Subterranean Magazine Fall 2012 by Nnedi Okorafor & Maria Dahvana Headley & Brian Lumley & Kealan Patrick Burke

Author:Nnedi Okorafor & Maria Dahvana Headley & Brian Lumley & Kealan Patrick Burke [Okorafor, Nnedi]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi

18 September, 1950

The tigress was waiting for us, as I knew she would be. We slept for three hours and rose in darkness this morning, K_____ protesting bitterly.

I didn’t want to stalk her any longer. I’d dreamed of Kenya, and of my wife sitting at the kitchen table, her tea in hand. I thought about how I would likely not see her again.

I didn’t expect to survive a tigress this large, to whom I’d already lost my courage once, to whom I’d lost my pride. A ghost made of hunger and air.

She was out there. The forest wailed her presence. I felt her intentions, her bulk in the trees. I took a small bone from Henry’s hand, and placed it in my pouch. I’d burn it, and give him his true funeral, if I made it out from these trees again.

We walked, watched at every step. I felt her in the woods, moving parallel to us, but it was pointless to aim at nothing. One never heard a tiger if the tiger was planning an attack. One might hear a soft sound, as a tiger departed, having decided not to leap. K_____ looked around, uneasy, pale. He felt her too.

The forest felt brittle, each leaf frozen now, each twig K_____ tread on cracking like a shot, and we ascended still higher. At last, something I recognized, a tiger’s call, but not that of a tiger.

Henry’s version, a human voice, perfectly mimicking a tiger’s roar. I heard him do it hundreds of times. It’s nothing one forgets. I shook my head, trying to dispel the hallucination.

It was, of course, a tiger calling. A night spent in Henry’s company. It was no wonder. Another roar, and this voice was Henry’s as well, calling in the tones of a tigress, and a moment later, calling in the voice of a male tiger, and now another, an elderly cat, and a cub.

“Do you hear that?” I asked K_____ and his only response was quick breathing.

“How many are there?” he asked.

“Do you hear Henry?” The depth of my uncertainty had overcome me. I was queasy with it.

“I hear tigers,” he said.

A flurry of calls, the startling bells of a sambur, like automobiles in traffic, squeezing horns. Tiger here, tiger passing All in the voice of Henry. It was as though Henry had become the entire forest, and all its occupants.

I stood still, fighting that old urge, run, curl to protect stomach, meticulously checking my rifle instead. Tiger running, shrieked a peafowl, in Henry’s voice.

Through the trees, I saw red. And more red. More than one tiger. How many? They were not leaping at us, but running for some other reason. A mass of tigers, in step, all moving at the same pace, flowing through the shadows faster than I could watch. This was nothing tigers, who do not hunt in packs, would do.

At last, I saw her, my old enemy, stepping out of the forest in front of us.

My rifle was already aimed as she leapt.

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