‘May the temptation of the Fox and the Crow always stay away from her,’ she asked with the profound strength of her love.
‘And may she never encounter mankind…’
CHAPTER FOUR
I Must Tell You about Mankind
The cubs’ second winter was almost over. The ice sheets on the river were beginning to crack, while the snow on the ground was turning into a huge swamp. The sound of water dripping echoed all around. The birds had given up their gloomy winter peeping and were now chirping and warbling, hopping from branch to branch.
Soon it would be time for the brief mating season, and Mother knew that her cubs would leave to conquer their own Kingdoms.
How many times had she lived through that moment!
And every time her heart was still filled with pride for being able to carry out her task. But this feeling often overlapped with another feeling – one that was subtler and more mysterious, and that suddenly made her feel fragile.
As she rested in front of the entrance to the den, she wondered if everything she had taught her cubs would be enough. Had she been clear enough? Strict enough? Would they be able to become true tigers?
Little Tiger and Tiger Cub were now old enough to hunt by themselves and spend the night outside. They often returned with some food for their mother as well. Tiger Cub was a specialist in boars. Little Tiger, however, favoured hares.
Mother had tried to reproach her, asking, ‘Is that all?’
But her daughter always found an excuse: ‘I wasn’t hungry!…I ate a salmon!…I fell asleep in a clearing full of blueberries…’
Little Tiger had a curious nature, and curiosity was not a good virtue for a Queen. For squirrels, perhaps, but not for a tiger. A tiger should be able to go straight for her goal.
Mother sighed. She couldn’t keep quiet any more. She had told them about everything except mankind.
Now it was time.
The thaw was already under way. Swarms of annoying insects rose from the huge wetlands the taiga had become. Tiger Cub had brought an old deer back to their den, and they spent two days doing nothing other than eating. It took just as long for them to digest it.
On the fourth day, Mother stood up and said, ‘I must tell you about mankind!’
Tiger Cub opened his eyes sleepily. ‘Can you eat it?’
‘We could, but that’s not the most important point.’
‘So why must you tell us about it?’
‘Because it is better that tigers and mankind do not meet, ever.’
Then Mother told them everything she knew. Out of all the animals, man was the only one able to put an end to their days. It was not very large, nor did it have nails or teeth worthy of those names. What he had, though, was a long rod out of which came fire, and with it he could kill tigers.
‘Does he want to eat us?’ Little Tiger asked.
Mother shook her head. ‘No, the man kills just for the sake of killing.’
‘In addition to the fire,’ Mother went on, ‘the man also knows how to build traps from which, once caught, it is very difficult to escape.’
‘We’ve never seen one!’ Little Tiger protested.
‘Luckily there are very few of them,’ Mother replied, ‘but it is best to know how to recognize those few.’
Then she got up, inviting the cubs to follow.
‘You need to know his smell. Learn to recognize it in even the most confusing winds, and whenever you sense it, you must flee in the opposite direction right away. Man also makes a lot of noise, especially if he’s not alone, but if you ever get to hear that noise it will already be too late to do anything.’
‘We tigers flee?’ Tiger Cub exclaimed, surprised.
‘What’s the point in dying at the hands of someone who won’t even eat you?’ Mother sighed. ‘A tiger respects the dignity of life.’
They walked in silence for a couple of days. Most of the time they followed the course of the river, then they headed into a vast forest of firs.
At one point, Mother stopped, sniffing the air. Then she started walking again, more cautiously now, in the same direction.
After a while, they found themselves at the edge of a clearing. A building made of wooden planks stood out in the middle. Part of the roof had collapsed and the area around it was neglected and overgrown.
‘See, this is a man’s den,’ Mother whispered. ‘An abandoned one.’
She was the first to approach it, with great caution, followed by her cubs.
Tiger Cub stopped, distracted by a pair of old boots. He moved forward nose first, sniffing all around.
‘That’s his smell?’
Mother nodded.
They entered the cabin and Mother urged them to sniff every little thing.
‘Can you feel it? Can you? Do you understand?’
They explored every nook and cranny.
‘I think there was more than one man here,’ Tiger Cub remarked at one point.
‘Right! This was a woodcutter’s hut. At least four of them have been here.’
‘Are they coming back?’ Little Tiger asked.
‘Not here,’ Mother replied. ‘They move around to cut trees.’
On the way back, the cubs were quiet, each absorbed in their own thoughts.
Now they knew that something else apart from the ice was a threat to them – and in the same way as the ice. Both would harm tigers not in order to survive, but only for the sake of doing so.
That year, the warm season was shorter than usual. The night devoured the daylight and they spent more and more time away from the den.
Mother knew that her cubs were fully grown. Soon she would be alone again, and then, if it so pleased the sky, a new life cycle would start.
For the first time since she had learned of her purpose as a tiger, she felt a vague sense of bewilderment. How many seasons had passed since her first litter? Closing her eyes, Mother tried to imagine how much of the taiga would be covered by her own Kingdom and the Kingdoms of her offspring. Her cubs must surely have ventured as far as where the sun rises. She could be proud. She had been a good mother; she had chosen a good father. It was he who brought her news of their offspring from time to time, as he was used to exploring much larger territories than hers.
In her heart, Mother smiled. Thinking about her children, and her children’s children, she realized that it was possible that there was no corner of the vast forest that wasn’t ruled by their progeny. Her life hadn’t been very different from that of the large trees of the forest, after all. She had been the trunk, and her children the branches, and her children’s children the fruit. But instead of embracing the sky with foliage, they reigned the entire Earth with their presence, bringing order to the world. No sick animal suffered and no creature lived longer than the forces of the sky allowed them to.
If it were not for man, the world would be perfect.
So many distant memories were now coming back to her. All of a sudden, she remembered the smouldering eyes of the one who had taught her that great truth years before: mankind is the principle of disharmony. Looking back on that time long ago, Mother let out a deep sigh.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Man-Tiger
Mother had been hardly bigger than Little Tiger when she met him. She had only just marked the boundaries of her Kingdom and was looking for the one who would become the father of her children. The snow had been falling for several days but the river was not yet completely frozen.
A young male of incredible magnificence had appeared at her side. They had sniffed each other, liked one another, and had begun chasing each other, jumping in the snow and wrapping their long tails around one another. Both were young and they had the same boundless energy, the same desire to be masters of the world.
It will be with him that I start my progeny, she had thought then, as they were catching their breath in between games. Yes, he’ll be the father of my children.
At this thought she had felt a great peace settle in
side her. Everything had been accomplished. She had her Kingdom, and soon the cubs would come too.
But days passed and nothing happened between them except the pleasure of being together. They continued to play in the den as siblings, but that was all.
One day, as they recovered from one of their chasing games, their breath forming small puffy clouds in front of them, the young male had inhaled deeply, staring at her.
‘There’s something I have to tell you.’
It was time! Her heart had leapt.
‘I would spend my whole life with you in the taiga, but I can’t,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I am not a tiger, but a man.’
The Young Tiger had jumped up.
How could that be possible?
He looked exactly like one of her kin. Not even his smell had alerted her! They both stood still, staring at each other.
‘I am a shaman, and the Tiger is my Spirit Guide. I live inside him, but I’m not him. Before the new moon, I’ll go back to living as a human being, just as I was when I was born from my mother’s womb.’
At those words, the Young Tiger had felt very confused. She didn’t know what a shaman was, but she knew that men were a great danger. She should have run away, but something compelled her to stay.
‘Fear not!’ he had told her, to put her mind at ease. ‘My time is not up yet. We can stay together for two days more.’
And so they did.
But something had changed between them.
The Young Tiger had no longer felt like playing, so they had started talking. With Man-Tiger next to her, she could see things that had been invisible to her up until that point.
It was the Shaman who explained to her the reason why humans killed tigers without eating them. It was because they loved putting their skin under their feet. Once dead, in fact, a tiger was turned into a rug, while its entrails were used to create medications with which humans entertained the delusion that they could acquire its powers.
But the true reason why men liked to kill tigers wasn’t even that, he had continued.
The real reason was envy.
They envied their strength and their majesty.
One snowy night, the Man-Tiger had shown her how perfect each snowflake looked just before melting on their fur. Together they had counted the stars, and they had kept vigil, waiting for the sun that would rise each day to start the world anew.
When the night of their parting finally came, they rubbed their muzzles together for a long time.
‘All of this is very sad,’ the Young Tiger had said.
‘Everything has a meaning,’ the Man-Tiger had replied, as he walked away from her slowly, vanishing into the fog that had engulfed the forest in the meantime.
After being buried in her memory for so many years, the words of the Shaman-Tiger were coming back to her now. Her survival instincts had almost led Mother to erase the memory of that episode.
And yet now, as she watched Little Tiger, she started to realize how different she was from all the other children she had borne, and how this difference could be a result of what she herself had learned during those nights long ago.
The Shaman had shown her a world that was invisible to others, and that world, trapped for so long inside her heart, had somehow found a way to surface in her offspring.
Without realizing it, the thoughts of Man-Tiger had become her thoughts, and her thoughts had become those of Little Tiger. She, however, had managed to dominate them, while Little Tiger was dominated by them.
CHAPTER SIX
What Will Become of Her?
At night, in the den, Mother watched her daughter sleep. She was an adult tiger now and she would have been the pride and joy of any mother. She slept with a serene expression, her stomach vibrating with each breath and her whiskers following the same rhythm.
She should have been ready by now to conquer her own Kingdom and find a mate, yet every time her mother looked at her she couldn’t help but see anything more than a rug.
The last three days they spent together were disrupted by an enormous snowstorm. In the dim light of the den they could hear the wind whistling, accompanied by the sudden crash of the older trees collapsing to the ground and the subsequent crackling of branches.
‘The wind speaks,’ Mother told her cubs repeatedly. ‘You just need to know how to listen.’
Little Tiger couldn’t sleep. The wind was speaking with the energy of a storm but, try as she might, she couldn’t decipher a single word.
Her brother was restless too, pacing back and forth in the den as if his tail were on fire.
‘When will it end?’ he asked over and over again.
‘When it pleases the sky,’ Mother answered patiently.
Tiger Cub felt a surge of anger.
‘The sky – always the sky! There must be something that depends on our legs!’
That first rebellious outburst made it clear to Mother that the time for farewells had come. Once the storm had subsided, their family would part.
‘Yes, what about our legs?’ Little Tiger joined in. ‘If we are destined to reign, why must we submit to something else?’
‘The sky is our father,’ came Mother’s calm reply. ‘The Earth our mother. Our Kingdom is what comes in between. If the father wants something, it’s for our own good. Likewise, if the mother wants it. A wise tiger knows how to listen.’
But Mother’s words didn’t placate the restless young tigers.
Tiger Cub kept moving over to the entrance of the den, pawing vigorously at the wall of snow that was accumulating there, repeating: ‘We’re not rats!’
Then one day, just before dawn, the wind suddenly subsided.
The silence that follows a storm is the greatest silence of all. Everything is still, and the blanket of snow sparkles in the light of the sun. With gentle thuds, the branches of the fir trees are released from their white burden and the birds, baffled, keep repeating a single note. More than a song, it sounds like a question: ‘Chirp? Is it really over? Chirp? Really? Is it over?’
When the first rays of the sun entered the den, Mother knew that the moment for which she had been waiting for so long had finally arrived. That day, her children would begin their solitary adult lives. They would rub their long muzzles against hers and then their tails would slowly disappear from her sight in opposite directions.
During those stormy days, however, looking back at the many times Little Tiger had returned happily to the den, shaking just a hare in her mouth as proudly as a fox would, Mother had made a decision.
What kind of a Kingdom could her daughter ever hope to find for herself?
Heading out into the thick snow, Mother turned back towards her children.
‘The Big Moment has arrived! But it’s not nice to part ways like this. I will go out hunting for you one last time! I’ll bring back a moose more succulent than you’ve ever eaten. Then we will feast and you will be on your way.’
‘Yes!’ Little Tiger and Tiger Cub answered in unison, lifting their muzzles high in a salute.
As soon as Mother was out of sight, they threw themselves on to each other one last time, chasing each other in a childish game of rough and tumble.
Mother had a hard time making her way through all the snow. As soon as she reached the top of the hill overlooking the entrance to their den, she turned around one last time to look at her children. Little Tiger was crouching and hissing from the bottom of her lungs, and Tiger Cub was pretending to be scared. In a moment, she knew, he’d jump over her and they would both roll joyfully in the snow.
She had made the right decision.
Inheriting a Kingdom was easier than conquering one. If someone were to become a rug, it had better be her, not Little Tiger.
She closed her eyes, opened them, closed them once more, and then opened them one last time. She wanted that scene to remain forever imprinted in her heart.
‘May the sky protect you, and the Earth be
your friend,’ she whispered.
Then, with a giant leap, she disappeared among the immense white silhouettes of trees covered with snow.
CHAPTER SEVEN
To the East
Little Tiger and Tiger Cub waited for their mother for six days, hunting small prey from time to time to feed themselves.
They waited in vain.
On the seventh day, waking up his sister, Tiger Cub said, ‘She’s not coming back.’
Little Tiger was alarmed. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘It doesn’t take seven days to catch a moose.’
‘Let’s wait a bit longer.’
‘You wait! I must go.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To where the sun goes down.’
As they said goodbye, their noses brushed one last time.
‘You’ve been a good sister.’
‘And you a good brother.’
‘Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’
After a few uncertain steps, the young male sped up his gait and walked away without looking back.
It had been snowing steadily since the day of the storm. The area around the clearing was beaten by their paw prints.
Uncertain, Little Tiger stood in front of the entrance to the den.
The silence was broken only by the crackling noise of a squirrel gnawing at a pine cone overhead.
It was the first time that Little Tiger had been completely alone.
Alone in front of the den, alone inside the den.
The flattened leaves on the ground still smelled of her mother and brother.
It was only when night fell that she reluctantly stepped inside. There was nobody to keep her warm, nobody to curl up against. Lonely sleep was the saddest of all, and the lightest too. At every rustling noise she leaped to her feet, heart pounding, expecting an attack. She would then push her muzzle through the tangle of branches, but the cold moonlight on the snow always illuminated the same sight: black skeletons of trees against a black sky.