“Please! I will not hear of it. This is a matter of duty. This tiger has been terrorizing the local villagers. We leave early tomorrow. Meet us at the cavalry stables, Do you know where they are? No, you do not need to bring anything. Your hat perhaps, We have plenty of riding boots, and of course, rifles. A man with such skilled fingers as yourself will be a fine shot.” And at this flattery, and because he had already turned down one invitation, Edgar accepted.

7

The following morning, Edgar found the Captain saddling a horse outside the stables. Five other men were gathered around him, two Englishmen and three Burmans. Seeing the piano tuner approach, Dalton came out from under the horse, where he had been cinching the saddle. He wiped his hand on his breeches and extended it. “Mr. Drake, beautiful morning, isn’t it? Wonderful when a breeze comes this far inland. So refreshing. It means the rains may be earlier this year.” He stood and looked up at the sky, as if to confirm his meteorology. Edgar was struck by how handsome and athletic he looked: his face ruddy and tanned, his hair combed back, his shirtsleeves rolled up over his dusty forearms.

“Mr. Drake, let me introduce you to Captains Witherspoon and Fogg. Gentlemen, this is Mr. Drake, London’s finest piano tuner.” He pounded Edgar on the back. “A good man, family’s from Hereford.”

The two men extended their hands amiably. “Good to meet you, Mr. Drake,” said Witherspoon. Fogg nodded.

“I will be finished saddling this horse in a moment,” said Dalton, ducking back under its belly. “She can be very naughty, this one, and I don’t want to fall off when a tiger is in my sights.” He looked up and winked at the tuner. The men laughed. Ten feet away, the Burmans squatted on their heels in loose pasos.

They mounted the horses. Edgar struggled to get his leg over the saddle and had to be helped by the Captain. Outside the stables, one of the Burmans rode ahead, and soon disappeared. Dalton led their small group, chatting with the two other captains. Edgar followed them. Behind, the other two Burmans rode together on the same horse.

It was still early, and the sun hadn’t yet burned the mist off the lagoons. Edgar was surprised at how quickly Rangoon became farmland. They passed several oxcarts traveling into the city, whose drivers pulled over to the side of the road to let them pass, but otherwise scarcely acknowledged their presence. In the distance, fishermen poled thin boats through the marshes, materializing in and out of the mist. Egrets hunted in the marsh, close to the road, lifting and placing their feet with precision. Ahead, Witherspoon asked if they could stop to shoot them.

“Not here,” answered Dalton. “Last time we shot birds, the villagers made a huge fuss. The egrets are part of the founding myths of Pegu. Bad luck to shoot them, my friend.”

“Superstitious nonsense,” huffed Witherspoon. “I thought we were educating them to abandon such beliefs.”

“Indeed, indeed. But I, for one, would rather hunt a tiger than spend my morning quarreling with some local chieftain.”

“Humph,” said Witherspoon, enunciating the noise as though it were a word. But this answer seemed to satisfy him. They rode on. In the distance, the men threw spirals of fishing nets, blurs of rope that spun out water droplets in illuminated arcades.

They rode for an hour. The marshes began to give way to a thin brush. The sun was already quite warm, and Edgar felt sweat trickling down his chest. He was relieved when the trail turned and entered a thick forest. The dry burn of the sun was replaced by a sticky humidity. They had ridden only a few minutes into the forest when they were met by the lead Burman. While the man conferred with the others, Edgar looked around him. As a boy, he had read many tales of jungle explorers, and spent hours imagining the chaos of dripping flowers, the teeming legions of ferocious animals. This must be a different type of jungle, he thought, It is too quiet and too dark. He peered into the depths of the forest, but he could only see five yards into the tangle of hanging vines.

At last the men ceased talking among themselves, and one of them rode up to Dalton and began to speak. Edgar was too distracted to follow the conversation. His glasses steamed over and he took them from his nose and wiped them on his shirt. He put them back on his face and they fogged again. He took them off. After the third time, he let them sit on his face, watching the forest through the thin layer of condensation.

Up ahead, Dalton had finished conferring with the Burman. “All right then,” he shouted, and turned his horse around, the animal’s hooves trampling the tangle of underbrush. “I spoke to our guide. He says that he rode to the nearest village and asked the villagers about the tiger. Apparently, it was sighted only yesterday tearing the throat from the breeding sow of a local swineherd. The whole village is distraught, one of the soothsayers said that this same tiger is the one that killed an infant two years ago. So they are organizing their own tiger hunt, trying to flush it out of the jungle. They said that we can try to hunt it. It was last sighted three miles north of here. Or, he said we could try heading south to a series of swamps where there are many wild boars.”

“I didn’t come all the way out here to shoot pigs,” Fogg interjected.

“Nor did I,” said Witherspoon.

“And Mr. Drake,” asked Dalton. “Your vote?”

“Oh, I won’t even be firing a shot. I couldn’t hit a stuffed, glazed pig if it lay on the table in front of me, let alone a boar. You decide.”

“Well, I haven’t hunted a tiger in months,” said Dalton.

“It’s decided then,” said Witherspoon.

“Just watch where you fire,” said Dalton. “Not everything that moves is a tiger. And Mr. Drake, be careful of snakes. Don’t grab anything that looks like a stick unless you are certain that it doesn’t have fangs.” He kicked his horse’s flank, and the other men followed, winding on through the forest.

The vegetation grew thicker, and they stopped frequently for the first rider to cut at vines that hung over the trail. More plants seemed to grow from the trees than from the ground, twisting creepers that climbed vines toward the sunlight. Jagged epiphytes, orchids, pitcher plants, clung to the larger trees, losing their roots in the confusion of shoots that crisscrossed the sky. Edgar had always enjoyed gardens, and he prided himself on his knowledge of Latin plant names, but he searched in vain for a plant he could recognize. Even the trees were foreign, massive, borne by elephantine trunks that stretched across the ground with finlike buttress roots, tall enough to hide a tiger behind their walls.

They rode for another half hour, and passed the ruins of a small structure, wrapped in the tangled roots of the trees. The Englishmen rode past it without stopping. Edgar wanted to call out to ask what it was, but his companions were too far ahead. He turned to look at the stones, hidden in moss. Behind him, the Burmans also seemed to notice. One of the men, who had been carrying a small wreath of flowers, quickly dismounted and laid it at the base of the ruins. Edgar turned as his horse walked on. Through the tessellations of hanging vines, he saw the man bow, and then the vision was lost, the vines closed in, and his horse pushed forward.

The others had ridden ahead, and he almost collided with them at a turn in the trail. They were all gathered at the base of a large tree. Dalton and Witherspoon were arguing in a whisper.

“Just one shot,” Witherspoon was saying. “You can’t let a pelt like that pass. I promise I could get it in one shot.”

“I told you, for all we know, the tiger could be watching us. Fire now, and you will scare it away for certain.”

“Nonsense,” said Witherspoon. “The tiger is scared already. Three years and I don’t have a good monkey pelt. They are always so old, and the only fine pelt I could have had was ruined by an inept skinner.”