TIGER

The tiger entered the cave without making a sound.

One moment there was only the rain beyond the opening, silver where it crossed the light, black where it fell against the forest. The next, something interrupted its downward movement. A broad head passed beneath the hanging roots. One forepaw settled on the limestone, and water spread from it in a broad dark stain.

The young monk stopped breathing.

He had imagined this moment so often that its arrival felt, briefly, like a mistake. In every imagining he had been ready. His body had been quiet, his mind clear. Now his heart struck so violently that the cloth over his chest moved with it. His right foot, folded beneath him for too long, was numb. He could not have stood without first placing both hands on the ground.

The tiger took another step.

Its coat was darker than he had expected. Rain had flattened the fur along its shoulders into narrow seams through which the orange showed almost red. A leaf clung to one flank. Beneath the pale fur of its chin, a drop gathered, lengthened, and fell. The left ear was notched. There was a small healed wound beside its nose, a smooth place where the whiskers no longer grew.

He saw these things separately, with terrible precision.

Then the smell reached him.

Wet fur. Earth pressed into the spaces between the pads. The rich, close odour of an animal that had eaten recently. Something green and crushed, carried from the undergrowth. Beneath these came a sharper trace that he recognised without being able to place.

His mouth flooded with saliva.

He had learned, as a child, that the world came to other people in a different order. They saw a visitor at the gate and then decided whether to smile. He sometimes felt the visitor's presence while the road was still empty: a pressure beneath the ribs, an unwelcome tightening in his own throat. Only later would a motorbike arrive, and an exhausted man climb off, and his mother turn down her music.

For years he had believed everyone experienced this and was simply better at bearing it.

The tiger's eyes moved over him.

He lowered his gaze, but not before he saw the small reflection of the cave opening in each amber iris. He was in those eyes too, a pale face above a narrow body wrapped in ochre cloth. The son of Narin. A young man who had walked into the mountains carrying a bowl, a folded mosquito net, and an idea of himself that already seemed foolish.