Love of a Tiger

Chapter One Interviewer: You’ve referred to this hunt many times, of this dangerous task that you and her had to see through. Can you elaborate on what it was about? Caleb: It was about doing what was right. Interviewer: How did this particular hunt start? Take me back to the beginning. - Excerpt from Interview with a Shapeshifter, Monster Magazine 03, by Circe Cole. Printed with expressed permission. CALEB The Bali tiger was long extinct, but for only one, but for only him. The shape of his scapulae, high-angled, showed through his black-streaked crimson fur like the tips of two spearheads. His body, efficient, lay low to the leafy jungle floor, blended in, became invisible. His paws, large as plates, padded in silence. There would not be the rustle of a leaf, or the snap of a twig, to alert his prey to his presence. The jungle was silent around him. Not a bird dared chirp, nor insect buzz, nor frog croak, for fear of the tiger’s biting wrath. His anger was radiation, felt everywhere for miles. No more so than in his own heavy heart. His chest shook. The horror he had seen earlier that day… He drew from his anger; it washed away fear, relegated it to mere background counsel. It would help him, aid his reflexes, hone his sense of self-preservation, but would not own him, would not soften him, and would not slow him. The poachers had guns, but he had canines and claws. Bullets might pierce him, open wounds the size of ping-pong balls, but claws would rend flesh from bone, and the strength of his neck and jaw would snap a femur clean in half. Of course, it was quicker just to go for the windpipe. Caleb was on the hunt. He was after those who would cause suffering. He was after those who killed for profit. The poachers were overconfident, their voices loud and careless. They spoke in rapid-fire Thai, too quick for him to understand entirely. He had never spent very long in Thailand. The jungle was dense and hot in the Mae Wong National Park, close to the Myanmar-Thailand border. Water steamed, a milky haze that obscured all just thirty feet ahead. The air was close; it clung to him like damp clothing. The jungle was trees and vines for pillars and walls, a canopy of creepers for a ceiling. The sun could barely penetrate the alive, entwined covering; it was several inches thick. And for it, the jungle was one of shadows, broken by shafts of light that made it through the ever-shifting vents in the leaf-and-twig thicket. And for it, his tiger was unseen, even to the trained eye. The sound of an elephant in distress, a terrified blare that blasted out through its trunk, and the telltale thunderous stamping of its thick and heavy feet against the ground, echoed in the silent jungle. So the poachers had found their target. The ivory trade was illegal, and poaching elephants f*******n in Thailand, but the authorities could not patrol the vast swathes of dense jungle with any real coverage. Rarely were poachers caught, and even rarer were they successfully prosecuted, unless it was the right time to set an example, to fulfill a political obligation. There was too much money to be made, and appearances could be bought. Caleb growled, a baritone rumble that seemed born of his bones. He had tracked this group of men for two days now, and had seen the aftermath of one of their successful captures just hours ago. The elephant, barely an adult, had still been alive when Caleb had come across it, chained up and left for dead. Its tusks were missing; b****y stumps leaking puss. And gone with the tusks was part of the beast’s soul. A great rage had filled his being; it burned in his depths, bubbled to the top like magma from a volcanic vent. The great gray beast had seen him, his tiger, and the eyes had filled with terror, and Caleb’s heart had broken. He shifted quickly, his bones breaking, his tendons snapping, and his skin tearing to realign its shape, to turn into a sickening mush of pulpy pink scar tissue before he stood out of it, a broad and tall man, his body every bit as lean and strong, every bit as efficient, as his Bali tiger. The elephant had found no solace in Caleb’s new form. That Caleb was a shapeshifter, inhabited both the animal world and the human one, meant nothing to the beast. Its terror at his man might have been more than at his tiger. Caleb despaired. He approached the beast, felled onto its side, and saw two bullet wounds in the elephant’s chest. He placed his ear against the rough gray rind, and there he heard the sounds of blood in the beast’s lungs. Soon the blood would clot, and the elephant would garner less and less oxygen with each breath, and as it weakened, it would breathe in less deeply, forming the cycle that would lead to its inevitable death. The elephant would suffocate on its own blood, and there was not enough time to save it. He shifted back into his tiger and suppressed the urge to roar his rage. He was going to get the men who did this, and he wasn’t going to play nice. But first he had to tend to the elephant. First, he had to put it out of its misery, and save it from a prolonged and painful death. Caleb was dragged back into the present by the scruff of his neck. The frenzied shuffling of this second elephant, of the poacher’s second prize of the day, was clear in his ears. But they would not get to claim another one. He darted out of the shadows of the jungle, nimble and graceful, at odds with his enormous frame. He saw there the four men he had been tracking; they had run around the elephant with a metal chain and tangled up its legs. With horror, Caleb saw the elephant tip onto its side, come crashing down. The earth shook. The beast wailed. The men jeered. He saw a silver pistol. The handle had a grip made from ivory. It was pointed at the elephant’s skull. Caleb lunged, his body streaking through the air, an orange smudge against green and brown. Paws first on one of the men, a rake down the chest, ribs exposed. A pounce at the second man, jaws clamping around his neck, drawing bitter crimson. The man with the silver pistol fired, but missed. The bullet splintered bark. Caleb closed his jaws around the outstretched arm, twisted, felt the bone snap, pierce out through the skin. He rolled the man over, wrecking the arm, before turning after the sole survivor, who in terror had dropped his rifle, and started to flee. He could go free, run into the jungle with a horrible fear holding his heart hostage. He would tell legends of the tiger in the shadows, would speak of the beast that hunted poachers… killed them. The survivor would recite the nightmare, a harrowed face in the smoky shadows of a sleazy hole-in-the-wall bar, or a dark, damp, silenced tea house. The man with the pistol had red-rimmed eyes that were wide with fright. Caleb shifted quickly, so quickly that it was painful as his tiger’s body was forced to realign into the shape of his man at an unaccustomed pace. It was always painful when the shift was quick. Four seconds was the usual; he did it in two. Wincing, rubbing the small of his back where he could feel a nerve pinched in his hip – when the shift was too swift, the body did not always get it right – he approached the poacher, who was now no longer afraid, but confused, and perhaps amazed. “I’ve heard legends,” the man said in accented English. Caleb could see mixed lineage; he was not all Thai. Caleb himself was of mixed lineage, a tangled mess of bloodlines. His caramel skin shone with sweat, and his hazel eyes, ablaze, bore fiery holes into the felled poacher still clutching uselessly at his mangled arm. “Of shapeshifters,” the man continued, struggling for a moment to find the word. “Of men that change into wolves.” “I’m no wolf,” Caleb growled, gripping the man by his collar, and hoisting him up with a single arm. The man gasped at the strength held in Caleb’s body, and his eyes went up and down, taking in the sight of the n***d, athletic musculature. “I can pay you,” the man said after weighing his options, his intonation betraying the pain he was in. Caleb’s eyes narrowed. “If money is not what you want, then why have you let me live?” Caleb looked from him to the two dead men, two men he had killed. There was a thump in his chest, a quick burst of remorse, not for them, but for their families and their friends, those not party to the poaching. The region was poor; what if they had children to feed? His gaze went then to the elephant, no longer panicking, but watching out of intelligent eyes at his and the poacher’s exchange. There was never a time that this was easy, but this was all that Caleb knew. “Sit,” he ordered, pushing the man down into the dirt. The man winced, cradling his arm. Caleb bent down and picked up the pistol. The elephant began to panic, moving its legs uselessly against the chains. Its trunk slapped the leafy ground over and over, and its eyes were wide with fear. The beast surely smelled its dead brethren, for they were downwind from the poachers’ last catch. Caleb threw the pistol into the jungle. The cool smoothness of the ivory left his fingers tingling; he was disgusted. He saw a movement and pointed a finger at the sitting poacher who had risen to his knees. “Try something,” he snarled. “Please.” The man put up a hand, immediately wilting. “Okay, okay,” he whispered. He fell back onto his a*s and leaned against the tree behind him. “I won’t.” Caleb, wiping strands of sweaty chestnut hair from his eyes and tucking them behind his ears, turned to the frightened elephant. He approached it slowly, talking to it, soothing it, palms outstretched before him. Elephants were highly intelligent, and it had to know he held nothing in his hands. “I’m going to set you free,” he said, aware that this elephant could very well kill him afterward, either in an angry stampede or with a stab of its tusks, the tusks that still belonged to it. But Caleb had dealt with elephants before. Their emotional capacity, cleverness, and empathetic tendency was rivaled only by dolphins… and most humans. He needed to gain this elephant’s trust. Caleb spoke to it, cooed at it, stroked its side with a gentle palm and tender fingers for minutes. He waited for the beast’s breathing to slow, for its heart rate, heard thumping through its thick skin, to calm. It was then he began to loosen the tangled mess of metal around the elephant’s enormous fore legs. First he freed one leg, lifting the heavy limb with some difficulty, then another, and the beast got quickly to its feet, but lumbered forward, grunting in distress. Still the two hind legs were tangled. “Wait, wait, wait,” Caleb whispered, palms out. He smiled at the elephant, saw those beady, intelligent eyes regard him, consider him. “You’re still tangled. I’ll help you.” Gingerly, wary of the beast’s brute strength, he sidled up under the elephant and pulled the metal chains down its legs. The elephant trumpeted, trotted its free feet like a horse putting on a show, before turning to Caleb. The gray beast flapped its ears and turned to look at the poacher. Caleb felt the elephant’s anger. It was like radiation. He stepped aside, gave the elephant space, and waited. He could not hope to stop such a large creature, and he wouldn’t try to, anyway. But though the elephant’s breathing grew heavy and tense, and though in those tiny eyes there was a look of – he was certain – vengeance, the elephant turned and disappeared quickly into the jungle, leaving crushed foliage in its wake. Caleb turned to the poacher, approached him with long and angry strides, and once again hauled him up off the ground. “Up!” he shouted, throwing the man against the tree. He ripped the man’s shirt from his body, pulling a cry of pain from him, and tied a rough tourniquet above the break in his arm. The man winced, and his eyes watered. “Move!” Caleb barked, pointing due east and kicking the back of his legs. The man jumped forward and started walking. “No dawdling, you bastard.” They marched for two days to the edges of the national park, and there he turned the man in to the park guards. They knew better than to ask why Caleb was n***d. “You’re lucky the penalty for this is so low,” he growled in the poacher’s ear before leaving him. “So when you get out, find another line of work.” He stalked off back into the jungle, and when he was out of sight, shifted into his tiger. The poacher’s sentence would be light. Perhaps five years at maximum, and he’d be out early if he had connections, which he was likely to. As his tiger, he wondered if he should have just closed his jaws around the poacher’s neck and sent him swiftly to the grave. But the elephant had shown mercy. And Caleb had done enough killing for a lifetime.