have feared this tiger. On the burning veldts of Afarique, two million years ago in the primeval home of man, the fiercest predators on the planet had been everywhere: in the tall grasses and in caves and hiding behind the swaying acacia trees, always watching, always waiting. The tiger was the true Beast of humankind, the avatar of Hell out of the dark past. The tiger was a killer – but also something else. For it was the big cats, in part, that had driven human beings to evolve. For millions of years the tiger and the leopard had chased men and women across the grasslands, forcing them to stand upright and pick up sticks and stones as weapons of self-defence. Out of fear of darkness and bright pointed teeth, man had found fire and had made blazing torches with which to frighten these meat-eaters and keep them at bay. The constant evolutionary pressure to escape nature and its most powerful beasts had driven human beings to create spears and baby slings and stone huts, ultimately to build cities and lightships and sail out to the stars. Looking out across the darkening dunes at the tiger, Danlo marvelled at the courage with which his far fathers and mothers and all his ancestors had come down from the trees and faced the big cats, thus turning the possibility of extinction into evolution, death into life. In the short moment that he met the tiger eye to eye – while the innocent lamb still pawed the sand and trotted along unaware – Danlo saw the entire history of the human race unfold. And the deeper he looked into the black, bloody pools of the past, and into himself, the more clearly he saw the tiger’s burning face staring back at him. The darkness falling slowly over the beach did little to obliterate this vision. As the light failed over the dunes and the dark forest disappeared into the night, still he could see the tiger watching him. He remembered how tigers loved the night, how they loved to roam and roar and hunt at night. It came to him suddenly that in this love of walking alone beneath the stars, tigers were the true architects of man’s fear of the dark. All history, all philosophy had sprung from this fear. Darkness, for man, was death – whether the endless death of being enclosed in a wood coffin or the sudden death that came flashing out of the night in an explosion of hot breath and tearing claws. Man had always dreaded darkness and thus worshipped light; the ancient philosophers of the human race, in their beards and their fear, had made a war between light and dark, good and evil, spirit and matter, life and death. This urge to separate form from function, the sacred from the profane, was the fundamental philosophical mistake of mankind. Human beings, in their mathematics and their lightships, in their evolution into the universe, had only carried this mistake across the stars. And human beings, though they might explode the stars themselves into billions of brilliant supernovas, would never vanquish darkness or the terrible creations hidden in the folds of the night.
As Danlo stared forever at the tiger across a hundred feet of darkening beach, these thoughts blazed through his brain. The wind roared in from the sea, carrying in the sound of thunder, and he fell into a keen awareness of the night-time world. Above him were black clouds, black sky, the omnipresent blackness of the universe. Danlo realized then how much he had always hated (and loved) dark places. Yet strangely, like any man, he had always felt the urge to open the door to the darkest of rooms and see what lay inside. Or open the door to his house and see what is outside, in the night. And here, now, on this desolate beach, there was only a tiger. He looked at the tiger’s bright golden eyes blazing out of the darkness, and he remembered a line from the Second Hymn to the Night: You are the messenger who opens mysteries that unfold forever. He knew that the tiger would always be a mystery to him, as he was to himself.
And now the night was opening this mystery, beginning to reveal it in all its glory. Now, over the ocean, the storm was beginning to break. In sudden crackling bolts appearing out of nowhere, lightning played in the sky, connecting heaven to earth. It illuminated the beach in flashes of light. For a moment, the tiger and the lamb and the other features of the world were revealed in all their splendour, and then the dunes and the rocks and the sand vanished back into the night. During this brief moment of illumination, while tiger’s orange and black stripes burned with a strange numinous fire, reality was charged with such a terrible intensity that it seemed almost too real. With each stroke of lightning there was a moment of dazzle and then darkness. Danlo had a deep sense of knowing that there was something behind this darkness, all vivid and white like the lamb’s snowy fleece, but he could not quite see it. The lightning broke upon the beach, suddenly, mysteriously, and he marvelled at the way light came from darkness and darkness devoured light. In one blinding moment he saw that although tigers were truly creatures of darkness, this lovely tiger who waited for him on the darkling dunes had everything to teach him about the true nature of light.
When the tiger finally sprang, it was as if she had been waiting a million years to be released from a secret and unbearable tension. She flew forward in an explosion of colours, all orange-gold and black and streaked with white, and attacked in a series of violent leaps that carried her hurtling across the beach. Her paws hardly touched the sand. Although Danlo had had almost forever to decide how to meet the tiger, when she finally struck he had little time to move. In truth, he had nowhere to run, for there was nothing but grass and sand all around him, and even if the tiger hadn’t blocked the way to the house, he could never have reached its safety before the tiger reached him. Still, he thought that he should try to run, if only to lead the tiger away from the lamb. He should save the lamb; if he and the lamb ran in opposite directions, then the tiger might catch only one of them in her claws. It didn’t occur to him, at first, that the lamb was the tiger’s intended prey, not he. But when he decided to drop the rope and the lamb screamed out in terror, he knew. The tiger, in her astonishing dash across the beach, was no longer looking at Danlo. Her golden eyes were now fixed straight ahead on the lamb. Danlo immediately moved to place his body in front of the lamb, but it ruined his plan by springing suddenly to the left and thus entangling Danlo’s legs in the rope. His feet slipped on the soft sand even as the tiger bolted toward them. For a moment, as he stared at the tiger’s wild eyes and the powerful, rippling muscles that flowed like rivers beneath her fur, he remembered how, as a boy, he had once stood beneath an icy forest and watched as his near-father, the great Wemilo, had slain a snow tiger with nothing more than a simple spear. He remembered this clearly: the silence of the winter woods, the clean white snow, the tremendous power of Wemilo’s thrust as his spear found the heart place and let loose a waterfall of blood. But he had no knife, no spear, no time. In a second, the tiger would be upon him. There was nothing he could do. All his instincts cried out for him to devise some clever plan to flee or fight, and it nearly killed him to wait there in the sand as helpless as a frozen snow hare. But then it came to him that there was always a time to just stand and die, and he was afraid that his time had finally come. For surely the tiger would kill him in her lust to get at the lamb. He thought to raise his walking stick as a last defence, but against the power and ferocity of her attack, it would be worse than useless. The most he might accomplish – and only with perfect timing – would be to ram the sandy point of the stick into her lovely yellow eye. But this would not discourage her; it would only enrage her and cause her to fall into a killing frenzy, thereby dooming both him and the lamb. And more, such an injury could blind the tiger on one side. The wound might bleed and fester; ultimately, it might cause the tiger to sicken and die. He knew that he could never do such a deed. He remembered his vow of ahimsa then, and he realized that even if he had hated the tiger, he could never have harmed such a marvellous beast.
The tiger sprang through the air directly at the lamb, and he loved her: her rare grace, her vitality, her wild joy at following the terrible angels of her nature. The tiger, in her moment of killing, was nothing but energy and joy, animajii – the joy of life, the joy of death.
Even the lamb, he saw, knew a kind of joy. Or rather, the lamb was wholly alive with the utter terror to save his own life, and this sudden nearness of mortality was really the left hand of joy. As the tiger fell upon him, the lamb screamed and shuddered and jerked in the direction of the ocean in his blind urge to run away. Danlo, who had finally fought free of the rope binding them, tried to come to his aid. He too leaped toward the lamb. But the explosive force of the tiger’s strike knocked him aside as he collided with her. There was a shock of bunched muscles and bone, a rage of orange and black fur and slashing claws. Danlo smelled the tiger’s fermy cat scent and caught wind of her hot bloody breath. Her glorious face, all open with fury and gleaming white fangs, flashed in front of his. The
