taxidermy in the City, they told him; but there were forests the whole world over, forests belonging to kings and counts, even forests belonging to no one, and these forests were stocked with bear and wolf and lynx, whose hides were now worth a great deal to City men trying to distinguish themselves in social circles to which they had no birthright. In this world, the trappers told Dariša, the aristocracy had fallen from their frivolous pursuits, and a man could no longer rely on them to bring him work. Instead, he must go out and find the beasts himself, hunt them on his own time and with his own skill. If a rich idiot should happen to tag along, he was an added blessing; but rich idiots were harder and harder to come by, unreliable even when they expressed interest, and a man could not spend a lifetime waiting for them.

Dariša mopped floors for the rest of the spring and summer, but when autumn came he followed the trappers into the mountains. The hunt, he had convinced himself, was just a new avenue of the death business, and one way or another it would accommodate a return to independence and to the work he loved. He himself would bring home the hides that would revive Mr. Bogdan’s workshop; he would kill the bears whose pelts doctors and politicians would buy on market stands, the bears whose unseen deaths retired generals would embellish in fireside stories.

That first year, following one trapper and then another, Dariša became a hunter. They say he fell to hunting as if he had been born for it; but perhaps it was the possibility of having a purpose again that fueled him to adopt his new life with such ferocious energy and dedication. He learned to set up camp and mend weapons; to build a blind and sit motionless in it for hours; to read his quarry’s track in the dark and in the rain. He learned, by heart, the movement of deer herds across the mountains so that he could anticipate the bears who came to pick off the stragglers. He learned to hunt in late autumn, when the bears, slow-gaited and fattened, were fiercest in their last months of foraging before winter sleep. What the other trappers could teach him, he absorbed voraciously; what they could not, he figured out for himself. He hunted with traps and guns, with snares and poisoned meat, grew accustomed to the loud and stinking way bears died, and the way their skin came away from the body if you cut it right, heavy, blood-filled, but as accommodating as a dress pattern. He learned to love solitude, unbroken except for an occasional encounter with other trappers, or the unexpected hospitality of some godforsaken farm where the men always seemed to be gone, and the women always happy to see him. He learned that seven months of hunting could earn him the pleasure of three months of work in Mr. Bogdan’s basement, shut away from the world, rebuilding the skins he had brought with him.

He learned, also, to tolerate and understand the necessity of taking on rich idiots—a trickle of young men trying to cling to the noble birthrights of their fathers and grandfathers. By his third year of hunting, these youths would follow him through the brush, as sure-footed as fawns, their alarm wild and loud and completely unpredictable. They were the kind of men who came oversupplied and underprepared, whose teeth would chatter and arms go dead at the crucial moment. Every so often, one of them would inexplicably rise to the occasion and deliver the thunderclap blow at the correct moment and precise angle; these rare boys, few and far between, could never recover completely from the shock of their first kill, and their faces, in hunting photographs and for weeks afterward, would register smiles of stupefaction and little else.

But more and more, as times grew harder, Dariša found himself hunting specific bears, problem bears. Stories of his prowess had spread, and messengers would scour the woods to find him: a black bruin had made off with somebody’s child in Zlatica; an unseen devil-bear was coming down to a farm in Drveno, slaughtering horses in the field. A red sow the size of a house had lost her cubs to a male bear in Jesenica, and was jealously guarding the cornfield in which they had died, attacking the farmers during harvest; an old gray boar had made a lair for himself in a barn in Preliv, and was hibernating in there.

One by one, he found them all; and when the killing was done, he took their hides with him to the next village. The villagers would welcome him and take him in, feed and clothe him, buy the pelts he did not keep for himself; and then, when the time came for him to help them, too, they would line up in awe along the village streets and watch him leave the village for the forest beyond. Whether or not Dariša took the precaution of burying his weapons somewhere in the forest is irrelevant. Suffice it to say that he made an impressive sight, all five foot seven of him, disappearing into the forest unarmed, with the great bear pelt rolling over his shoulders.

Dariša the Bear. Behind him, knowledge of the golden labyrinth, and somewhere ahead of him, advancement toward it. And in the meantime, nothing but bears.

_____

And now, a tiger. It is said, of course, that Dariša interfered on Galina’s behalf as soon as he heard of the villagers’ misfortune; the truth, however, is that Dariša had little interest in hunting a tiger in the bitter winter. He was already in his late forties by then, reluctant to tangle with the unfamiliar; and, besides, he knew the war was coming closer, sensed it in the stories he had heard along the road. He was not compelled to stay in this part of the mountains with the troops moving quickly through the foothills, ready to come up at the first hint of spring. And though his refusal to the priest was firm, it was the apothecary who finally convinced him to stay, the apothecary who appealed to Dariša’s sense of compassion—not through righteousness or desperation or even the novelty of the quarry.

It was well known that Dariša, during his stays in the village, was content to sit in the square, sharpening his knives and eavesdropping on the breathless, well-side conversations of women; or to tease them in the marketplace, where they stood cross-armed behind their stands, eyes alert and unwavering. Dariša’s affection for women extended to an intolerance of the things that harmed or humiliated them: loud men, loutish behavior, unwanted advances. Whether or not this stemmed from his days of responsibility toward Magdalena, I also cannot say; but he was notorious wherever he traveled for dislocating the shoulders of aggressive drunks, or pulling the ears of neighborhood boys who stood about whistling at young women coming back from pasture.

So at daybreak, the apothecary took him to the edge of the forest on the pretense of showing him the tiger’s tracks.

“At least come see what we’ve got on our hands,” he said, “and tell me what you think of it.”

The two of them knelt over the previous night’s paw prints, and Dariša marveled at the size of them, the strong and unhesitating track that wound up the mountain and into the trees. Dariša climbed into the bracken to look for urine, and traces of the tiger’s fur snagged on the low-hanging thickets, and when he came back, they followed the tiger’s trail back to the village, to the pasture and over the fence. It led them, of course, to the butcher’s house, and the tiger’s wife came to the doorway and watched them pass by. She was already obviously pregnant, but something—perhaps the pregnancy itself, or Luka’s absence, or something else entirely—had made her come into grace.